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  • Disciplinary Panic: A Response to Ed White and Michael Drexler
  • Russ Castronovo (bio)

Many of us have been melancholy for a long time without understanding exactly why. Ed White and Michael Drexler help pinpoint the sources of a malaise that stem from feeling alone, so alone, as literary critical work in the field of early American studies is relegated to the status of an oddity or simply ignored. In assessing feelings of historical inadequacy (does one's article have enough footnotes to satisfy empiricists?) that compete with those of literary cowardice (why is work in early American studies often maligned as glorified social studies?), White and Drexler outline a sickness that is at once professional and metaphysical. Their vision invites a Joycean diagnosis: History, we might say, is a discipline from which we are trying to awake. Suffering under an "unspoken apprenticeship in the guild of History," literary critics become other to themselves, toning down the inventiveness of stylistic and formalist analysis while doing their best to appear comfortable in the guise of the historian. The condition is one of disciplinary panic: effeminate traces associated with the literary must be purged even as compulsory historicity takes over by "beefing up" footnotes and "regularizing" expression.

If the implications of this portrait are credited in full, identifying the condition of early Americanist work as Joycean only confirms the metaphoric, imprecise, and belletristic tendencies that are the source of the problem in the first place. Within early American studies, literary scholars feel their deviance keenly: theoretical sophistication often seems like a hyperbolic display of literariness while style is distrusted as academically flamboyant. [End Page 495] Hard data are positioned against the prospective, optative, or speculative (read "soft") nature of literary analysis that aspires to theoretical commentary on texts. To guard against such an easy dismissal of literary-theoretical labors, White and Drexler take pains to amass evidence—as though they desire, not speculation, but facts and data as much as other scholars do—for their statements about how a "compromise canon" negatively affects the status of theory within the field. Of course, though, their intervention comes in using figures about publication, the funding of editorial projects, press resources, and library holdings to advance theoretical speculations about the status of history within early American studies itself.

Surveying the publication history of Early American Literature, White and Drexler document the field's ambivalent and changing relationship with history in conjunction with its gradual evolution beyond New England literary production. This archive serves up a portrait of a self-hating literary criticism that seeks approval from the very historical establishment it often disdains. It is an account preserved in the fossil records of library shelving. While pre-1800 materials have flourished under the reign of historians, library stacks, like layers of sedimentary rock that provide evidence of mass extinctions, suggest a premature die-off of an early American canon in literary critical environments. White and Drexler sagely observe that these trends "signal [how] institutional resources of money, staff, libraries, presses, and conferences" were organized around "the ever-increasing dominance of history as a discipline." Even after canon expansion and New Historicism introduced significant changes to the field, what counts as knowledge production and scholarly contribution remains underwritten by disciplinary criteria more closely associated with history than literature. White and Drexler make this extended argument, moving from the 1950s and 1960s to contemporary academic practice, by referencing Eric Slauter's argument that literary scholars cite historians without experiencing anything like reciprocity. For a contribution on theory, it is worth remarking how much space White and Drexler give, not to theorizing, but to data and tabulation as if they, too, are always writing to curry favor from more empirically and less theoretically minded readers.

That I share this disciplinary panic can be seen by my own offering of hard data: while the website for the Organization of American Historians lists ten book prizes in the field of American history, the Modern Language Association lists seven, but the bulk of these are intended for work in Italian, French, or composition and only one award, the William Sanders Scarborough Prize in African-American literature, refers to American topics. From 1987...

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