Shock & Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by William V. Spanos (review)

Abstract

Shock & Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. William v. spanos, Shock & Awe: American Exceptionalism and the Imperatives of the Spectacle in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Re-Mapping the Transnational: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies. Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth University Press, 2013. Pp. xviii, 222. isbn: 978-1-61168-462-9. $40.Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), the story of nineteenth-century Hartford resident Hank Morgan who suffers a blow to his head and awakens in the sixth-century England of King Arthur, is a seminal book in the American literary canon. Over the years, it has been read many ways: as a 'contrast' between Arthurian times and the present (to use Twain's own word), as a brilliant satire and social critique, as a burlesque, as a political commentary, as a foundational work in the science fiction subgenre of time travel, and, of course, as a masterpiece of American Arthuriana.William V. Spanos' study Shock & Awe proposes a new and provocative reading of Twain's landmark novel. Inspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, Spanos offers a fresh assessment of the place of a global America in the American imaginary. He argues that Twain identifies with the character of Hank Morgan, particularly in his defining use of spectacle, and therefore with an American exceptionalism that anticipates the George W. Bush administration's normalization of the state of exception and the imperial policy of 'preemptive war,' unilateral 'regime change,' and 'shock and awe' tactics.In his initial chapters, Spanos outlines his study and offers an overview of both his argument and his methodology. He establishes the 'ideological context' for reading the literary criticism on Connecticut Yankee 'by undertaking a genealogy of the American exceptionalism' that he believes is at the 'thematic heart of the novel'; and he provides the 'historical context-the particular techno-scientific avatar of the American exceptionalist ethos-at the time of the closing of the American frontier at the end of nineteenth century, when Twain was writing the novel.' A more detailed critical analysis of the dominant representations of Connecticut Yankee follows and is divided into several parts: 'the early representations, contemporary with Twain, which interpret the novel as a celebration of the exceptionalism of the American nation at the end of the nineteenth century (phase 1); the later, Cold-War ones, which, troubled by the contradictory excessive violence of the climactic Battle of the Sand Belt, read the novel as a noble failure (phase 2); and the latest ones, encompassing the period between the Vietnam and the War on Terror in the wake of September 11, 2001, which categorically-without commenting on the anxieties expressed in phase 2-distinguish an anti-imperialist Twain from his protagonist's techno-capitalistrepublican- imperial project on feudal England (phases 3 and 4)' (p. …