History and Paradigms of American Studies

- The field of AS began developing during the 1920s and 30s, but itsfull development took place after WWII, which corresponds withtaking it overseas and with a higher education boom in post-war US

- Many people started attending college, the returning soldiers wereincorporated into education, there was also an influx of women acomplete transformation of the higher ed. scene took place, itbecame more diversified, more universities were established

- The subject is the enigma of America, what is the American ID, is itan idea, a state, a project?

- The term “America” is too general, it usually refers to the US,which marginalizes Canada and everything south of Rio Grande America is often identified with the US because of the US'sgeopolitical power, due to which it has become a subject of study(although today there are Canadian and Latin studies)

- “Studies” has become a prop, there are all kinds of studies today(British, German, Italian, European, ethnographic, gender…)

- Croatian studies (Hrvatski studiji) is a negative example: it’s afaculty whose establishing idea was to have a Croatian equivalentto American studies, but no similarities exist, the same subjectsare taught at other Croatian faculties in the context of Croatianstudies, the two words don’t share the same connection as “American”and “studies” do

- A discipline is something abstract that has concrete forms: degrees,conferences, publications tracing the rise of a discipline isseeing what one can do with a degree in that discipline, whether thesociety can make use of this skill

- American Studies is not, as the name would suggest, a collection ofdisciplines simply designated as American or a body of Americantexts

- It’s almost a discipline, some say transdiscipline,interdisciplinary approach (depending on how far we go into it),interdisciplinary field/network that is continually changing, anongoing research protocol that has a moral/ethnical/political taskof tackling current problems

- A body of knowledge(s), myths of origin/being, self-representationand self-understanding that has accumulated throughout the 20th

century, since the 1920s/30s, in works by different authors fromdifferent fields (historians, literary critics, economists,

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anthropologists) who attempt to answer the question “What isAmerica?” and “How did America come to be?”

- American Studies is an institutionalized body of expertise, there isa whole established routine of studying AS in the States as well asat universities throughout Europe, there are institutionalizedmodels of studying, graduation, dissertations and PhDs on that topic there is a history of different ways of doing AS that havechanged over time, done differently in different geographical spaces

- It’s an exemplary case: since it’s so recent, it has been assessedby people practicing it

- AS also has a political function, it was instituted to propagateAmerican policies and interests, even in other countries it’sclosely related to American interests, there is a whole diapason ofdifferent interests

- Our generalizations about America are often unfounded, there is muchvariety, but as outsiders, we hold a privileged position we wantto show how the early assumptions about American ID are illusionaryimplications that leave out a great deal of it

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Interdisciplinarity- AS is founded on a hybrid methodology, it itself has no methodology

but relies on other methods, we look at the context, go outside thetext, avoid perceiving phenomena through only one disciplinary field

- There is a difference between AS and American civilization(Amerikanistik) – AC has more to do with literature, there is nobroadness of perspective

- The development of interdisciplinarity is related to how thedefinition of culture expanded

o in the 19th century, Arnold defined culture as what has beenbest taught and best defined in human history, which is anelitist/exclusive conception of culture, restricting cultureto the greatest works of art

o in the 20th century, Raymond Williams defined culture as a wayof life, which is an inclusive conception, encompassingpopular culture, work habits, technology etc.

- The same thing happened in AS, the initial interdisciplinarity wasnot as broad as today

- The early AS practitioners wanted to develop a countermovement toformalist approaches and New Criticism (and its focus on poetictexts) they argued for an interdisciplinary approach butrestricted themselves to interdisciplinary dialogue between history,literature and religion

- Later, AS scholars called for a broader study of national characterand for that purpose developed the first recognizedinterdisciplinary paradigm – the myth-and-symbol-school of the 50sand 60s in order to study what was specifically recognizable asAmerican, it went into American cultural heritage, connectedliterary works (e.g. Moby Dick, the central work of AS) to popularculture, politics, anthropology, sociology and economics, and triedto uncover the basic myths of what constitutes the American ID

- They called for a curricular reform and wanted to seeinterdisciplinarity introduced into American curricula, with thebasic connection between humanities (esp. literature) and socialsciences (sociology, economy etc.)

Holistic approach- The early AS practitioners, MSS and the American Studies Association

(founded in 1951) focused on the New England tradition, where NewEngland was a metonymy of the whole US, a WASP conception of what isreally American their aim was a holistic approach (coherence),

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studying American culture and history as a whole, capturing thewhole of America in one symbol or myth

- There is a methodological blindness right at the beginning of AS since America is pluralist country, this inevitably meantsimplifying reality, harmonizing differences, unifying the pluraland omitting many histories and issues because they didn’t fit ininto these formulas of coherence/holism, more things were left outby MSS than included

- This way, MSS contributed to the creation of American ideology, ofideological structures and crucial values that falsified reality(the virgin land, the pastoral ideal, the American Adam, the bridge) it created a “usable past” which can be used for ideologicalpurposes in the present

- The myths thus created are still present, e. g. the idea of beingunburdened by history and turning a new leaf (Obama’s speech), thenotion of the Virgin Land in Bush’s image of a cowboy chopping wood

- The myth-and-symbol paradigm held sway during the 50s and 60s, inthe mid-1960s it came under attack precisely for studying asimplified reality, a symbolic reflection of ideas of Americansociety

- Later authors focused on what had been hidden/excluded by MSS: wholegroups which were left out (women, racial & ethnic minorities, etc.)and issues which were ignored (race, gender etc.)

