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F. O. Matthiessen and the Tragedy of the American Scholar

Randall Fuller

in Emerson's Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists

This chapter describes a curious incident that occurred as F. O. Matthiessen completed the opening section on Emerson for his magisterial American Renaissance: he, too, suffered a nervous breakdown. ... More

This chapter describes a curious incident that occurred as F. O. Matthiessen completed the opening section on Emerson for his magisterial American Renaissance: he, too, suffered a nervous breakdown. Even more curious: as he writes in his journal about the causes for his suicidal depression, he uses Emerson's language to express himself. Matthiessen's vocalization of Emerson suggests not only an unsettling identification but also a profound uneasiness with the writer. While Matthiessen may have found in the American Scholar a vocational model that promised to unify culture and so rescue the intellectual from social isolation, he also discovered in Emerson's writing radical contradictions he believed were symptomatic of his own position as public intellectual — and private homosexual — in American society.Less

Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narratives and the “Map of the Infinite”

Paul Giles

in The Global Remapping of American Literature

This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It ... More

This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It argues that antebellum narratives situate native soil on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement. In itself, the idea of medieval American literature is hardly more peculiar than F. O. Matthiessen's conception of an “American Renaissance.” Matthiessen sought to justify his subject by aligning nineteenth-century American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne with seventeenth-century English forerunners such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The chapter considers resonances of medievalism within nineteenth-century American culture and how many antebellum writers consciously foreground within their texts the shifting, permeable boundaries of time and space, suggesting how fiction and cartography, the writing of history and the writing of geography, are commensurate with each other.Less

Translating F. O. Matthiessen

Marjorie Garber

in Loaded Words

The life and work of F. O. Matthiessen seem very vivid and timely these days, given recent political developments. A lifelong supporter of left politics and political engagement, Matthiessen might ... More

The life and work of F. O. Matthiessen seem very vivid and timely these days, given recent political developments. A lifelong supporter of left politics and political engagement, Matthiessen might well have found great interest in the election of Barack Obama. For Matthiessen, writing at the beginning of a remarkable career that touched many lives, the decision to write about Elizabethan translation seems uncannily apt. This chapter explores the ways in which Matthiessen's scholarly, activist, and private worlds may be read together, even though he kept his own scholarship—as he thought—quite distinct from his political and personal life. Yet such stories always intertwine. William Shakespeare and the Elizabethan period offer a way into the interconnections between Matthiessen's public and private lives. The chapter begins with an intriguing fact: Matthiessen did not invent the title of his most famous book, American Renaissance; the title was suggested to him by a colleague and former student who became an equally celebrated professor and critic, Harry Levin.Less

To the Heart of Europe: F. O. Matthiessen’s Baedeker

George Blaustein

in Nightmare Envy and Other Stories: American Culture and European Reconstruction

F. O. Matthiessen and Alfred Kazin were the advance guard of a generation of American scholars bringing American literature to Europe after the war, but their European encounters shaped “American ... More

F. O. Matthiessen and Alfred Kazin were the advance guard of a generation of American scholars bringing American literature to Europe after the war, but their European encounters shaped “American literature” as a canon. Matthiessen was a gay Christian socialist who taught in Czechoslovakia just before the 1948 communist coup; he committed suicide, in 1950, having come under suspicion for “un-American” activities. Originally a scholar of Elizabethan translation, Matthiessen’s encounters in Europe changed his sense of what does and doesn’t get lost in carrying over a novel, an ideology, or the entire “American renaissance.” Kazin was a Jewish-American writer whose encounters in the wake of the Holocaust yielded opposing conclusions. Their dialogue, alongside European commentaries, illuminates the power of literature in postwar reconstruction. What did it mean for a Czech Americanist to read Keats in Buchenwald? And what did it mean for Europeans to read Moby-Dick in the postwar ruins?Less

F. O. Matthiessen: Comparative Criticism and the Rhetoric of Violence

Paul Giles

in Transnationalism in Practice: Essays on American Studies, Literature and Religion

This chapter discusses the issues of the rhetoric of violence and comparative criticism, focusing on the work of F.O. Matthiessen. It argues that Matthiessen's American Renaissance is the best book ... More

