Themes, Topics, Criticism

Within this chapter's titular and comparatively flexible catchment area—scholarship on themes, topics, and criticism of interest to Americanists generally—the importance of criticism (theories, methods, influential critics) has noticeably declined recently. In the wake of an Age of Theory, themes of broad national identity have returned to the spotlight they enjoyed half a century ago, a time when literary scholarship seemed to many a key to understanding America. This return to interest in the nation-state and the state of the nation is so dominant that more specific or localized topics such as race, gender, class, and sexual identity, which have dominated our work for several decades, are more and more being folded into it. At the same time and in accord with widely noted institutional contexts, journal articles continue to lose ground in comparison to monographs. Apart from other factors, if one seeks to make claims about the national imaginary, even well-crafted articles have difficulty attaining the scope of a book.

i Histories and Genres

In contrast to the earlier, Cold War emphasis on public or collective themes embodied in national myths and symbols, contemporary scholarship on national identity and identification stresses the role that seemingly private feelings and states of mind play in contributing to a public sphere. No work published in 2007 or 2008 exemplifies this trend more strikingly than Sean McCann's A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government (Princeton). How Americans feel about the president and the presidency, McCann proposes, stands at the center of their nationality. Beginning with Whitman's views on Lincoln as martyr, commander, unifier, and abuser of executive power, but mainly surveying a dizzying array of 20th-century novels from Henry Roth to Philip Roth, McCann investigates how writers have depicted presidential power and glory, how these depictions track other perspectives on the presidency, and how the Oval Office and the writer's desk challenge one another.

McCann breaks new ground methodologically in examining whether and how mainstream political science and punditry correlate with literature. Political discourse largely parallels literary productions from the same time, he argues, thereby tracking via fact and fantasy the hopes and fears American citizens have had for themselves. The claim about parallels between literary and political thinking or the possibility of influences between them is somewhat sketchy, but at the very least it invites further scrutiny and suggests a new context for literary scholarship. We have experience in thinking about literature in relation to history, philosophy, and perhaps even psychology or its newest offspring, cognitive science, but political science has arguably been as alien as physical therapy.

McCann boldly argues that national hopes and fears exist alongside particularist racial, ethnic, or sexual identities, perhaps even above them. For example, he reads Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison as participants in a national debate about sovereignty and allegiance, one that even from a black nationalist perspective looks to a people's national will as ideally incarnated in the president. If nothing else, this view would relocate the most important black writers of the right, left, and center as unwitting teammates, and it would reframe their relation to the dominant white discourse about nationality.

The presidency is a moving target here, to be sure, with the vicissitudes of emotional investment in the president and the actual powers of that office moving up and down several times between Theodore Roosevelt and George W. Bush. So also do concepts of the presidency vary. In theory, practice, and literary representation we have oscillated between an emotionally sacralized and effectively dictatorial figure (Lincoln, FDR), on the one side, and, on the other, someone who, constrained by and adhering to party politics or to the separation of powers, avoids any cult of personality in order to serve mainly as a functionary within the machinery of government (Coolidge, Carter).

As with any thematic study, one may wonder whether literary representations provide a key to cultural truths or if they are merely secondary reflections of historical forces better investigated elsewhere. Or, to put the matter as a question, why read novels if political science tells us...