Familiar Forms, Unfamiliar Beings

When Americanist criticism first revolted against the field's midcentury founding fathers (Richard Chase, Lionel Trilling, Richard Poirier, and so on) in the 1980s and 1990s, the account went something like this. The midcentury critics had valorized American fiction's propensity for "romance" because, as Donald Pease and others argued, the flight into a transhistorical realm of the imagination became a figure for the boundless freedom of the American individual. Canonical texts cemented this association by repeatedly telling the story of that individual's escape from society into a more capacious natural realm. The antidote, then, to this version of American literary exceptionalism was thought to lie in the practice of ideology critique. Americanists joined many other historicists across the discipline in restoring the historical constraints thought to be occluded by the tradition's twinned fascination with aesthetic and individual freedom.

As scholars have pointed out from time to time, however, the lure of the "superabundant agency" of the exceptional individual has remained a per sis tent one in Americanist criticism, albeit more recently with a political rather than an aesthetic valence.¹ In a much-discussed recent issue of Representa tions devoted to "The Way We Read Now," the editors argue that, in the era of ideology critique, an idealized "autonomy" simply reemerged as the hallmark of the critic reading the text rather than of the self or author within it, rendering scholarship itself a politically glamorous "practice of freedom."² As an alternative to this self-congratulatory form of criticism, the issue's editors argue for a turn away from "symptomatic reading"—aimed at plumbing the occluded motivations of one's object of study—to "surface reading," an attempt simply to describe that object or the reading pro cess itself, as evident in the emergence of such new interpretive modes as data mining, statistical analysis, book history, and criticism informed by neuropsychology and cognitive science (which would encompass various "new materialisms," including some forms of affect theory).

With respect to American literary studies, then, it might be argued that the turn toward these "surface" modes (which are certainly emergent in our own field as well) would seem well positioned to open a more definitive divide between present and past, by calling the figure of the individual more thoroughgoingly into question. Indeed, several other recent polemics on behalf of the new modes of interpretation specifically laud their ability to purge the field more completely of a residual humanism that is said to have persisted over several de cades of "supposedly anti-or posthumanist literary studies," despite the discipline's purported turn away from "the individual and consciousness" toward impersonal structures such as language or history.³ My quotes here come from one of the most rigorous and interesting of these writings, Heather Love's essay "Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn." Adducing many of the same tendencies noted by the Representations issue, in addition to the "object-oriented philosophy" of Bruno Latour, Love specifically aims to show how one might draw on their descriptive techniques to work against notions of depth, "richness," and interiority in favor of a more fully behaviorist account of human action. She draws on the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman, who critiqued what he termed "a vulgar tendency in social thought to divide the conduct of the individual into a profane and sacred part," the former encompassing "the obligatory world of social roles," seen as "formal, stiff, and dead," while the latter is reserved for the shibboleth of "what an individual is 'really' like underneath it all."⁴

If we have been right that American literary studies founded itself on a valorization of the literary (in the form of romance) for its ability to allegorize an idealized individual freedom, then arguments like Love's would surely seem able to put Trilling, Chase, and so forth to rest once and for all. This essay is going to argue something closer to the opposite.

First, I want to suggest, the midcentury critics actually wrote against what they already viewed as an unfortunate American tendency to valorize the heroic...