- These later scholars of the New American Studies focus on rewritingAmerican history, i.e. writing different stories through which wecan create identity and cohesion, which is criticized by theconservatives for being anti-American and developing anti-Americanstudies

Exceptionalism- America has no unique, defining language and hardly any historical

background, so Americans had to find another justification their existence- One of their arguments, which at the same time reflects America’s

geopolitical power, is the doctrine of exceptionalism America isspecial, separate, follows its own rules, came to be in a unique way

- This exceptionalism is based on the idea that American values are derivedfrom a metaphysical reality rather than society

- As opposed to the European hero, who enters society, the American heroenters the wilderness, nature on a barely domesticated continent, they areseen as free of constraints of society and money, in contrast with thereality of America as a major capitalist state

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- The early authors and the MSS believe in the American project and theexceptionalism of American experience, they believe to have uncovered thefundamental characteristics of what it means to be American, later authorsundermine these founding ideas

- These texts are not burdened by history, they don’t give an accuratedepiction of history but offer a symbol whose history is erased, but theycan’t deny the social and historical significance of these myths andsymbols

- In the preface of a monograph to Hawthorne, Henry James writes that wecan’t speak of American novel but American romance – America doesn’t havethat social differentiations that are necessary for a realist novel, acomplex social novel, it doesn’t explore social complexity but themetaphorical question of good and evil

- But recently (since Vietnam and 9/11) the doctrine has been weakening andhas come under attack of AS scholars, there is a sense that they are nomore peculiar than any other nation, aside from being big, America is notexceptional but similar to many W Europ. countries

Questions:- How do the texts on our list represent the States and its exceptional

nature? Is it convincing?- Could we use similar methodology in Croatian studies?

Denis Donoghue: “Reading America”- An Irishman who has lived in America for a great period of time, he

demystified AS as a discipline- Nobody can be neutral/disinterested towards America, everyone has to think

of their position towards America (acceptance, skepticism, anti-Americanism)

- 1944 marks the establishment of AS as an efficiently sponsored activity inEurope by the US government, with the intention of winning people overagainst the USSR (which is why there was little talk of class differencesin America, it was seen un-American, Marxist)

- In post-war Germany occupied by the Allies, denazification was soonabandoned in favor of pushing the notion of democracy as an antidoteagainst USSR and its totalitarianism, an important poet was Walt Whitman,“the poet of democracy”

- An important location for AS in Europe is Salzburg, where many conferencesand seminars were held the early meetings focused on literature(nowadays also on other manifestations of culture, esp. film) and thedilemmas that there was something identifiable as American experience(specificity/exceptionalism), a theory of American life based on the theoryof American literature

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- The founding texts of MSS express a belief that there is somethingexceptional about the American experience, this exceptionalism is based onthe idea that American values are derived from a metaphysical realityrather than society

- These texts aren’t burdened by history, they don’t give an accuratedepiction of history but offer a symbol whose history is erased, but theycan’t deny the social and historical significance of these myths andsymbols

- As opposed to the European hero, who enters society, the American heroenters the wilderness, nature on a barely domesticated continent, they areseen as free of constraints of society and money, in contrast with thereality of America as a major capitalist state

- MSS focuses on the “usable past”, on what can be used for ideologicalpurposes in the present, some issues are ignored (gender, class, race)

- The New American studies are aware of these marginalized issues

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Perry Miller: “Errand into the Wilderness”

Robert Fuller: “Errand into the Wilderness: Perry Miller asAmerican Scholar”- Perry Miller is seen as the father of AS by some, he explored two myths of

the myth-and-symbol school: the errand into the wilderness and nature’snation

- In the preface to “Errand into the Wilderness,” he describes how he came tobe interested in America and its origin: during WWII, while he wasstationed in Africa, on the Congo River, he reflected upon America and itsposition in the world and came to a sudden epiphany than he felt a need toexplain America to the world

- Epiphany: originally the manifestation of God in a Biblical sense, thenpopularized by James Joyce with the meaning of a sudden revelation,personal, intuitive knowledge, not one than comes from studies or research,but an artistic intuition

- Thus began his career of historicizing America that serves as a catharticexperience, on three levels

o Historical while historicizing the American past, he doesn’t present anobjective account of the past, he searches for a coherent model forexplaining America, a “usable past,” those segments/periods thatcan be used to explain the present America

he focused on the Puritan past of the settlers in the PlymouthColony and thus created a false story of origins: he ignored theVirginian settlers (Jamestown) deliberately and took the Plymouthsettlement as the origin, because he wanted a coherent story with acoherent beginning

Newer AS scholars criticize this paradox/mistake, there is amethodological blindness right at the beginning

o Personal/individual – a cathartic self-explanation, the early ASscholars were explaining America to themselves and experiencing acatharsis this way

o If we take Miller as the genesis of AS, this was a call for nationaldestiny, for America not as it is but for a projection of what it’ssupposed to be

- AS contributed to the creation of American ID, but we have to be aware ofthe fact that AS practitioners saw a difference between that and reality,they are asking where America went wrong, when an idealistic story oforigin became something else

- Fuller: in order to create an image of America as a unitary power, AS wasresponding to the class struggle & stratification of the 1930s, especiallyafter the Great Depression, friction between owners and laborers, todaymany draw parallels with this period

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- Fuller remarks that the way of looking at AS rise is an attempt to create aconsensus, transcend/neutralize class differences through images that werecommon to all

- Miller is critical of three thingso Of America as embodied by the genteel tradition, a bourgeoisie

tradition that emerged out of small towns and the middle classculture & consciousness

o Of intellectual constrictions and the imperial project – after WWIIAmerican power could no longer be explained in terms of Plymouth,scholars weren’t happy with the imperial spread of America, withMcCarthy and his red scare, witch hunts and rightist nationalism,many writers were accused of being anti-American and wereconvicted/constricted (???), many were Marxists/leftists at somepoint in their career

o Early 20th century tradition – Charles Beard, who tried to give asynthetic vision of American culture and origin, to trace thespecificity of the US from the beginning, viewed though economicrevisionism (???), America as marked by economic factors,transformation of a settlement into an agricultural society and theninto an industrial power Miller reacts against this but may bemaking a huge mistake, an economic consideration (business, labor,corporations, stock market) has all but disappeared from AS, eventhough America is an exemplary state of capitalism, which hasreturned today as a boomerang, people are realizing they have toconsider this

Speaking about economy and class differences was avoided during theCold War, one could be proclaimed a Marxist, the economicinterpretations were thought typical of the Eastern Block

But many Marxist today thrive in American universities, which is whytraditionalists critique the new AS as anti-AS

- By ignoring Virginia and the economic considerations of America, Millerfollowed a restrictive approach, he later admitted he was naïve in thinkingideas move things, ideas are only rationalization of the unconsciousnessand obscure the pursuit of tangible goods

