The Persistence of Literature in Early American Studies

Abstract

I N a recent essay, Murray Krieger observes that the history of literary criticism may be written as a two-thousand-year-old struggle between the aesthetic celebration of the literary text and an ascetic attention to the historical and social conditions in which the text functions.1 Philip F. Gura's account of our recent past in early American studies certainly fits that pattern as he applauds the recent shift in the weathervane of academic fashion toward social and cultural history and away from deconstruction and similar things francophile. Associating poststructuralism with the linguistic and ideological analysis that dominated the profession in the 1970s and early I98os, Gura says that historically minded scholars were forced to hunker down in their carrels and wait out the long dark night. Now, however, like prisoners emerging from Plato's cave, these scholars stand blinking in the sunshine and relishing the cool breezes of a new age of reconstructive criticism, one in which society and culture matter to scholars again and the historical context will reclaim land lost to textual studies in the preceding two decades. Aesthetic interest in textual analysis has once again yielded to an ascetic dedication to historical reconstruction, and Gura predicts a long and happy future for history in our field. Gura's survey is extraordinary in its breadth and insight, and the methodological affiliations he traces among so many different scholars and critics establish an intellectual coherence in early American studies that makes a powerful case for where we are now and where we are likely to be heading. To be sure, his account of the recent past and immediate future of early American scholarship is vulnerable to the obvious retort that things, as always, are more complicated than that, and his dismissive references to post-structuralism are far too quick to explain how the theoretical paradigms associated with that term could have wrought such damage on his friend Alan Kantrow and other hapless colleagues for twenty years. Such weaknesses are endemic to dialectical arguments, how-