How We’re Feeling Today

What is the subject of aesthetics doing to early American literary studies? What are we doing to (and with) the subject of aesthetics?

This is a timely and important issue of Early American Literature dedicated to a subject that is becoming newly relevant to the entire field. The essays collected here model distinctive and innovative methods with which to mobilize the category of aesthetics in early American literary studies. They also register the critical and intellectual stresses that arise from the critical reinvention of aesthetics in a scholarly field that traditionally has been invested in historical modes of analysis and interpretation. In collecting this set of essays Edward Larkin and Edward Cahill seem to be addressing important critical questions for our field to seriously consider at the present moment: Are historical and aesthetic understandings of early American texts compatible? Or do they lend themselves to such disparate concerns and modes of reading—the surfaces or depths of texts, for example—that they cannot help but reveal fundamental ruptures in our critical and professional assumptions? What I admire especially about this collection is that it cannot be reduced to a single methodology, objective, or agenda—these essays don’t collectively uphold a party line. If they demonstrate the resurgence of aesthetics as both subject of inquiry and methodology (and perhaps philosophy) of reading literary texts, they also attest to fundamental differences about how and why we currently theorize the relations between aesthetics and historicism.

Several essays showcased here approach aesthetics historically and focus particularly on the possibilities and dangers of the aesthetic imagination. Spectating, writing, and desiring: the work of Wendy Bellion, Ezra Tawil, and Abram van Engen places aesthetic experience in cultural and historical contexts detailing the complex dynamics of the simultaneous liberation and regulation of the individual subject. What Bellion succinctly calls early national spectatorship’s “bimodal experience of discernment and illusion” (335) begins to point us toward the overall ambivalence to imaginative experience that these three essays emphasize. Bellion’s understanding of the protocols for seeing and spectating in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street Theatre—the “visual knowledge” playwrights, architects, and impresarios meant to inculcate in audiences there (341)—is so compelling because it (as Elizabeth Dillon’s essay does with the book in the eighteenth-century Ohio Valley) accounts for the theater’s material and representational dimensions. The theater is not merely a generic space for putting on plays; its visual and material features, its architectural and decorative details and sensory games, are all engaged in the serious play of enhancing and limiting the spectator’s visual pleasure. “[O]ne indulged in the fictions of reality,” she says, “while remaining cognizant of the differences between artifice and actuality” (352). The perceptual play taking place in the theater, moreover, finds its representational analogue in the thematic of misperception taking place in the comedies being performed—their use of cross-dressing, mistaken identities, and plays within plays are enacting dramatically the experiences of spectators in the theater itself. If this leads, almost logically, to the conclusion that the early national theater is a postmodern venue, what Bellion calls the “metarepresentational nature of theatrical performance” (346), we begin to understand that early national theatergoers were meant not to get lost in the fun house.

That dynamic of simultaneously liberating and regulating aesthetic experience informs as well Tawil’s analysis of the American plain style tradition and Van Engen’s of the seduction novel’s handling of individual desire. Tawil makes the counterintuitive (and rather brave) case for the relevance of Perry Miller’s thesis on the importance of the Puritan plain style to American literature. His revision of Miller’s argument, however, significantly recasts it in terms of a transatlantic literary history rerouted through the eighteenth-century English sentimental novel. By unhinging Protestant aesthetics from the confines of New England Puritanism, and theorizing the plain style as a “floating signifier” accruing highly contextual meanings over time (and space), he is able to reconstruct transatlantic discourses about literary style itself. Taking the Bay Psalm Book as a seminal text that theorizes the relation between language and pleasure, he provides a new...