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Criticism, Biography, and Popular Culture: Comment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
The preceding essays by David Stineback, David Nye, and V. P. Bynack argue that there is a crisis in our discipline and proceed to make, or at least imply, suggestions for the future of American Studies.
1. We have failed to do justice to authors like Willa Cather; we have, in fact, not even approached the achievement of popular newspaper reviewers.
2. We have indulged in the old “pretense of biography” and overlooked the most significant sources while looking for such dubious entities as the one called, for example, “Thomas Edison.”
3. We are incurable nineteenth-century organicists and don't even know that we should know that we don't know what we are talking about.
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References
NOTES
1. Slote, Bernice, “Willa Cather,” in Bryer, Jackson R., ed., Sixteen Modern American Authors (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 39.Google Scholar
2. Hegel, , Asthetik II (1842; rpt. Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, n.d.) 354 (my translation); see also II, 97 and 426.Google Scholar
3. A model study of such interrelationships between cultural symbols and political interest is Abner Cohen's excellent analysis of “Drama and Politics in the Development of a London Carnival,” Man, n.s., 15, pp. 65–87.Google Scholar
4. Potter, David M., “Is America a Civilization?” in History and American Society: Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 224–25.Google Scholar
5. Trabant, Jürgen, Elemente der Semiotik (Munich: Beck, 1976), p. 101Google Scholar (my translation). Trabant juxtaposes Saussure and Eco here. Trabant's book is scheduled for publication in English by the Columbia University Press.