Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature by Michael J. Colacurcio

Abstract

Reviewed by: Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature by Michael J. Colacurcio Jonathan A. Cook Michael J. Colacurcio Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2021. xiv + 271 pp. In Doctrine and Difference: Readings in Classic American Literature, Michael J. Colacurcio continues to consolidate his place as a leading contemporary critic of classic American literature, with his main focus on writings of the Puritans and the impact of their beliefs on the American Romantics. Composed of essays published over the last two decades, the volume under review is one of several recent offerings from Colacurcio that bring to fruition a lifetime of teaching, thinking, and writing about the national literature—an output that now includes a capacious new two-volume study of Emerson and Other Minds (2021), and a recently published collection of essays entitled Hawthorne's Histories, Hawthorne's World: From Salem to Somewhere Else (2022), to follow up on his earlier The Province of Piety: Moral History of Hawthorne's Early Tales (1984). Additional evidence of this critic's broad impact on literary studies is the Festschrift of essays assembled by his former students and colleagues for his retirement, A Passion for Getting It Right (2015). Such a steadily growing roster of publication puts Colacurcio in a special class of historicist scholars, starting with the transformative figure of Perry Miller, whose foundational understanding of Puritan religious history and doctrine has provided productive insights into the larger development of American literature, particularly in that perennially appealing era known as the American Renaissance. While always rewarding in terms of breadth of comprehension and generosity of analysis, reading Colacurcio can sometimes be a labor of love, given the writer's embrace of a deliberately improvisatory style that at times resembles scat singing in its unpredictable assemblage of insights, strung together on extended fragments and elliptical aperçus. For Colacurcio is seemingly as much a postmodern performance artist engaged in a perpetual play of signifiers as a methodical expounder of ideas, and it occasionally takes some habituation to his style in order to appreciate the remarkable erudition that underlies his analyses. While some readers may be put off by the more gratuitous flippancies [End Page 101] and aporias, Colacurcio's passionate engagement with his subjects always provides productive grounds for thought, making the reader eager to reexamine the works under discussion to test his arguments. In the dozen essays contained in the current volume, Colacurcio examines a wide range of subjects: the tension between religious faith and emotional attachment in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet (Chapter 1); the paradoxical combination of cosmopolitan reading and provincial subject matter in Hawthorne's fiction (Chapter 2); the comparable literary aesthetics of Hawthorne and Poe (Chapter 3); the play of skepticism and subjectivity of Emerson's "Experience" (Chapter 4); the Melvillean idea of the "power of blackness" in Hawthorne's tales, notably "The Bosom Serpent" and "The Christmas Banquet" (Chapter 5); an anatomy of the use of genre in Melville's Polynesian narratives (Chapter 6); the suggestive relationship of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand" to related scenes in Moby-Dick (Chapter 7); the attenuated liberal Christian ideas of original sin dramatized in The House of the Seven Gables (Chapter 8); the religious and political dynamics in three works of Melville's short fiction (Chapter 9); winter as the implicit seasonal climax of Walden (Chapter 10); the shadowy skeptical world of Emerson's "Illusions" from the otherwise pragmatic Conduct of Life essays (Chapter 11); and, in a rare foray into postbellum American fiction, a study of manners and morals in Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham and James's The American (Chapter 12). Given this heterogeneous mix of contents, I will focus here on the three chapters devoted to Melville's fiction, examining what they offer the reader and the value of their approaches. In "The South Seas in Melville: Genre, Myth (and Sex) in Typee, Omoo, and Mardi," Colacurcio provides an overview of generic affiliations for Melville's first three narratives set in Polynesia, which he identifies as "first, captivity narrative well disguised as travel report, next, political critique masquerading as strolling island adventure, then, comparative mythology dressed in the...