Composing Cultures: Modernism, American Literary Studies, and the Problem of Culture

1. Van Wyck Brooks and Edward Sapir: Divided America and the Form of Genuine Culture

1 / Van Wyck Brooks and Edward Sapir: Divided America and the Form of Genuine Culture This chapter sets the context for what I argue is the interdisciplinary debate over culture in early American modernism, and it lays out several key contours of that debate—contours that will in different ways in different disciplinary arenas structure debates within modernist anthropology , literary criticism, and “Americanist” canon reformation. Specifically , I reveal the way in which the interdisciplinary journals of politics, arts, and opinion that in many ways shaped the contours of modernism were also important organs through which the debate over culture circulated , as articles by anthropologists, literary critics, social scientists, and artists formed what Richard Brodhead has called a “concerted textual program” constituting the problematic of culture. Van Wyck Brooks and Edward Sapir, I argue, were two key participants in this program, articulating different but complexly related versions of culture that together chart the contours of the debate. Brooks, I argue, makes “culture” itself the issue for “American” national identity : in contrast to a nineteenth-century idea of high Culture, Brooks articulates a model of cultural pluralism, wherein “culture” is defined as a unified “whole”; that whole, in turn, is organic in form and national in scope. In contrast, Sapir articulates a model of culture that is likewise plural and whole, but whose form is imagined as spatial, structural, and semiotic. Rather than the elements of “a culture” being organically related, they are connected structurally to create “meaning.” The “unit” of this spatially conceived culture, moreover, is the region, which stands 24 / COMPOSING CULTURES in explicit contrast to a “spurious” national culture. Together, the contours of this debate—what is culture, what is the unit of culture, and what is the relation of culture to form—will in turn structure, each in their disciplinary-specific terms, the debates within anthropology, literature , criticism, and canon formation. I begin by citing two moments, each well known in the disciplines with which they have traditionally been associated. The first is the publication in 1915 of Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming-of-Age. A former student of Harvard professor Barrett Wendell, and a disciple of romantic Irish artist and nationalist John Butler Yeats, Brooks by 1915 had already established his reputation as a literary critic, first writing in London and New York and then teaching literature at Stanford. Brooks wrote America’s Coming-of-Age during a year in London, where he was teaching literature courses in the socialist Worker’s Educational Association and immersing himself in the radical working-class politics and literary life of that city. When the outbreak of World War I forced his return to the United States, Brooks moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan near Columbia University to teach and write—and thereby placed himself at the center of the growing ferment of literary, artistic, and political activity that would, with Brooks’s participation, come to characterize modernist New York.1 In America’s Coming-of-Age, Brooks articulates what would become the classic formulation of “Young America’s” critique of the “genteel tradition” of the nineteenth century. Americans, Brooks argues, labor under a “peculiar dualism”: “on the one hand a quite unclouded, quite unhypocritical assumption of transcendent theory (‘high ideals’); on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities.”2 This now-famous divide between the “Highbrow” and the “Lowbrow,” between ideals and practicality, results in both the pragmatic “atmosphere of contemporary business life” and “the fastidious refinement” of American writers, whose detachment from everyday life results in “the final unreality of most contemporary American culture” (9, emphasis added). For Brooks, then, the problem of America is a problem of culture. His solution is to redefine culture itself: in place of passive preoccupation with high Culture, Brooks calls for a new definition of culture that would fuse these two realms, the practical and the ideal, into a whole, or what he calls elsewhere a “living, active culture,” a “fabric of ideas and assumptions, of sentiments and memories and attitudes which make up [a] civilization.”3 Thus Brooks seeks to replace the “culture of vAN WyCK bROOKS AND EDWARD SAPIR / 25 industrialism” with what he calls, in an article in The Dial three years later, a “national culture.”4 Brooks’s call for a new American culture—indeed, for a new definition of culture as such—has long been regarded as a foundational moment in...