The Political, the Personal, and "The Function of American Literary Criticism at the Present Time," 1983–2021

Focused on the work of Amy Kaplan and Edward Said, two critics known for their engagements with that longtime hot-button slogan, "the personal = the political," this essay updates Mathew Arnold's formula of the function of criticism at the present time. In her 2003 ASA presidential address, Kaplan posed the question, what should be the role of American studies scholars today, in the face of American empire today?–and together with Said, she answered it in a series of experiments with form. The essay, the address, and the book, all three reoriented toward making the personal = the political, become their routes to thinking empire as an ongoing historical subject, anarchic and incoherent rather than monolithic. The work on US empire in the 1980s, when Kaplan's denial thesis on the absence of empire in American studies took hold and inspired so many scholars, is still present but with new terminology in new disciplinary locations. The larger function of criticism appears when we superimpose the timeline of earlier empire work onto other, current confluences of dates (the centenaries 1992/1998, 9/11, BLM, and COVID-19, 2019–2020) and speculate on the why of these still-open-ended key contexts, textual clusters of empire.