Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation (New Americanists) - Hardcover

Grossman, Jay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822331292 ISBN 13: 9780822331292

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

Challenging the standard periodization of American literary history, Reconstituting the American Renaissance reinterprets the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and the relationship of these two authors to each other. Jay Grossman argues that issues of political representation—involving vexed questions of who shall speak and for whom—lie at the heart of American political and literary discourse from the revolutionary era through the Civil War. By taking the mid-nineteenth-century period, traditionally understood as marking the advent of literary writing in the United States, and restoring to it the ways in which Emerson and Whitman engaged with eighteenth-century controversies, rhetorics, and languages about political

representation, Grossman departs significantly from arguments that have traditionally separated American writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Reconstituting the American Renaissance describes how Emerson and Whitman came into the period of their greatest productivity with different conceptions of the functions and political efficacy of the word in the world. It challenges Emerson’s position as Whitman’s necessary precursor and offers a cultural history that emphasizes the two writers’ differences in social class, cultural experience, and political perspective. In their writings between 1830 and 1855, the book finds contrasting conceptions of the relations between the “representative man” and the constituencies to whom, and for whom, he speaks. Reconstituting the American Renaissance opens up the canonical relationship between Emerson and Whitman and multiplies the historical and discursive contexts for understanding their published and unpublished works.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jay Grossman is Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Jay Grossman powerfully demonstrates how the linguistic cohabits with the political in two of the nineteenth century's most provocative writers." Reconstituting the American Renaissance" thoroughly restructures our understanding of the Emerson/Whitman relationship. Some key, long-held assumptions about these two writers will now have to be completely reconsidered in light of Grossman's original and compelling critiques of all the familiar encounters between these literary giants."--Ed Folsom, editor, "Walt Whitman Quarterly Review"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Reconstituting the American-CL

By Jay Grossman

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2003 Jay Grossman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822331292

Chapter One

THE RISE OF THE REPRESENTATIONAL ARTS IN THE UNITED STATES

The degree of possible overlap between representative and representation in their political and artistic senses is very difficult to estimate. In the sense of the typical, which then stands for ("as" or "in place of") others or other things, in either context, there is probably a deep common cultural assumption. At the same time, within this assumption, there is the contradiction expressed both in the arguments about representative democracy and in the arguments in art about relations between the representational and the representative. -RAYMOND WILLIAMS, Keywords

E pluribus unum, "Out of many, one": dating from 1776 (but originating perhaps with Virgil), the national motto of the United States denotes at once the challenge and the achievement of the Constitutional Convention, the results of whose labors were formally endorsed when New Hampshire became the required ninth state to ratify on the first day of summer in 1788. The motto encodes as self-evident and essential what from a preratification perspective was precisely the defining issue, for the consolidation that the motto simply declaims, the Federal Convention and then the state ratifying conventions hotly debated. Would the United States continue as an aggregate of independent states under the conditions explicitly spelled out in the second section of the Articles of Confederation, and the insistence there that "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence"? What continuities had been retained between the Articles and the newly nationalizing instrument constructed in Philadelphia? The "E pluribus unum" that shines out from the face of the Great Seal of the United States occludes these questions, and, in their place, inserts a genealogy as teleology-making of one of a range of possible outcomes the one true outcome toward which all events necessarily pointed.

As Jay Fliegelman has argued, this national motto derives most directly in colonial times from the masthead of the popular eighteenth-century Gentlemen's Magazine and so offers, it is useful to see in this context, another example of the ways in which the "political" and the "literary" interpenetrate in the period. Under the motto's logic-in which nation-making and anthology-making tacitly overlap, and magazines are both printed and militia-ready-the Constitution might be figured as an attempt to adopt a uniform, centralized "editorial" authority where previously separate "articles" had been collected from a wide range of sources and drawn together by little more than their cover. It is not until after the Civil War that "United States" becomes, grammatically speaking, a unified nation (notion?) consistently requiring a singular verb, as the OED and the writings of the ardent unionist Walt Whitman make plain. These minor consequences of the motto's ambiguities begin to suggest the links that remain to be drawn between even this simple analogy about "magazines" and the rhetorical and political issues repeatedly raised by the published contest over ratification.

But the creation of united states is not by any means the only work of consolidation toward which "E pluribus unum" points. For there is another historical consolidation that has taken place since the adoption of the Constitution, one that has rewritten not simply the inevitability of the outcome of the debates that preceded formal ratification, but also the role and significance of the various printed materials debating ratification during the Constitutional episode. The principal documents in this category are the eighty-five essays that comprise The Federalist, the first of which appeared on 27 October 1787, in one of New York's five newspapers, the Independent Journal. By consolidation, I am referring to a historical process that has over the course of two centuries come to see The Federalist as a virtual substitute for the whole of the process of Constitutional consolidation that Publius's essays themselves take as their overarching subject matter. These essays, concerned at their heart with the necessity of energetic governmental consolidation, now themselves are sometimes seen by scholars to consolidate the cacophony that resonated during the period of Constitutional debate. From the multitude of published essays, letters, and broadsides that circulated as part of the ratification controversy, The Federalist often stands alone (as in the latest Norton Anthology of American Literature) and removed from this argumentative context. Compared against the late publication date of Herbert Storing's The Complete Anti-Federalist in 1981, the first collected Federalist appeared simultaneously with the completion of serial publication and essay No. 85 on 28 May 1788; roughly the first half of the series was published in a collected volume on 22 March 1788. Publius seems from the start to have had his eyes on that much larger potential audience called posterity, the same mentioned in the Constitution's preamble. Indeed, as Michael Warner has shown, "through various machinations [Publius] was able to appear simultaneously in four newspapers in New York and another in Virginia, with occasional appearances elsewhere to boot-a strategy of blanketing the public space of print that was warmly resented by his opponents" (Letters 113). Thus these multiple sites of reprinted Federalist essays reproduce one of the claims about the import of the new Constitution that opponents most feared and against which they declaimed most vehemently; indeed, "suppression of Anti-Federalist writing facilitated ratification in a number of states" (Cornell 104). Out of many (newspapers), one.

Patrick Henry's denunciation in the Virginia ratifying convention, decrying what he understood to be the central change in America's self-definition, addresses just these issues:

When the American spirit was in its youth, the language of America was different: Liberty, Sir, was then the primary object.... But now, Sir, the American spirit, assisted by the ropes and chains of consolidation, is about to convert this country to a powerful and mighty empire.... (F/A 122-23)

Henry may well have taken his evidence for these quasi-imperial ambitions from the opening lines of Federalist No. 1:

After an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION[,] the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.

Publius's use of the word "empire" importantly shifts the term away from the connotations that had helped to underwrite the break from Britain. Sheldon Wolin has labeled this change the "feudalist" groundwork at the base of the "progressive" American Revolution. In his reading, the confederated states adhered to, and worked to maintain, feudal systems of "imperial" governance marked specifically by "difference, pluralism, and the dispersion of power among several centers" (130) against the imposition, especially after...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2003
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822331292
• ISBN 13: 9780822331292
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar