Parlor Pianos, Homespun, and Ahab's Leyden Jar: The Arts and American Life

Abstract

What follows are informal notes on the general subject of how works of art may be shown to connect to social and cultural issues large enough to affect "plain folk." My emphasis is on works which do not obviously contain social or cultural information; I have chosen examples mainly from the last century in literature, painting, music and architecture. I plan to pay only limited attention to the interesting essay in which Henry Nash Smith asked whether the field of American Studies could develop a method.1 Smith, I think, just wanted license to go on studying and teaching good novels and poems; he was afraid scholars would come to concentrate only on the most commercially popular pieces. He had in mind an American Studies which dealt mainly with literature. But since no two American Studies programs in the United States or in other countries do the same thing to begin with—some do not deal with literature at all, while others are essentially enriched American literature majors—since there is comparable variety in scholarly goals and interests, Smith's question might be more distracting than useful.