- Miller: a society’s ways of knowing itself is framed more by its system ofbeliefs than social/material reality

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Chapter 1: “Errand into the Wilderness”- As the whole of AS, Miller does not strive to be scientifically objective

but a social poet, he explores metaphors that could explain the American IDand create a coherent image of America he draws a line between himselfand Frederick Jackson Turner and his “frontier hypothesis” (1902), herejects Turner’s geographical determinism, “errand” and “wilderness” aremetaphors that aren’t necessarily grounded in reality, not theses

- Miller isn’t a celebratory writer, he doesn’t glorify the US or actuallybelieve in the myths he is studying, he merely wishes to excavate them anduncover the motivations of the American ID and show how these myths stillpersist and influence American thinking e.g. how the errand into thewilderness still gives them a sense of being the chosen people with amission to bring democracy into various wildernesses in the world (theVietnam jungle, the Afghani hills, the Iraq desert)

- While he does want to impose monolithic/coherent/unified image/form onAmerica, he also expresses skepticism towards such ageneralization/simplification, he admits that America is in fact “acongeries of inner tensions,” proved by the insistence of many Americanshow that is not true.

- Miller’s task is to look at the journey and settlement of the Puritans ofthe Massachusetts Bay Company as a great migration (analogy with theJewish), as the essence / rudimentary beginning of American ID

- Miller is struggling with figuring out the essence of their journey, he isnot completely sure: “It was an act of will, perhaps of willfulness.”

- the Puritans thought of themselves as God’s messengers sent on an errand byHis providence, the aim was to create an ecclesiastical government, aBiblical polity, a rigorous Protestant society of solidarity that willserve as a role model for the rest of the world, a universal social model the Puritans could not test this model in England, so they came to abare land devoid of any institutions and the Church, where they could startanew

- John Winthrop’s sermon delivered aboard their ship Arbella is consideredone of the founding texts of American culture

o he warns his companions to discard any hope of personal/physical profit formtheir journey

o God created a hierarchy where some are rich and some poor, so they shouldn’tattempt to change their situation

o they aren’t traveling to find an egalitarian utopia but to fulfill a holycause, a mission/errand bestowed upon them by God’s providence

- But the doctrine preached by Winthrop was formulated in England, where landwas already divided and was not for taking, in America the wildernessproduced greed and desire for property, they could chop down woods andclaim the land as their own

- the wilderness was seen as a void to be filled with human presence, avirgin land, even though there were already people and civilizations there,

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but they were seen as “the other”, not human, so the settlers had no qualmsabout taking their land forcefully

- As a result, the second and third generations began to stray from theoriginal mission and the prescribed rigid Protestant morality, becameoriented towards the social, constructed a capitalist system in idealconditions, there were no constraints of Church, feudalism and property,they turned pure land into a commodity

- the synods (ruling church body) listed enormities in twelve headings, whichboil down to two categories: disciplining the body and the economic sphere(a decay in godliness, manifestations of pride, lascivious behavior,wanting property, greed, working to increase one’s wealth etc.)

- Jeremiads – lamentations, wailing over unfulfilled promises, lost past andreality being different from ideals, declensionary narratives, stories ofdecline and degradation Puritan writers wailed about how the youngergenerations had strayed from the mission, the errand had failed, the worlddid not look upon America as a role model, their universal model turned outto be a provincial particular (epic fail!!), what is the meaning of oursociety in the wilderness then, boohoohooo!!

- Despite this, the notion of an errand persists until today, America stillsees itself as a model society for the world / the ultimate universal,wants to impose democracy on the whole world, a form of government itthinks is universal and will work everywhere

- Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter” explores the hypocrisy of theclaustrophobic society in Massachusetts

- Another metaphor is the city upon a hill, as mentioned by Winthrop beforethey set out on a journey, one of the most powerful ideological props, theideal utopian city, appears even today in political discourse andliterature

- Just as the city upon a hill, the errand is part of the cultural constructof America, a journey into wilderness, humans encountering nature,expresses an opposition between nature and culture

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Chapter 9: “Nature and the National Ego”- Another founding American concept/historical construct is the oxymoron

of a nature’s nation, many refer to Miller as its originator- Americans see themselves as a nation embedded in/in tune with nature,

which makes them closer to God and gives them a future closelyrelated to the myth of the virgin land and the American Adam metaphor(starting anew on a bare continent and not being burdened by theballast of civilization)

- The first Puritan settlers saw woods as demonic, full of Indians, butnature/the wilderness soon began to be seen as everything that isinnocent, pure, good, sublime and unsullied by men, as opposed tocivilization, which is ugly, debauched, evil and artificial,utilitarian, same as Europe had become, and must be resisted

- Nature vs. civilization is a fundamental opposition that could beviewed as THE American theme, but also a paradox, because artificialityis culture

- Nature is not a value-free word here but a rhetorical force, a nature’snation is seen as created by the nature/God Himself which means it mustbe righteous/virtuous, nature is God, so it’s God’s nation, an Edencreated by God where the American lives as Adam before the Fall

- Other antipodes of Nature are:o Europe – debauched and artificial, materialistic and utilitarian,

corrupted by its civilization, Henry James’ plots often involve ayoung, innocent American coming to Europe

o the city – another paradox: the must urban culture nowadays hasalways had an uneasy relationship with cities, they avoid using theword village as to not bring up the city/village opposition, they say“I’m going to the county.”

