Paul Giles

Transnationalism and Classic American Literature

Taking issue with associations between American literature and identity politics, this essay argues that to remap the culture of the United States in global terms is to problematize its exemplary and exceptionalist qualities and recognize inherent transnational frictions. As an example of this, the writings of Emerson and Thoreau in the 1840s are situated in relation to conflicts over the Oregon Territory, so that their textual designs come to seem less abstract or Neoplatonic than aggressively nationalistic. To restore a sense of the spatial problematic to American literature is to interrogate its more traditional integration within a temporal dimension of prophetic destiny. The essay concludes by suggesting that reexamining American allegories of interiority through pre-Romantic theories of spatial formation effectively produces a different perspective on texts that have become naturalized as examples of liberal self-reliance and institutionalized as types of classic American literature.

Reconstructing American Studies: Transnational Paradoxes, Comparative Perspectives

While American Studies continues to be a popular subject in universities and colleges on both sides of the Atlantic, several influential critics have recently expressed some sense that its methodological direction appears increasingly uncertain. To be sure, there never was a time when this fields methodology has not been problematic: arguments about what American Studies should include, and indeed whether its eclectic narratives could reasonably be said to constitute an academic discipline at all, have circulated many times since the rapid growth of the subject in the late 1940s. This development has been well documented over the last few years. Philip Gleason has shown how the end of the Second World War led to a patriotic desire to identify certain specifically American values and characteristics; this led to various mythic idealizations of the American spirit in seminal critical works of the 1950s; and this in turn was followed by a more empiricist reaction in the 1960s and 1970s, when social scientists and historians of popular culture were concerned to demystify those earlier, holistic images of a “virgin land” and an “American Adam.” These are old controversies, and I do not intend to rehearse them in detail here. From the perspective of the early 1990s, what is more urgent is to consider how, or indeed if, the field of American Studies might continue to make an important contribution to our understanding of the United States, as well as a significant intervention within the world of learning more generally.

Narrative Reversals and Power Exchanges: Frederick Douglass and British Culture

Within the last thirty years, Frederick Douglass’s first two autobiographies—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)—have become canonical texts. One reason for this rapid institutionalization is that Douglass’s ‘‘cult of the self-made man’’ who triumphs over adversity dovetails with a much more traditional American ethic of individual virtue.1 As Joseph Fichtelberg has observed, Douglass appears to present himself as a kind of black Benjamin Franklin, an exemplar of heroic selfreliance, striving ‘‘to embody the millennial ideals of an America foretold in the Declaration of Independence.’’ 2 My purpose in this essay is to problematize these critical homologies that yoke Douglass and an abstract idea of American nationalism by considering his two autobiographies in light of his engagement with British political culture. I will argue that the melodramatic representations of violence in the 1845 Narrative are reformulated in My Bondage and My Freedom by a textual dynamic of self-contradiction, which works deliberately to disrupt indigenous perspectives of all kinds. This dynamic can be linked to the impact on Douglass’s work of transnationalism, which he began to regard as a literary and discursive phenomenon as well as a social imperative. Nationalism for Douglass thus came to involve not so much a positive or universal ideal but, rather, a set of fluctuating contrary terms. I will argue, accordingly, that there is a correlation between Douglass’s aesthetic structures of ironic displacement and the epistemological paradoxes that frame his political career, such that his point of identification keeps shifting, and power is represented as a material commodity to be recycled and exchanged.

The Parallel Worlds of Jose Marti

It might be argued that José Martí sought deliberately to transpose himself into mythological status by his final, self-immolating dash against Spanish troops in the Cuban rebellion of 1895. Certainly the sense of him as a martyr for Cuban independence, what Fidel Castro in 1959 called an “Apostle” of revolutionary freedom, still haunts our view of his achievements today.1 Philip S. Foner’s editions of Martí’s works emphasize his increasing disillusionment toward the end of his life with relationships of “capital and labor in the United States,” with Foner’s selections being arranged to make Martí appear a forerunner of twentieth-century socialism.2 Enrico Mario Santí has also written recently of how Martí “has been co-opted by the ideology of Latinamericanism” in its effort to disseminate a politics of anti-imperialism, while George Lipsitz has commented more specifically on the relevance of Martí for offering “radical alternatives . . . to the terms of hemispheric unity prefigured by the North American Free-Trade Agreement,” dominated as it is by the economic interests of the United States.3 While such readings do usefully highlight particular aspects of Martí’s life and work, they tend also to flatten out his view of the United States, toward which his writings maintain a more complicated sense of ambivalence. After his arrival in New York in January 1880, Martí’s first reactions, as documented in the essay “Impressions of America,” are generally positive. He welcomes the fact that he is “at last, in a country where everyone looks like his own master,” and he applauds the openness of the United States to enterprise and innovation: “A good idea finds always here a suitable, soft, grateful ground.” He writes: “You must be intelligent, that is all.”4 At the same time, he accuses Americans of lacking “intellectual height, and moral deepness,” of being a

Hart Crane : the contexts of The bridge

Introduction 1. Bridge as pun 2. Relativity 3. Capitalism 4. Capitalism and the underworld 5. Burlesque 6. Bridge as myth 7. Abstraction and the city 8. Music 9. The new machine and the new word 10. James Joyce 11. La Revolution Surrealiste 12. Surrealism and madness 13. Pscyhoanalysis and homosexuality 14. Paradox and oxymoron 15. Alchemy and the Romantic quest 16. Conclusion Appendices Notes Works cited Indexes.

