Criticism and American Cultural Repair

Abstract

American cultural criticism came first, American culture second. Europeans always had ideas about what America was going to have to measure up to. The land was theirs before they were the land's. Cultural criticism is what we have come to call the genres of Americans examining America in light of their expectations for it. Although commonly expressed in terms of objective issues-what effect does America have on the personality, what sort of literature has it produced, etc.--it is persistently a tradition of expression about how America seems to its self-consciously philosophic, literary, intellectual individuals. Beginning even before the Puritan expectations for a city upon a hill lost out to an equally expectation-laden claim for a new world in which there was happiness to be gained, the tradition has partaken of the prophetic. It is important, however, that both the spiritual and material promises of American life, by which its culture was to be judged, new Eden or New Jerusalem, were a priori standards to which American culture was meant to measure up. The American cultural critic was born a prophet and still aspires to the prophet's schematic life: apart from the crowd, moved by an inner voice, more often vindicated than appreciated, a paradigm of the demanding, opinionated, hyperattentive seer, surest when alone, truest when unheeded. More characteristic than prophets unheeded have been American prophets embarrassed by acceptance. The essays in this number of American Literary History suggest that acceptance creates the baffling condition of American cultural criticism. It is clear that the eagerness of the culture to heed its critics, to accept their prophecy, haunts the tradition of American cultural criticism, which has come to depend on the rewards of the critical stance. The critic has become the one left standing, criticism identified by unpopularity. Cultural criticism invariably reflects what some individual wants or feels. It is not only thinking; it is thinking about how the culture within which one lives, works; it is the individual's