- These views were especially expressed in the Romantic period in thefirst half of the 19. century, also called transcendentalism, AmericanRomanticism or American Renaissance (Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Whitman) in European Romanticism, nature served for individual/personalartistic fulfillment, in America for nationalist fulfillment, thedoctrine of exceptionalism

- Problem 1: Peter Redding: American Romanticism / transcendentalistliterature has always been focused on when trying to form stories ofAmerican ID and to construct an archive of canonical texts that wouldreflect the American image in relation to Nature

o this created a usable past, an ideology which is divorced fromreality and social circumstances, an alternative that almost hidesreality

o AS revisionists today point to the great number of works of thisperiod that were left out (slave narratives, women’s writing) and

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subvert these canonical giants and the usable past created out ofthem

- Problem 2: In the European context it’s hard to think of a nationalismbased on nature, they are mostly based on language and history, but Americahas no unique, defining language and hardly any historical background, it’sa strategic move to find the justification / rhetoric for the nation in theNature, they had to find a peculiarity to justify their existence

- But today AS critics attack the doctrine of American exceptionalism, thereis a sense that they are no more peculiar than any other nation, aside frombeing big, America is not exceptional but similar to many W Europ.countries

- Problem 3: Despite their glorification of nature, Americans had no qualmsabout harming nature to make progress for their civilization and materialprosperity We can’t speak of a nature’s nation because that nationdestroys nature

- The more their civilization and capitalism grew, the more they accentuatedthe role of nature in making them a virtuous nation with a certain future nature works its way back to culture, even though they are antipodes

- Problem 4: Up to 1900, America is constructing itself as a continent, ageographical arena, Miller talks about the writers and painters who depictthe American landscape and its sense of openness and wilderness in theirworks, the word “sublime” is often used to describe the immensity ofdeserts, mountains, prairies and rivers

- But Miller focuses only on literature and painting to make statements aboutAmerica, his construction of an American ID relies on drawing ideas from avery elitist definition of culture at first, AS tried to establish anarchive of canonical texts perceived as a reflection of the American ID,but today, for making statements about America, AS includes mass culture aswell (The Simpsons, Rambo, cartoons, commercials) and hardly makes adistinction between popular culture and high culture

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Simon Schama: “Landscape and Memory” (1995)- The book goes into different peoples and nations and the landscapes

they hold in great esteem and are important for their national ID,encapsulating the very essence of a nation, e.g. Lithuania - thegreat oak forest, Germany - the Black Forest (Schwarzwald)

- <Croatia is too diverse to have one particular landscape on whichthe Croatian ID draws its essence>

- In Chapter 4, he talks about America and how its fascination withthe woods has lead to the establishment of wilderness parks

- In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln issued a bill that createdthe first wilderness park, it constituted a revelation of uniquenessof the American Republic, expressing the authenticity of thecountry, as common of the US people from which they derive their ID,boy scouts pay pilgrimages to them, private enterprise is denied theuse of them

- Sequoia National Park in California: the gigantic sequoia treesvindicate the colossal grandeur of America, they are the embodimentof the sublime, they are temples not constructed by men, not plantedby human hands, a product of God that awaits the chosen people todiscover its grandeur in the forest

- The first Puritan settlers saw woods as demonic, full of Indians,but once they were “cleared” of the indigenous people, thisperception changed, the Americans began celebrating the wildernessas celestially sanctified nature unsullied by men out of which theycountry was born The 18th and 19th century painters such as Coleoften depicted the primordial vegetal matter of America

- They believed a second chance was given to America to realize thedivinity of landscape, they began sealing it off to stop the marchof civilization

- America is an urban country but maintains its wilderness withouteconomic exploitation, even today there are debates whether theseparks should be exploited

Leo Marx: “The Idea of Nature in America” (2008)- Reads Miller from today’s point of view- The idea of nature is one of the fundamental American ideas that

define the meaning of America- The encounter of white settlers with nature was the defining

American experience – Marx uses the past tense here because the mythof the nature’s nation has recently come under attack as aconsequence of the ecological crisis, what is the significance of NNif man is destroying nature

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- The nature as such no longer exists, its very notion is a notorioussemantic and metaphysical trap, ambiguous – we can’t always tell ifit includes or excludes people, it carries the sense of essence, itdenotes an ultimate irreducible quality, an ahistorical character,the proper/correct thing

- Marx quotes Raymond Williams, the father of Culture Studies: natureis probably the most complex English word and when the idea ofnature is yoked with ideological concept of the America nation, asPerry Miller does it, the ambiguity is compounded by chauvinism

- The words nature and natural are a powerful persuasiveforce/rhetoric: when we say something natural, we are saying it’sthe way it should be; saying that America is a Nature’s Nationimplies that other nations are unnatural, merely historicalconstructs, not founded in nature, while America is not derived fromsocial forces and comes from nature

- The American ideology of imposing the “natural” order of democracyon the rest of the world stems from its ID as a NN, this mentalitycontinues up to our days, America is empowering itself by forcingits vision on others, wanting to “correct” the unnatural in others

- When everyone calls upon nature to justify things, the word becomesde-semanticized, loses its substance, becomes merely a rhetoricalstrategy to justify something, a tool of legitimization in politicsand ideology, e.g. many 18th century poets justifying their differentways of writing as natural; “natural” borders

- Initially, America could assume the title of NN because of itsspecific sublime geography, but even back then there was anundercurrent of nature being essence, law, the proper/correct, arhetorical asset, a way American settlers distinguished themselvesfrom the natives

- The problem with this ideology was that the indigenous people ofAmerica were actually more identified with nature the Americanshave always had a love-hate relationship with the Indians, one theone hand they wanted to cleanse the continent of them, on the otherthey saw them as noble savages who are more in tune with nature andhave more authentic knowledge of things

- Transcendentalism – Emerson: nature was - and should once againbecome - a primary locus of meaning and value for Americans

- Each generation of AS practitioners go back to interpreting Melvilleand Moby Dick to describe America, it stands as an ur-text, aprimary text that attempts to understand America, Captain Ahabtrying to capture the whale is a symbol of technology trying toimpose its will on nature, which has tragic consequences, naturecan’t be subdued permanently, it’s not to be controlled, it comes

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back with a vengeance and evades our control eventually fromtoday’s point of view, this vengeance is global warming, floods

- <In Croatia, we are not engaged in these issues, AS can serve as arole model here, we aren’t concerned with our relationship withnature and our place in nature in Denmark, the government usesthe findings of a study on nature and man to make decisions relatedto pollution>

- Fredric Jameson: postmodernism is what we will have when themodernization of nature is complete and nature has disappeared, atotally urban world, we are at a turning point at which man hasdevastated nature and imposed his power

