The symbol-myth-image generation of American Studies scholars went to school to giants, and in vital respects were giants themselves. They were tutored by the likes of F. O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, Ralph Henry Gabriel, Samuel Eliot Morison, Arthur O. Lovejoy, Howard Mumford Jones, and they went on to create such classics in the field as Virgin Land; The Savages of America; Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age; The American Adam; The Jacksonian Persuasion; The Quest for Paradise; The Machine in the Garden.

In the winter quarter of 1979 I was teaching a junior-level American Studies core course that introduced our students to comparative culture study. Many of the students had taken one or two classes from me already; but I decided, nevertheless, to begin the course with an essay that would say again in a new way exactly what are the characteristics of interdisciplinary thinking. I had begun other courses in this way but not with much success. Faced with student puzzlement and confusion about what made American Studies different from disciplinary study about America, I had had to resort to naming examples for students to emulate. What we lacked was a way to talk about interdisciplinary thinking, especially a way that was accessible to undergraduates. I had read and appreciated the previous summer an essay in The CoEvolution Quarterly; so I decided to try beginning the course with that brief, breezily discursive piece. I was a bit nervous about deciding so. Gregory Bateson's essay “The Pattern Which Connects” reads much like a story and is based on a talk for a general audience in 1977. But Bateson could be “maddeningly obscure” in his writing and speaking. (I recalled my total awe and bewilderment when, sometime in 1972 or 1973, I had my only experience listening to a Bateson public lecture.) My only earlier experience teaching Bateson—two essays from Steps to an Ecology of Mind—had been a miserable failure. My worry was that “The Pattern Which Connects” would be total gibberish to the students—not an auspicious beginning for a course.

Clifford Geertz has observed that “anthropology is a science whose progress is marked less by a perfection of consensus than by a refinement of debate. What gets better is the precision with which we vex each other.” Geertz's observation on anthropology seems equally applicable to other disciplines interested in the study of culture, including history and American Studies. With this in mind, this essay is intended to contribute not to some “perfection of consensus” but, rather, to a “refinement of debate” by sharpening the ability of those in culture studies to vex each other more precisely. My focus of attention, as well as my major point of departure, is Clifford Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures, a book that is widely cited and that has had significant cross-disciplinary appeal.

As originally planned, The Social Construction of Reality was to have been a collaboration among three sociologists and two philosophers and would presumably have been addressed to an audience composed of practitioners in both disciplines. As written, however, it is a work of “systematic theoretical reasoning” addressed to sociologists by sociologists. Although Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman may have anticipated a somewhat wider audience for their argument, they locate themselves and their theoretical position firmly within the history and discipline of sociology.

“A good deal of our politics is physiological.” When Ralph Waldo Emerson made this remark in his characteristically emphatic way, he might have been merely alluding to the traditional notion that the physical body and political systems are related in some odd way. But that Emerson was saying this in America in 1851 has a significance that goes beyond his being a clever, bookish man with the habit of connecting dots across wide conceptual spaces.

Most scholars interested in Cotton Mather have read his diary; none has read Mather as diarist. The distinction is crucial. In the one case, the diary is a source of information. In the other, the diary is a work in a literary genre. In the one case, the diary is a record of events; in the other, a sequence of entries. In the one case, the diary is to be supplemented; in the other, it is a whole. To read Mather's diary is simply to hunt through it for something of interest. To read Mather as a diarist is to define his diaristic context, to describe his diary within that context, to establish its norms and exceptions, and to see how those norms and exceptions vary over time.

For historians who use slave narratives to document the immediate physical and social facts of slave life, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself offers a frustratingly low yield. Beside Solomon Northup's detailed account of living quarters, diet, work life, holidays, and family relations, Douglass's Narrative must seem spare, incomplete, even misleading in its portrayal of the slave experience—an incendiary polemic written more to fuel the abolitionist cause than to convey the nature of the slave experience. To read the Narrative from this point of view, however, is to misapprehend how Douglass's text treats slavery and to be needlessly disappointed. Unlike Northup, Douglass focuses on the linguistic significance of bondage: He tersely portrays masters and slaves almost solely in terms of their linguistic acts because, for him, the reality of slavery is a profoundly rhetorical one. He charts his own relentless progress to freedom as the acquisition of an ever deeper understanding of language use in a slave economy, and the realization of his own freedom at the Nantucket antislavery convention is preeminently a linguistic event. Douglass's perspective is an important one, for as sociolinguists have discovered, “peoples do not all everywhere use language to the same degree, in the same situations, or for the same things. … Languages, like other cultural traits, will be found to vary in the degree and nature of their integration into the societies and cultures in which they occur.” Douglass was acutely sensitive to the linguistic system of slave society, of the ways in which language was used—and withheld—by one human being to enslave another.

American classical realists in the period 1865–1900 sought, in one way or another, to grasp the essence of their new concern and method. William Dean Howells defined it as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” Mark Twain claimed in the preface to his first book, “I am sure I have written honestly, whether wisely or not,” whereas Henry James (in The Art of Fiction, 1884) enjoined the aspiring writer not to “think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the color of life itself.” Truth, honesty, faithfulness to the “color of life itself”—what serious writer, in any period and writing in any mode, is not committed to those things? The problem, of course, lies in what we mean by each term, where the “material” and the “color of life” are, and by what standards (and by whom) they are to be validated. The resolution of those questions is a version of cultural politics.

