The Transcendentalist Constant in American Literature by Roger Asselineau (review)

Book Reviews127 Roger Asselineau. The Transcendentalist Constant in American Literature. New York and London: New York University Press, 1980. 189p. This volume brings together brief and rather diverse essays, some of them previously published, having to do with Whitman and a handful of his "spiritual heirs" among 20th century American writers. Accordingto the author, his various chapters were originally written "without preconceived design." His prefatory hope is that in being published together, the essays will achieve a certain unity, or at least mutual enhancement, for they all touch on a strain of American idealism given tutelary force by Whitman and modern extension in the work ofsuch figures as Hemingway, O'Neill, Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Tennessee Williams. The central idea of this book, that most American writers are avowed or crypto-romantics, having been discovered after the fact, thus remains a suggestive linking idea rather than a closely argued thesis. One wonders, though, at the need for another book even casually devoted to this theme, for the centrality of Whitman (and Emerson) to American writing has been more fully documented by many others and is now virtually a commonplace of literary history. Moreover, most of the essays gathered here are either too slight or too tangential to the overall theme to find their sufficient justification in contributing to it. So introductory and wide-ranging are some of the chapters that they seem originally prepared for an undergraduate audience. But taken individually, a few of the essays are rewarding. "The Quiddity and Liquidity of Leaves of Grass," an analysis of water imagery, reflects throughout the deft elegance of its title. Another Whitman piece, a discussion of the poet's relation to Taine's literary historicism, is a model of insight and economy of means. Others probe less deeply. A discussion of Whitman's humor turns a stolid ear to most of the poet's antics and the chapter on Dreiser, defining the letter's belief in blind cosmic force as fundamentally American, does nothing to distinguish his thought from the crypto-romantic vitalism of, say, Thomas Hardy. There are few false notes in this book — it is written with unfailing ease, clarity, and knowledge. Certainly not in its whole, however, and only rarely in its parts, does it take us to a leading edge of literary study. It is a volume to be skimmed and sampled. WILLIS J. BUCKINGHAM Arizona State University John Bowers. The Theory of Grammatical Relations. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981. 288p. In his new book. The Theory of Grammatical Relations, John Bowers proposes replacing the Classical Theory of transformations with a more adequate one in which transformations add meaning to the string to which they apply and the different components of a grammar are seen as more interdependent and interrelated than previously thought. In Chapter One of his book. Bowers discusses Chomsky's Classical Theory and shows how the lack of questioning ofthe basic assumptions about the nature oftransformations in the theory has led to artificial and ad hoc treatments of new phenomena . Chapter Two describes how a redefinition of the notion of transformation may help to resolve many problems which have arisen in Classical Transformational ...