- Bill McKibben: “The End of Nature” (1989): a nation legitimizesitself based on nature, nature’s independence IS its meaning,without it there is no nature, nothing but us, we have taken itsindependence, changed it and made it depended of our culture, it nolonger serves as our support, we can rely only on ourselves, anation can no longer justify itself by anything other than itselfand its actions and can no longer claim to be a NN, it loses therhetoric of persuasion and becomes unnatural as any other nation,it’s delegitimized

- This employment of nature is part of teaching AS, e.g. theUniversity of Oregon offers environmental history as a course,environmental historians point to the fact that the pre-civilAmerica was not completely untouched, Indians left traces in thenature, they tilled the land, used the forests, hunted the buffalos,cleansing America of them meant destroying the inherited culture

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R. W. B. Lewis: “The American Adam”

- Much like Miller, Lewis is conscious about what is he is doing as an ASscholar, he interested in mythology that brings America together, inthe history of ideas and the representative imagery that produced theseideas, the stories Americans told themselves to explain their ID, notin material history (sociology, anthropology, economics, politicalhistory) his sources are thinkers and artists, particularly poetsand novelists that transformed the issues of their time into aconscious and coherent narrative and have thus produced the myth oftheir nation, Lewis wants to disentangle this myth from their writings

- Every culture achieves ID and produces its own myth not so much throughone particular set of ideas, but through different voices and pairs ofopposed terms that clash together and enter into dialogue with eachother this was reflected in the narration of 19th century novelists,poets, essayists in America, often dealing with opposing terms such asinnocence, novelty, experience, sin, time, evil, hope, the present,memory, the past, tradition

- Lewis presents three typical images of American ID and their dialoguederived from a body of work of the American Renaissance, when a newculture was in the making (Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman etc.), theyfocused on what was special about America in comparison to othernations very similar to what Miller was doing, used the samesources, but focused on a different myth

1. THE PARTY OF MEMORY / PAST THE ORIGINAL SIN- The nostalgic party, the representatives are orthodox Calvinist who put

great emphasis on the burden of sin that had supposedly been inheritedfrom Europe

- The central notion was the inherited guilt: Adam, the first man,committed the original sin in the Garden of Eden and was banished fromit, condemning all of humanity to inheriting the ballast of sin as hisdescendants

- They see America as the peak of man’s sinfulness, both the presentAmerican generations and their posterity are enslaved by their past andare morally depraved by their nature

- Lewis notes how they failed to acknowledge the positive effects ofhistory, the way in which the past can enliven the present instead ofburdening it for them, the past was simply the place whereeverything had already been decided and this decision was all thatmattered

2. THE PARTY OF HOPE / FUTURE THE AMERICAN ADAM- Lewis is primarily interested in this camp

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- General. The American Adam is one of the most powerful myths of theAmerican culture, it’s the idea that America can always start anewwithout being burdened by history/inheritance/ancestry/the past, thatthe individual can reinvent himself/herself in a world of vastpossibilities and a certain future

- Unlike the Roman myth (Aeneid), which focused on the long and richtradition of Rome and was created by one talented artist (Virgil), theAmerican myth was created collectively by the American people and sawlife and history as just beginning the Americans are not acontinuation of Europe but are starting anew on a new continent andhave been given a second chance by God after Europe’s social formationshad failed

- America is seen as being distinct from Europe, separate from itshistory and social structures, it’s a democracy, a revolutionarysociety, defined by not being what Europe (“the other”) is like – anegative identification America has always defined itself inopposition to some other part of the world (“the other”): Europe, USSRand communist countries (after the Cold War, a kind of vacuum occurredbecause the other was no longer present), the Islamic countries, China

- While the European identity is constructed out of a long history and aunique language, America starts ex nihilo, it’s seen as something newand not an end-product of a long history, it’s an endemiceruption/disruption of man into nature/wilderness, breaking the chainsthat bind it to history, separating itself from the past, itsorientation is towards the future only, with an air of hopefulness andvast possibilities

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- Literature. The party of Hope called for literary independence –fresh, underivative literature that doesn’t rely on European literarytradition, original American forms and fables, a new kind of hero in anew kind of land

- Some (e.g. Edward Tyrell Channing) claimed America had been soextensively cleansed of European influence that creative activity wasimpossible American life is not adequate for fiction, the party ofHope’s vision of America has no dramatic value, can’t describe dark andtragic adventures, too fresh for realism, too hopeful and innocent fora novel, inadequate for a story

- But the American society did have its tensions that could serve asmaterial for fiction, just not the same ones continental fiction had:As opposed to the European hero, who enters society, the American heroenters the wilderness/nature on a barely domesticated continent

- The new American hero is emancipated from history, unsullied by thepast, unburdened by ancestry and inheritance, free of conventions andsocial structures – that makes him into an independent, self-reliantindividual, fundamentally innocent and virtuous, identified with Adambefore the Fall, a figure of innocence and vast potentialities, poisedat the start of new history

- A lonely, solitary individual in the ocean of space who springs fromnowhere (eruption into nature), flees historical and socialconstrictions, at home in the presence of God and nature where hedoesn’t feel the ballast of time

- In American literature, this image of Adam occurs in final works ofnovelists, when the American culture came to full realization of themyth

- The first heroes were celebrated as such Adamic figures, but laterheroes are more complex, tragic and pay the price of their innocencewhen they get thrust by circumstances into an actual world and anactual age or when they become alienated from the same ocean of spacethat made them independent

- Walden as an exemplary work. Thoreau’s “Walden” is a one of thecanonical texts of American literature from the Romantic period, astory of him leaving Boston and going into the woods, where he keeps adiary, what he records is a ritual of cleansing/purification, a desirefor a new kind of life, total renunciation of the traditional/theconventional/the socially acceptable, total immersion in nature,individuality, a primordial gesture this is why he was popular withthe counter-culture of the 1960s

- He saw this kind of life as grounded in reality and nature itself,enriched by the total awareness of nature (change of seasons, sequenceof night and day)

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- Transcendentalism is Puritanism turned upside down – it used theinherited Puritan vocabulary in an unfamiliar context, the new tensionwas no longer the relation between man and God but between natural andartificial, new and old

- This means that he was concerned with nature being strangled byconventions from the Old World, these imposed conventions had to bewashed away so that the natural could reveal itself again and createits own conventions