This chapter discusses the issues of the rhetoric of violence and comparative criticism, focusing on the work of F.O. Matthiessen. It argues that Matthiessen's American Renaissance is the best book of American literary and cultural criticism published during the twentieth century. The chapter explains that this book exerted a crucial influence in consolidating and directing the Americanist field during the second half of the twentieth century and that it was able to interweave close readings of particular authors with the discourses of history, painting, architecture and other contextual areas, so as to create both a cumulative and a synthetic portrait of American culture in the 1850s.Less

Whitman and the ‘Lawless Music’ of American Culture

Günter Leypoldt

in Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective

This introductory chapter discusses Walt Whitman and his ‘lawless music’. This musical trope is considered significant because it relates a ‘pure’ aesthetic form to a political practice. This implies ... More

This introductory chapter discusses Walt Whitman and his ‘lawless music’. This musical trope is considered significant because it relates a ‘pure’ aesthetic form to a political practice. This implies that Whitmanian poetry not only talks about democratic issues, but that it also transforms the essence of democracy. The chapter furthermore looks at the American-Renaissance construction, Whitman's cultural parallelisms, and the division between Whitman and the poets of gentility.Less

Elegy in the “Native American Renaissance” and After

Arnold Krupat

in That the People Might Live: Loss and Renewal in Native American Elegy

This chapter examines elegy in the “Native American Renaissance” and after, starting with the elegiac autobiographical text The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) by N. Scott Momaday and “Prologue” from ... More

This chapter examines elegy in the “Native American Renaissance” and after, starting with the elegiac autobiographical text The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) by N. Scott Momaday and “Prologue” from Linda Hogan's novel Solar Storms (1995). It also considers Gerald Vizenor prose elegy for a red squirrel, along with elegiac work attributed to various Native American poets such as Sherman Alexie, Jim Barnes, Kimberly Blaeser, Jimmie Durham, Lee Francis, Lance Henson, Maurice Kenny, Adrian Louis, Simon Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Ralph Salisbury. Many of these elegiac poems engage in various forms of melancholic mourning by telling the stories, reciting the names, and remembering those who have died, so that the People might live.Less

Epilog: After the American Renaissance

Günter Leypoldt

in Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective

This chapter reviews the American-Renaissance construction, which lost a lot of its credibility during the 1960s and 1970s, looking at the post-Kantian Whitmanian moment, and describing Whitman's ... More

This chapter reviews the American-Renaissance construction, which lost a lot of its credibility during the 1960s and 1970s, looking at the post-Kantian Whitmanian moment, and describing Whitman's image of the American poetry. It suggests that reductionism can be solved if one views literary production as a kind of imaginary world-making that cuts across strict world–art oppositions, such as socio-political expressiveness versus stylistic artistry.Less

Race, Civilization, Empire

in Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World

This chapter explores the later writing of Frederick Douglass and the extent to which it can be considered an indicator of a late alignment with the United States as empire. Even as Douglass took ... More

This chapter explores the later writing of Frederick Douglass and the extent to which it can be considered an indicator of a late alignment with the United States as empire. Even as Douglass took internal ethno-racial hierarchies, he was entailed in the prolongation of equally destructive, extra-national tropes in the US and African American imaginary. His trip to Egypt highlighted his determination to tackle a significant political facet of the cultural tourism of the late nineteenth century. Douglass's discourse on Egypt showed the vying trends in the anti-racialist rhetoric of Afro-America, and the extent to which it too is implicated in the discourse and practice of empire. Moreover, his late image as American Renaissance man caught the strengths and shortcomings of the national cultural imaginary.Less

Contemporary Reception

Günter Leypoldt

in Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman: A Transatlantic Perspective

This chapter tries to recreate the heterogeneity of Whitman's contemporary reception. It mentions the postbellum ‘Whitman myth’, which emerged and recombined with the modernist American-Renaissance ... More

This chapter tries to recreate the heterogeneity of Whitman's contemporary reception. It mentions the postbellum ‘Whitman myth’, which emerged and recombined with the modernist American-Renaissance construction. The chapter takes a look at the concept of ‘Whitmanian authority’, or a discursive space that guides the enunciation of nationality within professionalizing sites of cultural production. It also considers the cultural parallelisms and contradictory meditations on poetics that were highlighted by Whitman's modernist readers.Less

