No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
The topic “Criticism, Biography, and Popular Culture” raises issues that epitomize current intellectual possibilities and problems. As Emerson said of his own time in “The American Scholar,” this is a moment when “the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of men are being searched by fear and hope.… This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” If anyone's “energies” are being “searched by fear and hope” today, it's because we face a similar situation. The two preceding essays brought to bear in rapid succession two historically different models of how the world works. These models, which I will follow Fredric Jameson in calling the “organic” model of the nineteenth century and the “linguistic” model of the twentieth, imply two different versions of the character and status of language, two different versions of what literature is, two different versions of what the self is, and two different versions of what we could mean by saying that we use these things to study American “culture.”
1. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The American Scholar,” in Whicher, Stephen, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1957), p. 77.Google Scholar
2. Jameson, Fredric, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. v–ix.Google Scholar
3. By “model” here I mean something similar to Thomas S. Kuhn's notion of an “exemplar.” See his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed., in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), II, No. 2, 187–207Google Scholar. Gene Wise's application of Kuhnian ideas to the history of American Studies has appeared since this essay was written.“‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly, 31, No. 3 (bibliographical issue) (1979), 293–337Google Scholar, provides a view that contrasts in intention, and therefore in methods and conclusions, with what follows here.
4. Emerson, , “American Scholar,” p. 77.Google Scholar
5. The phrase is from Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), p. xivGoogle Scholar. For a critique of Williams's approach to the concept of culture, see Eagleton, Terry, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso Editions, 1976), pp. 21–43.Google Scholar
6. Webster, Noah, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols., (New York, 1828)Google Scholar, unpaginated; see entries for Culture and Manners. Italics are Webster's.
7. Webster, Noah, “Remarks on the Manners, Government, and Debt of the United States,” in A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv [sic] Writings on Moral, Historical, Political, and Literary Subjects (Boston, 1790), pp. 103, 84.Google Scholar
8. Whitman, Walt, Democratic Vistas (1871 revision)Google Scholar, in Bradley, Scully, ed., Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1949), pp. 512, 510.Google Scholar
9. Bercovitch, Sacvan's explication of this concept is clearest in Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. The tension between “high” and “popular” culture permeates discussions of American national culture, appearing in what may be its most famous form in Van Wyck Brooks's 1915 essay, “America's Coming-of-Age,” as the “Highbrow” and the “Lowbrow” (Three Essays on America [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1934]).Google Scholar
10. Emerson, , “American Scholar,” pp. 77–78.Google Scholar
11. Ibid., p. 79
12. Ibid., p. 78.
13. Ibid., p. 79.
14. Ibid., pp. 75, 73.
15. Kuklick, Bruce, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” American Quarterly, 24, No. 4 (10 1972), 437.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Nature,”Google Scholar in Whicher, , ed., Selections, pp. 50, 32Google Scholar; Webster, Noah, “Introduction,” in American Dictionary of the English Language, unpaginatedGoogle Scholar; Whitman, , Democratic Vistas, p. 537.Google Scholar
17. de Saussure, Ferdinand, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Baskin, Wade (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), pp. 66, 67.Google Scholar
18. Ibid., 67, 69, 70.
19. It is thus no accident that in Nye's use of Greimas's “semantic squares,” the Edisons come in multiples of four. Semantic squares merely chart “difference”; they display the way any given term implies the terms that differ from it by opposition and inversion. The linkage of “difference” and “deference” pins down Jacques Derrida's French pun différance. See, for example, his “Signature Evénément Contexte,” Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), pp. 365–93.Google Scholar
20. Jameson, , Prison-House of Language, pp. 109–10Google Scholar. Of the critics of culture who use a semiotic approach, the one who most successfully avoids the problems I'm raising is Clifford Geertz. He does so, I believe, because his approach is rhetorical as well as semiotic. His strategy is to stress the suasive, communicative aspect of cultural texts, not their foundations in codes and systems into which the communicative act can be deconstructed. His response to “functionalism” and “psychologism” serves equally well for structuralism and poststructuralism: “to regard [symbolic forms] as ‘saying something of something,’ and saying it to somebody, is at least to open up the possibility of an analysis which attends to their substance rather than to reductive formulas professing to account for them” (“Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures [New York: Basic Books, 1973], p. 453)Google Scholar. Paul De Man, the most dogged of deconstructionists, grudgingly admits the validity of Geertz's strategy and the strength of his position in a meditation called “Rhetoric of Persuasion (Nietzsche)”: “Nietzsche's final insight may well concern rhetoric itself, the discovery that what is called ‘rhetoric’ is precisely the gap that becomes apparent in the pedagogical and philosophical history of the term. [This gap is between rhetoric as the “notquite respectable handmaiden of the fradulent grammar used in oratory” and as “the ground for the furthest-reaching dialectical speculations conceivable to the mind.”] Considered as persuasion, rhetoric is performative but when considered as a system of tropes, it deconstructs its own performance” (Allegories of Reading [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979], pp. 130, 131)Google Scholar. De Man implies that Geertz's rhetorical strategy is a way to preserve for language a power and legitimacy that critics like Derrida would deny it. By stressing the suasory aspect of rhetoric, Geertz has staked out the alternative to the deconstructionist position, one of “two incompatible, mutually-destructive points of view” (p. 131).
21. Stallo, John Bernard, Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, 2d ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1884), pp. 14, 133–34.Google Scholar
22. Not surprisingly, it is a question of major concern for Marxists, who have devoted a good deal of attention to it. Of particular interest are Lukàcs, Georg's work Toward the Ontology of Social Being, trans. Fernbach, David (London: Merlin Press, 1978)Google Scholar, and more recently, the work of Louis Althusser (for example, his “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Brewster, Ben [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971]).Google Scholar