- This could also be read as a return to childhood the child becomesthe hero of the myth with its primordial innocence unbound byconventions, able to open up deepest truths, the power of thisperception is lost as we grow up, even today there is a culture ofyouth in America

- Some Transcendentalists wanted to create utopian communities where theywould cast away conventions and live in tune with nature

- Politics. Aside from fiction, these ideas found expression in politicaland economic proposals The sovereignty of the living / the sovereignpresent

- They dismissed/marginalized the past, despised memory and returned tothe same old conflicts and discoveries decade after decade, they wantedto escape from every existing mode of organizing and explainingexperience, in order to confront life in original terms

- Stressed the need for purification, for periodic radical change ofAmerican society, for a one-generation culture against institutionalcontinuity

- In order to secure the rights of the future generations, the presentgeneration must have only temporary rights as long as it lasts, it mustnot burden the future generations

- Rights and power can only belong to the living, the disjunction betweengenerations is needed for the sake of democracy the notion that thedead should have no voice is being questioned today, today’s studiesfocus on the voices that were ignored by history, try to re-inscribethe experience of the past

- Thomas Jefferson was opposed to inheritance, he calculated theapproximate life-expectancy of a single generation and believed lawsshould be reviewed with every new generation

- Thomas Skidmore attacked the concept of inheritance because it doesn’tgo well with the equality proclaimed in the Declaration ofIndependence: If people depend on inheriting goods from theirancestors, they are not really equal because some have nothing toinherit or nobody to inherit from

a radical thinker, but was never part of the canon because of hisradical anarchist position, America was often considered a utopianpossibility, but the American canon has tended to minorize the

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radical and revolutionary potential of America (socialism, the labormovement), especially during the Cold War, when such themes wereconsidered anti-American

socialism used to be a strong movement in America, Marxist criticismis studied in the States today, only the conservatives call thisanti-AS

the whole realist/naturalist tradition (dealt with social issues) hasbeen considered less valuable (Jack London, John Steinbeck), todaythere is a paradoxical return to the economic, the repressed has comeback with a vengeance

- Today’s revisionist point of view. A modern revisionist viewacknowledges that America is a creation of European capitalism, but themyth hides the truth of historical continuity of European processes inAmerica

- Lewis is writing from the point of view of 1955, when the technicaldevelopment (nuclear weapons) had already made this image impossible,he acknowledges the force of the American Adam in his culture, but isconscious it is an illusion and has nothing to do with actuality, thatthere may be no such thing as American experience, that new beginningsand freedom from the past are an illusion, that history, which wasignored by the myth-and-symbol school, is coming back to haunt theAmerican ID

- Even today, America is a dynamic, active, vibrant culture that seems toeasily process the past and forget traumatic experiences, the mythsstill function in American popular culture, it has a short notion ofthe contemporary (the events relevant to the present), in Europe, thepast is often a vital factor in political decisions

3. THE PARTY OF IRONY THE FORTUNATE FALL- Important representatives: Henry James, Horace Bushnell, Dr. Oliver

Wendell Holmes- They watched the opposition between the two other parties, disagreed

with both of them and arrived at their own conclusions- Recurring narrative themes: tragic optimism, the fortunate fall, an

organic relation between past experience and the living moment,original use of discredited traditional materials

- They have nothing against innocence per se, but against remaininginnocent, they want a new kind of tragic hero

- They are definitely hopeful writers and unburdened by the paralyzingnotion of inherited guilt/original sin, but they see the Adamic herobefore the Fall as self-centered, vulnerable and helpless in hisinnocence, disempowering, stupid and dull because he has no ambition tobetter himself and is not capable of confronting the real world shapedby generations of experienced men

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- They believe in achieving perfection, just like the part of Hope does,but not by remaining in that original innocent state before the fall,but instead by falling, being reborn/resurrected and thus getting schance to mature into a truly dignified and fulfilled human being bylearning from moral history and tradition

- Adam’s fall was not a fall from God’s favor, but an actual rise to anormal human level, a resurrection to life, a fortunate fall

- The party of Memory was also in the wrong because their insistence onthe burden of sin makes them unable to participate in the process ofregeneration – the humanity’s penchant for sin is actually a good thingbecause it gives them a chance to reaffirm their dignity after falling,tradition is re-established as the essential means of human redemption

- Holmes is a proponent of empirical science and constant humanevolution, he wrote “medical novels” (“Elsie Venner,” “The GuardianAngel”) which show how the past can have both positive and negativeeffects on a person’s present/future, but the negative effects havenothing to do with the original sin, the past can help men search fororigins of their bad actions

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE AMERICAN ADAM IN LITERATURE

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810)- “Arthur Mervyn” (1799) – an earlier, gothic representation of the

American hero, still entangled in continental literary conventionsbut nevertheless with an American theme: the effect of wickedness ona foolish young solitary innocent (although still not in space)

- He, unlike Cooper, was aiming at depicting the terror implicit inthe hero's solitary condition in an unknown world

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)- Could be viewed as the first undeniably New World writer- The evolution of the Adamic hero in space begins with Natty Bumppo –

a hero detached from time, in an ocean of space, which is an area ofpossibility

- But Cooper’s heroes are still pure and unaffected by evil, poised atthe very brink of time, without connections, unlike later heroes ofe.g. Melville space allows him to resist the onslaught of timeand remain virtuous

- “The Deerslayer” – the last Leatherstocking novel, celebration ofthe full-fledged Adamic hero, Natty Bumppo as a self-reliant youngman who seems to have sprung from nowhere and whose characteristicpose was the solitary stance in the presence of Nature and God

- The Leatherstocking novels go backwards from Natty Bumppo’s old ageand death in “The Pioneers” (1823) and “The Prairie” (1827) to hisgolden youth and rebirth (new name: Hawkeye) in “The Deerslayer”(1841) the end is a fresh beginning, that is the true myth ofAmerica

Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854)- “Nick of the Woods” (1837) – relies more on conventions of English

popular fiction that Cooper (romance, social intrigue etc.), but isalso skeptic of them

- The character of Nathan Slaughter shows what happens when thesolitary hero is driven mad by his position: he is an Adam in spaceturned sour, scorched by experience, he originally possesses manyAdamic qualities but experiences a trauma that strips him of hisvirtue

