In Memory of Emory Elliott: August 2009

When Emory Elliott died suddenly in late March at the age of sixty-six, American studies lost a powerful advocate and a good friend. Emory’s most powerful legacy is his uniting of those two roles, drawing together the public and the private, the political and the personal in his passionate commitment to education. Emory’s career spanned the period of radical revision in the canon of American literature and the methodologies of American studies, a transformation he worked tirelessly to imagine, extend, and institutionalize.

Emory engaged questions of inclusion and exclusion, aesthetic judgment and political power, the possibilities of fiction and the failures of critical imagination. His books, Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England (1975), Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725–1810 (1982), and The Cambridge Introduction to Early American Literature (2002), reconsidered critical moments of American political, social, cultural, and literary history: the Puritan society of seven-teenth-century New England and the revolutions of the eighteenth century. Turning away from the dominating narratives of an American myth of origin, his research created the grounds for reconsidering what we know about the circumstances in which some of the most persistent tropes of U.S culture emerged. Emory feared that we ignored the Puritan legacy at our peril, a fear he felt realized in the demonizing rhetoric of the Bush administration’s War on Terror. His 2006 ASA presidential address cannily invoked the foundational terms of a largely overtaken vision of American studies—“Wilderness and Wrath,” “Errand,” and “Renewal”—to structure a discussion of diversity and transnationalism in the field. Rather than universalizing the perversely provincial vision of Puritan New England, Emory began with the question the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. posed in the face of the Vietnam War’s escalating violence, “Where do we go from here?” and ended with a reading of Paule Marshall’s novel of personal transformation rooted in a transnational vision, Praisesong for the Widow. In many ways his address modeled his scholarship by pulling opposing ideas into dialogue and debate. Emory’s research continued to be deeply engaged with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, even as African-American literature came to occupy an increasingly central place in his vision. Drawn to the very different spiritual quests in both traditions, Emory wrote with passion as well about postmodern novels predicated on radical doubt, and the great skeptics Twain and Melville.

Emory’s scholarship survives him, a rich record we can continue to consult and engage. I had the good fortune to be Emory’s colleague for twenty years; literally my entire career. Not surprisingly, I feel most keenly the loss of Emory’s well-known personal touch. At the memorial service we held on the University of California, Riverside, campus, there was a comforting comedy to the repeated stories of going to lunch (or dinner or coffee) with Emory and the difference that he made to so many people in so many fields. Emory was a powerful and influential man, one of a handful of scholars to earn the title of University Professor in the University of California system, who advised leaders at the highest levels of the university. Yet I believe that it was his ability to make a difference in the careers of assistant professors that forged Emory’s most profound impact on UC Riverside and the profession. When Emory became an assistant professor at Princeton in 1972, he joined an overwhelmingly white and male academy, one steeped in privileges of tradition and exclusion. In this world, Emory recognized both great opportunity and the need for profound change. When he became a leading scholar, with great accomplishments behind him, he avoided one of the academy’s most conservative habits; Emory never assumed his particular path—his training, his experience, his career—to be a blueprint for the future. He worked with resolve and energy to make the academy open to scholars of diverse backgrounds, identities, and interests.

Emory was a subtle and perceptive critic, not only of American literature, but of the university as an institution and the academy as a profession...