Scandinavian Contributions

Scandinavian scholars continue to explore American texts and contexts, bringing a great deal of energy to studies of contemporary writing. In addition, strong critical interest in American modernism has emerged, especially in Sweden, and Norwegian scholars engage with the dynamics of colonial encounters and postcolonial memory within the cultural and political space of the United States. One emphasis that surfaces from this type of broadening is a concern with ethics, which appears as a growing area of interest among scholars in both countries.

a. American Studies

A comprehensive, historical survey of the forces shaping American Studies, inclusive of the views of European scholars, is provided by Rolf Lundén (“The Eternal, Irresoluble Tensions in American Studies,” AmStScan 38, i: 1–28). Approaching his subject through a 1964 article by Sigmund Skard, Lundén reminds his readers that “American studies is a European invention” dating from Tocqueville and Filippo Mazzei, involving the establishment of the academic specialization throughout Europe in the late 1800s and leading to more interdisciplinary and comparative studies between the world wars. But even from its inception, he notes, American Studies has been fraught with questions of whether or not it should be an interdisciplinary field on the one hand or an international or transnational field on the other. The idea of a core discipline of national concerns and national identity advocated by the myth and symbol school, Lundén demonstrates, has repeatedly been challenged, and the so-called new transnational strain in American Studies announced in the 1990s is not new at all but actually goes back at least to the 1950s. Among the debates he examines are those among Leo Marx, George Lipsitz, and Amy Kaplan in the spring 2005 issue of American Literary History, in which, as Lundén puts it, “Marx implies that the New Americanists are unpatriotic America-haters, [and] Lipsitz counters by implying that Marx is George W. Bush’s errand-boy.” Lundén shows that the shift in focus from a monolithic national identity to a plurality of identities marked by ethnicity, race, sexuality, class, and gender that has taken place since the 1970s in the United States has also occurred in the Nordic countries, but that European scholars, while firmly anchored in their disciplinary homes, have nevertheless long practiced a comparative, transnational American Studies. Lundén thus raises the provocative question, Who ended up in scholarly provincialism, the Americans or the non-Americans?

A similar concern with the boundaries of the national can be found in Lene Johannessen’s “Remembering America,” pp. 124–35 in Postcolonial Dislocations, especially in relation to the cultural aftershocks and constituted/constitutive spaces of cultural memory that continue their journeys within the narrative of the United States. Staging a “conversation” between two rather unlikely perspectives, Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? The Challenges of America’s Identity (2004) and Richard Rodriguez’s Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002), Johannessen examines the legacies of the colonial encounter as they play out in these two very different visions and memories of national genesis. Against Huntington’s worry that Hispanic culture will eventually undermine the nation’s Anglo-Saxon foundation and true spirit, Rodriguez’s meditations on “brown” remind us of different trajectories following from other routes and histories than that of the Anglo moving west from east. This “conversation” takes place within the larger framework of colonialism and the traumas it leaves behind, never to be forgotten. It is the repercussions of the colonizing moment(s) that we hear in these two authors, revolving around different versions of the same story; hence “what transpires . . . is that the continuity and engagement of vectors pertaining to historical moments of colonialism and colonization continue to do their work in the forging of the United States as nation and project.” Underlying this “clash of visions” is a complex negotiation of cultural memories and representations that is not unique to the United States; as Stephen Wolfe’s examination of Mary Rowlandson (discussed below) demonstrates, this more universal process is important in and of itself. To situate the colonial history of the United States within the larger history...