- If his Kentucky frontier is an Eden, he has become the outraged,embittered Adam, hurled out of Eden by visitation of the devil (avillainous Indian who destroys his life) and returns from death forrevenge

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- He is at odds with his environment because it’s no longer benign buthostile (or neutral at best), it accentuates his isolation, theforest is the hideout of the evil Indian who kills his family

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)- His works explore more deeply the changes that Bird foreshadowed in

the Adamic fable of Cooper the Adamic hero in the American Edenis replaced by the isolated hero alone in a hostile or at best aneutral universe

- He both celebrated and deplored the images of Adam, depicted him asboth liberated and lost

- the Adamic fable yields to the authentic American narrative: theindividual going forth toward experience, the inventor of his owncharacter and creator of his personal history; the self-movingindividual who is made to confront that "other" – the world orsociety, the element which provides experience

- qualities of evil and fear and destructiveness have entered; self-sufficiency is questioned through terrible trials; and the stage isset for tragedy

- “The Scarlet Letter” - all that was dark and treacherous in theAmerican situation became exposed, Hester Prynne, a solitary youngwoman against a society with an inaccurate moral structure; if shehas sinned, she has done so in affirmation of life, her sin is thesource of life

- the Emersonian figure, the man of hope, who by some frightfulmischance has stumbled into the time-burdened world (burdened withancient social conventions)

- he has to make up his mind - whether to accept the world he hadfallen into, or whether to flee it, taking his chances in theallegedly free wilderness to the west – a choice between the villageand the forest, the city and the country

- Unlike Thoreau or Cooper, Hawthorne never suggested that the choicewas an easy one – he acknowledged that an individual needed anorganized society, but the said society could also destroy or hurthim/her (e.g. Hester)

- For Hawthorne, the forest was neither the proper home of theadmirable Adam, as with Cooper; nor was it the hideout of themalevolent adversary, as with Bird it was the ambiguous settingof moral choice, the scene of reversal and discovery in hischaracteristic tragic drama

- Many of his characters are criminals (e.g. Hester Prynne), othersartists frustrated by life who turn to art, for them creativity isanalogous to salvation

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- “The Marble Faun” - the transformation of the soul in its journeyfrom innocence to conscience: the soul's realization of itself underthe impact of and by engagement with evil - the tragic rise born ofthe fortunate fall, the fall is fortunate because it grants the herothe growth of perception and moral intelligence as a result

- tension between the innocent unconscious of time (Donatello) and theinfinitely history-laden environment (Rome), discovery of time as ametaphor of the experience of evil, his rise to manhood requiressin, suffering and accepting the burden of inheritance

Herman Melville (1819-1891)- Brought the story of the AA to its logical conclusion- With European characters, the realities of social experience and

action catch up with them, but the AA characters approach and enterinto those realities, with alternative comic, disastrous, ortriumphant consequences

- Melville took the loss of innocence and the world's betrayal of hopeas the supreme challenge to understanding and to art

- First, he didn’t want to accept the betrayal, but in the end hefound a new conviction about the saving strength of the Adamicpersonality

- He believed with Hawthorne that, in order to achieve moral (andliteral) maturity, the individual (and artist) had to engage eviland suffer the consequences

- in “Redburn” (1849), the eponymous boy-hero sets out from hismother's house in a state of innocence like that before the fall,and the voyage to Liverpool and back comprises the initiation ofinnocence into evil

- When Redburn realized he is an orphan, he is not liberated fromfamily and history, he has the tragic feeling of a lost, perhapseven betrayed son

- The three passages from “Moby-Dick” (1851), chapter 96, “The Try-Works”, describe two alternate conditions which correspond to theparty of Hope and Memory, both of which were dismissed by Melville,and each alternative is a path to destruction:

o an empty innocence, a tenacious ignorance of evil, which,granted the tough nature of reality, must be either immaturityor spiritual cowardice

o a sense of evil so inflexible, so adamant in its refusal toadmit the not less reducible fact of existent good that it isperilously close to a love of evil, a queer pact with thedevil

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o the “sunny spaces” of the third paragraph stand for a thirdpath, tragic optimism, a spiritual journey from sunlightthrough the fires of hell to a final serenity

- Captain Ahab is an Adam gone mad with disillusion, his anger atbetrayal by God is correlative to Melville's anger at thedevastating betrayal by experience of the promises of hope

- The novel is an ambiguous re-rendering of the old forms and fables(parallels with Homer’s “Odyssey”) once unequivocally rejected bythe hopeful in order to recount the total shattering of the visionof innocence

- “Billy Budd” is Melville’s last work, written 1886-1890 and firstpublished in 1924, unmistakably a product of aged serenity, Melvillehas gotten beyond his anger or discovered the key to it

- It’s a kind of a sanctification of the representative American heroand his representative adventure, his actions as shaped under a NewWorld perspective

- Melville's achievement was double: he brought myth into contemporarylife, and he elevated that life into myth - at once transcending andreaffirming the sense of life indicated by the party of Hope

- Billy Budd is just like Adam before the Fall: innocence personified,he springs from nowhere, fulfils every hopeful requirement, isn’tburdened by historic influence

- Since he is dropped in a world where his purity unfits him, he fallsinevitably Melville exposed anew the danger of innocence and itsinevitable tragedy; BUT in the tragedy he rediscovered a heightenedvalue in the innocence, there is no acquisition of different andtougher virtues through suffering, Billy is as innocent when he ishanged as he was in the beginning even though he unwillingly commitsa sin

- Billy is the type of scapegoat and redeemer hero, by whose sacrificethe sins of his world are taken away: the manner of Billy's deathtransforms the sailors' mutinous anger into acceptance andunderstanding and for them Billy becomes the subject of song andfable

- There are my similarities with the novel “Pierre” from 1852, butwhen the Adamic protagonist falls, he is unprepared for the Fall,much like Melville was unprepared while he was writing

Henry James- Very long series of innocent and metaphorically newborn heroes and

heroines: the birth of the innocent, the foray into the unknownworld, the collision with that world, "the fortunate fall," the

