Situation: Critical! Critique, Theory and Early American Studies

Abstract

Reviewed by: Situation: Critical! Critique, Theory and Early American Studies Ana Schwartz (bio) Situation: Critical! Critique, Theory and Early American Studies University of Pennsylvania, McNeil Center for Early American Studies Philadelphia, March 31– April 2, 2016 Early America is in a critical situation. This was the assessment of the Puritan elders of the third and fourth decades of New England settlement, and we have the jeremiad to show for it. That genre assessed the state of collective ideals—declining—and it replied by invoking the threat of what Emily Dickinson would later call the “fainter hammers further heard” of imminent destruction: the “imperial thunderbolt / that scalps your naked soul.” The specifically American jeremiad, assessed a century or so after Dickinson, was more rigorously critical. It strove, wrote Sacvan Bercovitch, to reconcile a “gap between fact and ideal” perceived by English colonists. Such theorizing reinvigorated commitment to the original mission. It did so, Bercovitch showed, by emphasizing the experience of generational identity (16). This spring, we came to “Situation: Critical! Critique, Theory and Early American Studies” to speculate on the ideals shared or contested by literary critics and historians. In our lively collaborative thinking, we saw how “critique” can name the collective search to understand America as an experience of obligation through time, an experience that includes contemporary scholarship. We also saw that some of the greatest challenges to collective thought appear not primarily regarding periodization or method but rather generational difference. Early American studies, unlike the Puritan errand in 1660, is hardly in decline. Its situation turns out to be one of renewed popularity. Our field, observed a participant during the closing roundtable, seems freshly relevant in popular culture. She was describing The Octoroon, a recent stage production here in Philadelphia, but a number of other highly visible examples might have been cited.1 This should come as no surprise. Eight [End Page 747] years ago, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, responding to Eric Slauter’s now-canonical critique of early American literary history, pointed out the questions of “value and desire,” more urgent in a postnational experience of the state (205, emphasis added). Early American literature, particularly its prenational archives, she noted, can show how ideals for collective life make affective use of the past. These texts can generate desire for, and in some cases facilitate access to, forms of national belonging through shaping “cultural citizens,” as one panelist, citing Homi Bhabha, reminded us. Popular histories whet that desire (Shaw). They are vessels of affective investment. Their financial success demonstrates the pedagogical success of the methods we’ve passed on to our students, and the strength of the approach by which future generations will learn to feel for history and find pleasure in rehearsing it. The university, of course, profits from this exchange of knowledge for feeling; and we got, instead of Dickinson’s “Winds hold[ing] Forests in their Paws,” the noisy construction of a new undergraduate dorm behind the dais of the McNeil Center’s Stephanie Grauman Wolf Room. Less visible than that infrastructure, but no less firm, was the organization of the conference according to profession and period. The presentations tended toward the later end of “early American studies,” and were separated into subgenres by experience in the archive. Younger literary historians populated the panels; well-established critics, the keynotes. Age and institutional memory seemed to determine what any of us meant by theory. Distinctions of age and experience in the content of those talks were subtle, and appeared mostly, though not exclusively, in the cited names of “named theory” (Fredric Jameson qtd. in White and Drexler 476). Jacques Rancière, for example, one of the most popular recent theorists of aesthetics and politics, was highly favored among the younger in the profession. The older, on the other hand, often recalled deconstruction through the proper names of J. Hillis Miller, John Guillory, Geoffrey Hartman, and of course, Jacques Derrida. The spirit of cross-generational conversation energized these citations. These names affirmed the existence of a shared resource to think beyond our individual archives and inherited approaches, and to recognize the diversity of investments in maintaining such extraarchival reservoirs of thought. Michel Foucault was tapped most among these reservoirs...