Abstract

In recent years, calls for a radical revisioning of field of American studieshave sounded forth from such influential voices as R.C. DeProspo, Amy Kaplan, Donald Pease, Gregory Jay, Peter Carafiol, CarolynPorter, and Paul Lauter. I use term Americanist guardedly here; someof names just dropped have made compelling cases for permanentlydispensing with term Americanist altogether, along with attendantsupporting narratives and myths (the Puritans, exceptionalism, Hew World,democracy, and so forth) that together brought academic identity ofAmericanist into being during first half of twentieth century.1Americanists today, according to one recent article, allow a virtually xeno-phobic nationalism, that most American literary scholars would condemn inpolitics, to reign in field of literary studies (De Prospo 1992, 250).Judging from conference themes and issues of journals andmonographs of last ten years, however, it is probably more accurate tosay that while most of us maintain more or less intact (xenophobic)concepts of American studies that imagine United States into a criticaldiscipline, few of us today communicate research that supports kinds offormalist and frankly nationalist claims associated with classic traditionof American literary studies, ostensible target of De Prospo's and other'spolemics. In spite of fact that late history of scholarshipcan usefully be seen as an ongoing conversation about multiple Americanliterary traditions, competing group identities and cultural histories, and thecountry's imperialist history, newer dissensus and multicultural mod-els, we're now told, have nonetheless come to undergird yet another edificeof a totalizing nationalist criticism. As Amy Kaplan warns in her introductionto Cultures of United States Imperialism, the new pluralistic model ofdiversity runs of being bound by old paradigm of unity if itconcentrates its gaze only nervously on internal lineaments of Americanculture and leaves national borders intact without interrogating their for-mation (Kaplan 1993, 15). This essay objects to a slippage that has occurredwithin American studies, in which risk of hypostatizing pluralism hasbecome, for many, a widely accepted critical commonplace.

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