Both for scholars and for the wider public Henry James began to come into his own after the centennial of his birth in 1943. If, as I believe, James has had a cultural function, we can tell approximately when he assumed it. The writer who is discussed in Frederick Dupee's collection of the critical essays written before 1945 had, generally speaking, been regarded as one interesting novelist among others. It was in the decade following the mid-1940s that he enjoyed a distinct position that set him apart and attracted a wider audience. He was often spoken of as the artist prized by other artists, although this did not, of course, explain the vogue that led to the reprinting of so many of his works, and the absorbed reading they frequently got from those who had no interest in the character of James's innovations in fictional technique. Did James answer a need felt by his readers at the time, and if so, what was it? Assuming that the novels, as Lionel Trilling once put it, read us—assuming, that is, that James supplied something we badly wanted—what clues about us does this offer?

Roy Pascal has observed that autobiography involves an interplay or collusion between the past and the present, that indeed its significance is more truly understood as the revelation of the present situation of the autobiographer than as the uncovering of his past. As readers of autobiography we ordinarily do need to be reminded of this obvious truth, even though Freud and his followers have shaken our faith in the ability of memory to provide reliable access to the contents of the past. When we settle into the theater of autobiography, what we are ready to believe—and what most autobiographers encourage us to expect—is that the play we witness is a historical one, a largely faithful and unmediated reconstruction of events that took place long ago; whereas in reality the play is that of the autobiographical act itself, in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness. This mediation of the past by the present governs the autobiographical enterprise, and it frequently supplies a frame for narrative in modern autobiography. In Henry James's autobiography this mediation is prominently displayed in the foreground of the text, and it is for this reason that James's narrative has seemed to me especially suited to an inquiry into the nature of the autobiographical act.

The presence of the large, the massive, the majestic, the panoramic in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American painting can be well documented. Aesthetic theories of the sublime, scenes of Niagara Falls and mountains, large canvases, vast views—all of these attest to the longing of the small American nation on a sprawling continent to project its vision of a great destiny, the possible future, the promised future, in its art. An early work in oil on canvas (1833) encompassing the large in a small (193⅜ by 16⅛ inches) canvas is The Titan's Goblet by Thomas Cole, who is called the father of American landscape painting and who, in fact, in his transitional role between Washington Allston and Frederic Church, transferred a symbolic way of seeing, especially in terms of American nationhood, to the enterprise of American landscape painting. The Titan's Goblet, “one of Cole's smallest and most finished works,” according to an early biographer, is a mysterious and fantastic painting that begs for interpretation: It seems peculiarly central to the process of making the American landscape function in a metaphorical way. Clearly symbolic itself, the goblet in the painting may be more than that and can be seen as emblematic of what it represents; that is, it can be seen as a singular object that stands for something else by suggesting the other thing's nature or history.

“The automobile is treacherous, just as a cat is. It is tragically difficult to realize that it can become the deadliest missile, and can instantly turn … into a mad bull elephant.” So J. C. Furnas warned his readers in an article for the August 1935 Reader's Digest entitled “… And Sudden Death.” Furnas's graphic description of the devastation on the highway in the wake of a crash was intended to terrify drivers into saner behavior behind the wheel. His words forced the reader to imagine the horror of accident scenes that “no artist working on a safety poster would dare depict … in full detail.” Reader's Digest prefaced the piece with a warning to the fainthearted.

In one of the most famous paragraphs of our most famous autobiography, Henry Adams located the precise moment when “eighteenth century troglodytic Boston” joined industrial America: “the opening of the Boston and Albany Railroad; the appearance of the first Cunard Steamers in the bay; and the telegraphic messages which carried from Baltimore to Washington the news that Henry Clay and James K. Polk were nominated for the presidency. This was May, 1844.”

The history of the Jews in America is to a considerable extent the history of an idea. It is the story of how Jewish history was transformed by the idea of America and how, in turn, Jewish writers, intellectuals, artists, and public figures helped to sustain and modernize this idea. While it altered the modern Jewish experience, Jewish thinkers often led in the effort to make the idea of America relevant to the needs of an urban, industrial, and even postindustrial age. The work of such writers and thinkers served to keep the American idea meaningful in a time of competing authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies.

In the first flush of independence, while most Americans celebrated their success at arms against the English, Benjamin Rush remained more guarded. “The American war is over,” he reminded his countrymen, “but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.”

Rush's assertion was an arresting one at the time, and in an attenuated way its insight persists in the work that currently affords us our paradigmatic account of the Revolutionary movement. For Bernard Bailyn extends it to argue, in a succession of brilliant studies, that the ideas set loose in the struggle for independence had a logical momentum all their own. He has traced what he calls the “transforming radicalism of the American Revolution” to fruitions far beyond the conflict with England, and he affirms the fundamentality for all American history of the continuing “contagion of liberty” that originated in Revolutionary rhetoric.