In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined ¤nally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to ¤nd all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920) Emerson and the Entente des Anciens et des Modernes The monumental and today much-maligned Literary History of the United States (1948) begins with a prominent trope in American literary historiography , one with deep roots: “Each generation should produce at least one literary history of the United States, for each generation must de¤ne the past in its own terms” (Spiller et al. vii). Since then virtually every major contribution to this ¤eld—including The Literature of the American People (1951), the Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), and the Cambridge History of American Literature (1994–)—invokes more or less explicitly the notion that the act of historical revision remains the prerogative of each succeeding generation, a kind of institutional birthright whose metaphoricity gets lost in the presence of other, more pressing areas of theoretical contestation (“American,” “literary,” “history”). The most famous example of this generational rhetoric, one regularly but casually cited by literary historians, is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s so-called declaration of cultural independence,the “American Scholar” address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard in 1837, roughly the moment when the earliest American literary 1 Generational Rhetoric and American Avant-Gardism histories were being published. The passage in question develops a metaphor for books as peculiar as it is complex. Books are imperfect, Emerson argues, like nineteenth-century vacuum chambers: “As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as ef¤cient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not ¤t this” (Works 1:55–56). The larger context for this crescendo of ¤gurative language, which accelerates wildly from one metaphor to another, generally escapes notice by critics eager to seize upon the cultural nationalist implications of the oration or to see the American scholar as another version of the Emersonian freethinking individualist. These metaphors (for books, artists, and periods) make up one small facet of Emerson’s appropriation and ultimate dismissal of the centuries-old querelle between the ancients and moderns, rendered in English as the “battle of the books” since Jonathan Swift. Rather than draw the expected strict comparisons between ancient and modern, or between pagan and Christian, or even between more and less perfected, Emerson sets up an opposition between a solipsistic self-understanding (“the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself’”) and an environmentally located self-consciousness (“the modern precept, ‘Study nature’”). However, the distinction rings hollow, as these modes of analysis “become at last one maxim.” Not only has Emerson the naturalist introduced a measure of scientism absent from previous versions of the ancients-versus-moderns debate (even if he remains ironically distanced from an aesthetic of “ef¤ciency” and the science of vacuums), but he has also introduced a subtle historicism into an equation that normally privileges the “either” (antiquity) or the “or” (modernity). Moderns, he suggests , look to nature because all knowledge and all cultural artifacts remain grounded in, stained by, their immediate historical circumstances. Modern literature is not inherently superior to that of the past; it is simply less remote , more relevant. Although he never de¤nes “generation” with any precision , we can be sure that it signi¤es a time span far briefer than any referenced during the heyday of the querelle. I ¤nd myself drawn to this example from Emerson because it incorporates two important elements commonly found in generational rhetoric. First, it focuses attention on the local, on a geographically and chronologically palpable sociohistorical milieu. Emerson’s artist, and presumably his cultural historian, measures progress as a succession of discrete generations, not as ages or epochs.1 Here Emerson’s literary historical chronometer is more in 18 generational rhetoric [3.17.183.24] Project MUSE (2024...

Share