The Modernist Nation: Generation, Renaissance, and Twentieth-Century American Literature

2. Renaissance Rhetoric and American Cultural Nationalism

Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language? . . . America, which has no past to speak of, a mere “parvenue” among nations, is creating a national literature which in its most characteristic products differs almost as much from English literature as does the literature of France. Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Bret Harte, and Cable, to name no more, are very American, and yet America was once an English colony. It should be more easy for us, who have in us that wild Celtic blood, the most un-English of all things under heaven, to make such a literature. W. B. Yeats, letter to the editor of United Ireland (1892) The pRE-history of the American Renaissance For a nation that tends to see itself as youthful, and very often ¤guratively as a youth, the United States owes a considerable debt to the pre¤x “re-,” which signi¤ed backward motion in early Latin. Even in modern English the pre¤x functions in this way, but more often these days it signals newness, a kind of conceptual motion forward, thanks largely to the semantic inventiveness of the Elizabethans (who assured the pre¤xal success of “re-” by attaching the letters to nouns and verbs almost indiscriminately, without regarding the root word’s etymological origin).1 And so today American historiography relies on “re-” in numerous efforts to imagine a collective past—a national family tree, so to speak—by continually invoking concepts such as “Revolution,” “Reconstruction,” and perhaps most important to literary his2 Renaissance Rhetoric and American Cultural Nationalism tory, “Renaissance.” (I would be remiss if I failed to mention the contemporary proliferation of efforts to “reconceive,” “reconstruct,” “recover,” and “revise” history of all sorts, literary and otherwise. And a happy coincidence it would be if “realism,” “regionalism,” and “religion” could be thrown into this mix.) But what if “re-” were to disappear? Where would Americanists be without recourse to the American Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance, the Little Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, the Southern Renaissance, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Chicano Renaissance, the Native American Renaissance, or the Queer Renaissance?2 What would we call our courses and title our books? How would we periodize? I hope to demonstrate how and suggest why what I call “renaissance rhetoric ” so often and so disarmingly informs our understanding of American literary history, and speci¤cally American modernism. By way of illustration , this chapter provides an archaeological assessment of the Harlem Renaissance , or the “Negro Renaissance” as it was once known, but I will touch on these other examples because their mutual in®uence cannot be avoided. It would be misleading to suggest that just because something gets labeled a renaissance means that we can identify a coherent literary movement with well-de¤ned principles and unswerving group loyalty; in fact, group identity labels often mask intense con®ict over the public meaning of the names given literary movements and the texts allowed to fall under their net. Alain Locke and Wallace Thurman had a dif¤cult time agreeing on where to lunch, let alone on the guiding principles of the Negro Renaissance each discussed on numerous occasions—their shibboleth is spelled the same but pronounced with different accents. Thoreau and Longfellow belong to the same renaissance more because they breathed the same New England air than for any obvious aesthetic or ideological reasons. Vachel Lindsay’s poetry probably has more in common with that of Langston Hughes than with Ezra Pound’s, yet Lindsay and Pound belong to the Little Renaissance; meanwhile, Hughes and Fire!! get anthologized and cataloged alongside Jessie Fauset and Crisis. The racial politics of literary history determine who belongs in one camp and who does not. I hope to suggest a way around these sometimes misguided distinctions by shedding some light on at least one common transnational source for virtually every example of American renaissance rhetoric: the so-called Irish Renaissance of the late nineteenth century grappled with many of the same issues embedded in the public discourse on U.S. modernism , and American modernists took careful note. As with their Irish counterpart, all of America’s renaissances bring with them a set of expectations for literary art and artists as well as for liter58 renaissance rhetoric ary criticism and critics. American renaissance rhetoric tends to establish the following hierarchies: art over...