Critical of the divergence between America’s realities and its World War I rhetoric about equality and freedom, in 1918 the American intellectual Van Wyck Brooks held that it was necessary to recover a “usable past.” Interestingly, he identified American literature—not history, as it was then written—as the main resource for retrieving a “usable past” that would help us imaginatively rethink what America was, is, and can be.
He did not explain adequately why literature has this critical quality. Nevertheless, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s the founders of American studies adopted the “usable past” as their collective rallying cry because they were committed to developing a usable American Studies. This is why they categorized American Studies not just as a field, but as a movement.
Has American literature been as usable as it might be in the invention of a usable American Studies? American Studies has excelled at “historicizing” American literature and reading American literature as ideological symptoms complicit with the reproduction of social contradictions. These approaches are valuable.
But does American literature offer readers more than texts that enable readers to practice “historicizing” and “demystifying”? After all, American literature itself “historicized” and “demystified” American culture—and literature—long before academics made this their preoccupation. I want to sketch two ways in which American literature can contribute to the development of a more usable American Studies.
First, the American Studies movement has been in the vanguard of bringing history, cultural theory, and interdisciplinary perspectives to the critique of American culture and literature. Can American literature return the favor? What’s at stake in bringing American literature to our concepts of history, cultural theory, and interdisciplinary syntheses?
My last three books have been about history and cultural theory, not primarily about literature. However, when I wrote them I became intrigued by the implications of the fact that I returned repeatedly to literary authors—not just historians—for insight into various kinds of history. And I consistently revisited literary authors—not just cultural theorists—to advance my understanding of cultural theory.
Why should this be surprising? American literature probed areas of social and “personal” experience (cultural formations of subjectivity, gendered, sexualized, racialized, and nationalized identities) well before historians recognized these areas as belonging to history. When reading a literary text one might ask more than what kinds of history need to be brought to it and more than how the literary text might modify the history we know, and ask more imaginatively what areas of history the literary text suggests have yet to be conceptualized, researched, and written.
American literature explored key cultural-theoretical concerns (materialist critique, poststructuralism, feminist theory, transnational studies) long before academics institutionalized the field of “theory” and long before theorists abstracted such matters as “theory.” And American literature was complexly “interdisciplinary” generations before the academy had to concoct such a term to counter its own disciplinary splintering of knowledge production. Literature is not a discipline literature is about life. And life, unlike the academy, is not sliced into disciplines. So interdisciplinary scholars might read literary texts to learn how to make interdisciplinary syntheses even less limited by disciplines.
American literature practiced versions of American Studies and cultural studies long before American Studies became an academic field in the 1930s and well before the British academicized cultural studies in the 1960s. My point is not that American literature can replace history, cultural theory, and interdisciplinary ventures (we need them). Rather, American literature—if its critical work is valued—can advance history, cultural theory, and interdisciplinary approaches.
Second, this raises a large question: how do the creative work and the critical work of American literature interact? I can pin down the arguments of Howard Zinn’s important historical contributions and Terry Eagleton’s vital theoretical works. I can catch their drift. Sometimes the playful appeal—and critical value—of complex literature is that one cannot wholly catch its drifts. Often literature’s drifts keep drifting. Literature’s readers drift. This literary knowledge production process is instructive. American literature’s multivalent and indeterminate qualities add to, rather than diminish or compromise, literature’s usefulness as a generative cognitive and critical resource.
American literature often entices us to return to it—reread it, rethink it, fill in its gaps, double its meanings, and “trouble” its meanings. Much of the American literature I turn to, inside and outside the canon, does what Herman Melville described in his experimental novel Mardi: A Voyage Thither (1849): it makes “creating the creative” its project. American literature’s readers, as well as American literature’s texts, become “the creative.”
The British theorist Derek Attridge, who has studied literary creativity (but not Melville), has helped me think about Melville’s “creating the creative.” One of Attridge’s premises sounds very “American Studies.” Literary creation, he writes, “always takes place in a culture, not just in a mind.” And literary writing, “perhaps without realizing what was happening, exploits discontinuities, presses at their limits”—the “limits of the culture’s givens”—and searches for the “contradictions” and “tensions” that make visible the “exclusions” that sustain these limits and givens.
There is no GPS for literary creativity. Attridge quotes the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee: “You write because you do not know what you want to say.” Also, Professor Matthew Garrett has observed that literature “means more than it says.” He views readers as “writers” of the literary texts they are reading. Literary creativity can help American Studies value process, uncertainty, risk, and creative reading.
Might we envision American Studies as a creative reading project as well as an interdisciplinary, critical, and “historicizing” project? How would this be usable? To consider this we can ponder the poet Adrienne Rich’s cautionary advice: “We must be acutely, disturbingly aware of the language we are using and that is using us.” One might add: we must be acutely, disturbingly aware—as readers—of the forms, narratives, genres, tropes, images, presuppositions, histories, and theories we are using and that are using us.
To fail to read this is to be bamboozled by seemingly self-evident givens. American literature’s experiments with writing America have lessons to teach about reading America and how America would have us read—limit—ourselves and our collective possibilities. In all these ways American literature is powerful and can help American Studies develop creative reading projects, “historicizing” projects, cultural-theorizing projects, and interdisciplinary projects that can make it even more powerful.
Pfister is the Kenan Professor of the Humanities and Chair of the Department of English.
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