Historicizing the Transnational: Robert Coover, Kathy Acker and the Rewriting of British Cultural History, 1970–1997

On the face of it, the move to classify any particular cultural period might seem such a slippery, arbitrary undertaking that the result would almost inevitably appear excessively homogenizing or otherwise misleading. The first use of the term “Enlightenment” in the English-speaking world was not until 1865, for example, while the notion of literary Romanticism as a discrete historical phenomenon did not emerge until the later part of the nineteenth century, long after Wordsworth and Coleridge had died.1 The more sceptical wing of microhistorians and new historicists would say this merely exemplifies the categorical distance and difference between particular situations and the subsequent rationalizations imposed forcibly upon them. A counterargument, however, might suggest it is only through retrospective mapping of this kind that what Arjun Appadurai calls the “isomorphic” qualities running through particular eras can be brought to light.2 Works or phenomena apparently quite diffuse and unrelated can be brought together in illuminating constellations, thereby suggesting ways in which structural patterns of certain kinds, ideological as well as economic, have helped to shape, if not altogether determine, cultural narratives at particular junctures in history. Fredric Jamesons 1984 essay “Periodizing the 60s,” for instance, rigorously eschewed both the anecdotal indulgence and the sentimental forms of nostalgia which have accumulated persistently around that decade through its insistence that history “is necessity, that the 60s had to happen the way it did, and that its opportunities and failures were inextricably intertwined, marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation.

E Pluribus Multitudinum: The New World of Journal Publishing in American Studies

As part of the “international initiative” at the 2004 meeting of the American Studies Association in Atlanta, a roundtable took place at which nineteen editors of American studies journals from different countries introduced their publications and discussed the current state of the field. However, as with a similar workshop held at the First Congress of the International American Studies Association in Leiden one year earlier, the ultimate effect of the ASA session was to generate more bewilderment than enlightenment. The editors in Atlanta gave excellent presentations on behalf of their journals, but the audience was left wondering how and why American studies journal publishing could have proliferated in such a comparatively short space of time. In the 1950s there was just one journal dedicated specifically to American studies, American Quarterly (AQ), which had published its first issue in 1949. During the second half of the twentieth century the number grew steadily, often linked to the growth of national associations of American studies outside the United States; however, during the past ten years the volume of traffic has increased exponentially, despite the fact that library budgets in most universities worldwide are suffering severe fiscal retrenchment. In an attempt to respond to such concerns, AQ invited us to write a critical essay examining the state of journal publishing in American studies throughout the world, and we set out to ask why the market for academic journals in this field has mutated and fragmented so much. We are well aware of our constitutional inadequacy for such a task and of how any attempt at a global perspective will find itself thwarted not only by limitations of linguistic competence but also by an unavoidable circumference of professional experience and investments; in a 1999 essay, Fernando Rosa Riberio aptly comments that “one of the more perverse effects of ‘world’ or ‘global’ history studies . . . is that, as we venture out to other shores . . . we often do so with the scholarly equivalent of a vanity bag as sole luggage.” Nevertheless, we believe that the story of American studies journal publishing is an interesting and, at times, not entirely obvious one, so that it is worth trying to tease out the alternative,

Romanticism's Antipodean Spectres: Don Juan and the Transgression of Space and Time

This article finds an antipodean imaginary as a central axis of Romantic poetics. More than shaping the content and thematic attitudes of what came to be called Romantic poetry, the notion of the geographical and conceptual antipode acts as a structuring formal principle of some of the periods most exemplary texts. With attention to how that principle operates in a range of works from Southeys early poems to Byrons Don Juan, the article offers a corrective to recent historicist treatments of Romanticism, which have at times overlooked the complex ways in which transpacific space enters into Romantic poetics and, further, how those aesthetic constructions shaped and continue to shape global political imaginings.

Transatlantic currents and the invention of the American novel

Like all histories, the history of the novel has always been written retrospectively, producing in the celebrated work of Ian Watt and Cathy N. Davidson powerful alignments of theories of fiction with the emergence of national narratives. In Watts case, this involved the valorization of a masculine, middle-class individualism that, in The Rise of the Novel , he took to typify the realistic idiom of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Writing some thirty years later, Davidson identified in the early American novel a predominantly female discourse of sentimentalism, whose “distinctive voice” she understood as combating the “demoralizing derision of Anglo-European arbiters of value and good taste,” and as a counternarrative that constituted a resource for “those not included in the established power structures of the early Republic.” Both Watt and Davidson sought to inscribe generic and national types, but it is equally important to acknowledge the inherent instability of both these typological categories throughout the eighteenth century, with formal and generic mutations of the novel being akin to the amorphous, fluctuating nature of national formations. The Derridaean maxim that the “law of genre” is inherently self-contradictory since it establishes norms only for the purpose of violating them thus has a particular historical resonance in the case of the novel, since, as Homer Obed Brown notes, the novel as an “institution” did not begin to be consolidated or canonized until the early nineteenth century.

Alan Trachtenberg, in Conversation with Paul Giles

This conversation took place in Oxford on 27 February 2007. Alan Trachtenberg was Visiting Professor at Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute during winter term 2007, co-teaching with Paul Giles a course on ‘The Idea of Culture in American Thought and Art’ as a methods course for the new Oxford Master’s degree in English and American Studies, which accepted its fi rst intake of students in 2006–07. Readings on the course included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, William Carlos Williams, Alain Locke, Constance Rourke, Hart Crane, and Walker Evans. Leo Marx, emeritus professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology — born in 1919, but still academically active — visited the seminar on 7 February, and he later gave a talk to the Oxford English Faculty on The Great Gatsby. Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, originally published in 1964 and never out of print since then, is, along with F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), one of the most seminal scholarly works in American Studies of all time.