Reply to the Critics

Abstract

AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF "THE IDIOCY OF AMERICAN STUDIES IN THE American Quarterly a few months ago, a few sound verbal thrashings for its author seemed inevitable. Directed as it was against the carnivalesque "Wayne's World" of poststructuralism in contemporary American Studies -party on, Jacques, party on, Michel -the piece seemed likely to ruffle a few tailfeathers. As these two essays demonstrate, the essay was successful at least in those terms. So while it can be rather discomforting to attend a public hanging, especially when it's your own, I would like to remove my head from the noose long enough for a brief reply. Barry Shank's indignant essay accuses me of many sins: intemperance, moralism, simple-mindedness, lack of sophistication. He's probably right on all counts. But two other assertions, upon which his homily really rests, do not hold up. First, he sternly calls me a "crude Cartesian." This goes too far. On some playgrounds, that's enough to start a fistfight. But be that as it may, the assertion itself is rather silly. Even a cursory reading of my article shows that, contrary to Shank's claims, I do not believe that "discourse is separate from material reality, and when push comes to shove, we historians really ought to be concerned with reality." (All I really asked was that they have a nodding acquaintance with it.) The claim that I am hostile to "literary-cultural analysis" and "literary theory" and "literary perspective" comes as news to me, since that is largely what I