There's No Place Like Home: Response to Blair

I would like to begin by saying how much I enjoyed Sara Blair's essay. The reason I enjoyed it is that it raises many of the questions that currently haunt and structure debate within the field of American studies. Let me start by reinvoking the two that I find most significant. The first concerns the category of the "literary." Blair follows a brief summary of shifts toward a cultural studies paradigm within the field of the "new" modernist studies by questioning their implications for what she called, in a previous version of her essay, "literature's deep curiosity and pleasure," and, what she calls, "the oneiric, sensory, and social dimensions of the ideal of literature as a distinctive site of experience." If one of the axioms of the "new" cultural studies is that modernist texts can no longer be treated simply as aesthetic objects, then how, Blair asks, are we to avoid a simple inversion that abandons the specificity of the "literary" altogether? The second question concerns the category of the "domestic." Here, Blair worries about the tendency of recent criticism to treat the "home" merely as a site in and through which bourgeois, imperialist, racialized, and gendered subjects are produced. In her footnote to this claim, she cites Lauren Berlant and Amy Kaplan as two critics who convincingly treat domesticity as a locus of what could be broadly conceived of as an imperial pedagogy, but at the cost of "eliding the differentiatiable, microhistorical realities of the home as a social process and space, which the literary, in all its contestatory and emergent forms, enters into shaping." What happens, she asks, "after we chronicle continuities--as opposed to ruptures--between commodity culture and high modernism," between the languages of domesticity and imperialism?

Blair's advance on these approaches suggests that we ought to pay closer attention to the intersections of literary modernism and modern domesticity or, in her words, the "fluid, bidirectional circulation of texts, tastes, and fantasies" between "the bourgeois home and the modernist salon." Let it suffice to say that I fully agree, though I also think that Blair's passing allusions to other critics set up something like a pair of straw men (or women) to argue against, and that Kaplan and Berlant are doing precisely this sort of work. Like them, Blair wants to provide a kind of literary history that resembles what Mary Poovey refers to as a "historical epistemology"--one that treats unfashionable critical fields and vocabularies historically, rather than simply discarding them (in modernist fashion) as the relics of a history that we have now surpassed (16-26). As a means to this end, Blair turns to Gertrude Stein's "If You Had Three Husbands," arguing that the story, its publication history in the avant-garde magazine Broom, and the site of its production at 27 rue de Fleurus together raise the question of how "prevailing notions of avant-garde literary production shift when we understand the latter as embedded in the changing form of domesticity." This tale of three husbands evokes a polyandrous economy of "biological, cultural, and social" reproduction that characterizes one "markedly new kind of space. Not only queer, not only commodified, this is a domestic economy at once metropolitan, countercultural, and bourgeois." And it challenges us to think more carefully about the material geographies of culture as a productive form of literary history--to replace "overly figurative notions of class and taste (or even racial) divides, separate spheres, distinct spaces of production" with an appreciation of the "effects of spatial proximity, contiguity, and simultaneity."

Given this summary of what I take to be Blair's "purposive redirection" of the ends of literary history today, I would like to use this response to raise two further questions, both of which illustrate the difficulty and scope of the kind of project she outlines. The first concerns a totalizing vocabulary that creeps into her analysis at key moments. At...