American Literary History and the Romance with America

In reflecting upon changes in the theorizing and practice of American literary history over the last decades, the goal cannot be a comprehensive coverage or yet another survey of competing approaches. Upon closer look, these approaches always stand in the service of underlying premises and purposes. To be sure, new approaches like to authorize themselves by claims of methodological progress. They promise historical contextualization where formalism dominated before, emphasize difference against holism, or present the transnational turn as a cutting edge development which will finally overcome the exceptionalism of earlier analyses of American literature and culture. However, methodological classifications such as historical criticism, gender criticism, or transnational studies remain empty boxes as long as we have not clarified to what purpose and in the service of what premises they are employed. There never existed an approach in the history of the field that had no other purpose than the faithful reconstruction of American literary history. We cannot first collect historical data or describe transnational phenomena and then interpret them; instead, we are always already—and inevitably—guided in our selection and interpretation of data by prior assumptions about the objective of study. In the case of American literary history, this objective consists of three parts: “literature,” “history,” and “America.”¹ The latter remains a point of reference even where a transnational perspective is pursued, because, as the term “transnational American studies” already indicates, such a perspective is designed to redefine “America” (or understand its place in the world better).² For a discussion of developments in American literary history, it is of great interest to see how the meanings and uses of the key terms literature, history, and America have changed over the years.

1. Literature I

My picture will be painted in broad strokes, because to put it somewhat irreverently and from the outside perspective of someone who does not have to compete in the American academic market, American literary history appears to be by no means as diverse and “powerfully original” as its practitioners would like to claim. On the contrary, the admirable intellectual fireworks produced by a highly selective academic system in which the best and the brightest compete for distinction may obscure the fact that upon closer look, only a few basic narratives have been told, albeit in often dazzling, brilliant variations. One of the first and most enduring of these narratives was established by the myth and symbol school generation. In its theoretically more interesting and ambitious versions, the underlying premise, linking a range of different studies, was to describe American literature as a proto-modern literature with a specific adversarial potential.³ This was the basis on which claims could be made that the US had a literature worth speaking of, one that deserved to be studied on its own terms. On the surface, the reasoning was, American literature seems to affirm foundational American myths such as a naive belief in progress or in the regenerative powers of the frontier. But on a covert level, the major works of American literature are characterized by a unique potential for saying “No! in Thunder.”⁴ Without ever discussing these premises explicitly, the myth and symbol school thus drew on a modernist aesthetics of negation in order to give America “real culture.” As Leo Marx puts it in the afterword to a recent re-edition of The Machine in the Garden: “Nevertheless, The Machine in the Garden emphasizes a fundamental divide in American culture and society. It separates the popular affirmation of industrial progress disseminated by spokesmen for the dominant economic and political elites, and the disaffected, often adversarial viewpoint of a minority of political radicals, writers, artists, clergymen, and independent intellectuals” (383). In this search for an adversarial culture, literature was seen through the lens of New Critical formalism. Its promise was that of an inherent, unique potential for semantic complication, if not transformation—a “deeper meaning,” potential—created by poetic devices like irony, repetition plus variation, paradox, ambiguity, or symbols. “Literary form” (and later “literary structure”) were seen as the instruments for successfully realizing this potential; in order...