Emerson: Prospects

Michael T. Gilmore

in The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature

Emerson's efforts at reform and his Transcendentalist aversion to social witting and unwitting set the agenda for most antebellum writers by reinvigorating the prophetic voice—a breakthrough that ... More

Emerson's efforts at reform and his Transcendentalist aversion to social witting and unwitting set the agenda for most antebellum writers by reinvigorating the prophetic voice—a breakthrough that Emerson associated with the recovery of sight. Emerson's idea of the poet-actor, his powers no longer vitiated by blindness or retrospection, dominates the American Renaissance. Although Emerson's turn toward reform has been copiously documented, repairing the overemphasis on his Transcendentalist aversion to the social witting and unwitting, with the controversy over slavery, has not been recognized. The consensus is that Emerson did not awaken to the magnitude of the nation's original sin until August 1844, when he committed himself to abolition with his “Address on...the...Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.” This chapter analyzes this claim merged with the larger political drama of the antebellum years.Less

Conclusion: Emergent Literatures and Cosmopolitan Conversation

Cyrus R. K. Patell

in Emergent U.S. Literatures: From Multiculturalism to Cosmopolitanism in the Late Twentieth Century

This concluding chapter discusses the rationale at the heart of this book—the humility of understanding the limits of one's own knowledge and the efforts to expand it through varied means. This view ... More

This concluding chapter discusses the rationale at the heart of this book—the humility of understanding the limits of one's own knowledge and the efforts to expand it through varied means. This view is contextualized in the doctrine of “fallibilism,” which lies at the heart of contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism. The chapter also explores the antithesis to this notion in “counter-cosmopolitanism”—the unwillingness to question and possibly adjust basic assumptions. The hostility toward multiculturalism voiced by conservative educators and politicians in the United States during the 1980s, and the accompanying assertion that “American Literature” should be taught as a set of classic, canonical texts centered on the writers of the so-called American Renaissance, may be seen as a call for a kind of cultural purity that echoes the sentiments of counter-cosmopolitanism. In the end, the chapter proposes that emergent literature is one way to meet the challenges of counter-cosmopolitanism.Less

Final Chorus

Ann Charters and Samuel Charters

in Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation

As he continued his battle with cancer, John Clellon Holmes wrote letters expressing his concern about the collected volume of Jack Kerouac’s writing that he still hoped he and Ann Danberg could edit ... More

As he continued his battle with cancer, John Clellon Holmes wrote letters expressing his concern about the collected volume of Jack Kerouac’s writing that he still hoped he and Ann Danberg could edit together for the Viking Portable Library series. During this time, his wife Shirley discovered that she herself was afflicted with lung cancer. Holmes remained in touch with Richard and Rosemary Ardinger, who continued to work on the new collection of his poetry for their Limberlost Press. In one of his letters dated June 23, 1987, Holmes answered three literary questions: about the form of his novel Go, about the ideas inherited by the Beat Generation from the literary American Renaissance, and about the source of the yearnings of his own character “Paul Hobbes” in Go. On March 30, 1988, Holmes finally succumbed to cancer of the jaw and died in the Yale-New Haven Hospital at the age of sixty-two. Less than two weeks later, Shirley passed away. One of Holmes’s final poems, “Sweet Charity,” was published a year after his death.Less

Temperance Novels and Moral Reform

Debra J. Rosenthal

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 5: The American Novel to 1870

This chapter examines novels that deal with temperance and other moral reform movements in nineteenth-century America. It shows how writers and activists involved in the anti-alcohol movement relied ... More

This chapter examines novels that deal with temperance and other moral reform movements in nineteenth-century America. It shows how writers and activists involved in the anti-alcohol movement relied on storytelling in an effort to change both private drinking behavior and public policy toward drunkenness. It also discusses the tension over the function of alcohol; the alluring dark sensationalism of the anti-drink movement informed journalistic writing of the time; the appearance of temperance themes in the works of prominent writers associated with the American Renaissance, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe; and the analogies between alcohol consumption and slavery. Finally, the chapter cites examples of temperance novels such as Maria Lamas’s novel The Glass; or, The Trials of Helen More (1849), Timothy Shay Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar-Room, And What I Saw There (1854), and Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862).Less