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wisdom and the maturity which suffering produced a series ofexpert violations of the Adamic idea

- The longer James lived in Europe, the closer he moved toward aclassic representation of the native anecdote and away from socialrealities

- In his last completed novel, “The Golden Bowl” (1904), the Adamicmetaphor becomes explicit and central as it is inverted: James wasthe first American writer to do realize that innocence as thecondition prior to conscience could be cruel as well as vulnerable,have undertones of the amoral as well as premoral

The contemporary situation: Adam as the Hero in the Age of Containment- …

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Henry Nash Smith: “The Virgin Land”

- The cultural imaginary is a term which denotes the way human beings imagineand tell stories about reality (e.g. the errand into the wilderness and theAmerican Adam are part of the American cultural imaginary), the archivesused are history, literature, music, film; it also includes a spatialimaginary

- The spatial imaginary denotes the human practice of giving meaning to space(i.e. nature, setting, the natural world, physical environment, geographyetc.) – it ceases to be neutral, a mere natural extension, a merephysicality, which it is for natural sciences like geography and geology;humanities view space in relation to the cultural and social, it’sextensiveness is transformed into a particular place

- A place depends on human intervention and how humans perceive it, theyisolate places from space and create identities for them based on pastexperiences and stories, these places are individual representations, theyare not neutral but have a past significance, they are used forconstructing the national ID

- The spatial imaginary consists of places that a particular ID sees asrelevant, it’s not neutral but an archive/sum/selection/hierarchy of placesto which a particular ID relates, it’s not a map of a country and doesn’treflect objective geographical facts / reality, some places are moreimportant for the formation of national ID, some less

- This hierarchy of places is not permanent/set once and forall/stable/unchangeable, there are different hierarchies in differenthistorical periods based on different social and cultural transformations,e.g.

o the Irish national ID used to see the rural west of Ireland as the“real,” green, emerald Ireland, uncontaminated by the British,ignored Dublin and other urban parts this spatial imagery was ahindrance to Irish development, is no longer adequate to thecomplexity of Ireland, considered artificial and paralyzing, it waslost in the process of modernization (e.g. James Joyce transfers thefocus to Dublin and the urban)

o the American West / the wilderness started in New York City and movedto the west

o in early American literature, when American settlements were stillconcentrated around the coast, the focus is on the sea, later theAmerican imagination turned to the frontier/continent/West

this shift in the American spatial imaginary is best exemplifiedby Cooper’s opus: his early novels are sea novels, the laterones center around the frontier

possible explanation: Americans wanted to construct a distinctnational ID, the sea was already part of the British ID, so theyturned inward, towards the continent

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o the whole concept of “real” America as plains, prairies, wilderness,the West, not cities and the coast is no longer in power

- the spatial imaginary is not binding for all members of the society, it canbe differentiated by class, gender, race etc., often excludes many groupsin favor of a white, masculine image

- Paradigms = symbols, myths, lines of thought- One such is the West / the frontier / virgin land / the wilderness – can

still be used today to understand patterns of American behavior- In the hierarchy of paradigms of the spatial imaginary, the West is the

most mobilizing / dynamic paradigm, the cowboy has become the commonstereotype of Americans, even though the West has lost some of itssignificance

- This type of hero spread even got transposed into other, non-Westernsettings, i.e. John Wayne in a WWII movie, later in the Green Beret(Vietnam); Clint Eastwood as an urban cowboy in Dirty Harry; Space Cowboys

- The West is a geographical fact, but it’s also a powerful social,economical and political ingredient; it’s also a relative term, it wasconstantly shifting towards the Pacific (in Cooper’s time the West was NewYork)

- Since the settlement of America started on the eastern coast, there is ageographical reason for American expansion from the east to the west – thismovement also underlines the general movement of American culture, identityformation of the WASP culture (the basic axis of American culture arisingfrom the genteel, centered city seaboard into the plains)

- Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier inAmerican History” defines the frontier as the meeting point betweensavagery and civilization, Turner believed it had been closed by then

- John Nash Smith also relies on the notion of virgin land and uninhabitedwilderness which is ripe for taking – this notion has been critiqued bypostcolonial writers because it writes American existence into the virginland without mention of its indigenous people, today America is trying tomake it up to them for its past sins and atrocities

PREFACES- Smith expresses his intention to isolate the symbols and myths of

America from their culture, but he is not certain of the terms he uses- Same as the errand into the wilderness, the machine in the garden etc.,

the virgin land is collective representation rather than a work of asingle mind, has a socially binding function, an intellectual constructthat fuses concept and emotion into an image

- The concept is a neutral geographical space that frequently has to dowith the western parts of the state, but it can produce an emotionalcharge and has become deeply involved in the construction of theAmerican ID

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- There is a dialectal meeting of environment/history and the mind,history cannot happen without images that express a collective desireand impose a coherence on events and experiences (same as Miller andhis need to ignore Jamestown in favor of Plymouth for the sake ofcoherence)

- The Americans have an emotional connection to the West: most nationalparks are situated in the Rocky Mountains and are a kind of pilgrimagesite for many Americans

- Even though the West is a powerful icon, it’s being questioned at thepresent, together with other myths

- In his 1970 preface, Smith admits that his readings are somewhatproblematical, he defends his use of the word myth: he wanted toprotest against the common usage (erroneous belief) of the word

- Just like other scholars of American Studies, Smith is not concernedwith a positivist methodology and with proving that these imagesreflect empirical facts, but that they exert influence on practicalmatter and on empirical behavior

- Myths are drastic simplifications and are never exact representationsof the physical and social environment, they can’t motivate a directaction, BUT they do become part of all IDs and can cause seriouseffects on reality & the present, e.g. make us falsify historicalcircumstances

18TH CENTURY ORIGINS- The West is usually seen as a 19th century phenomenon, starting in the

1820s and lasting up to the closing of the frontier near the end of thecentury

- Many people have tried to answer the question of what it means to beAmerican, with varying national self-consciousness, differentgeneralizations

- Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries emphasized freedom andrepublicanism as the defining characteristics of American society, evenbefore the French Revolution propagated these values in Europe – abetter alternative to the feudal and kingdom-defined Europe

- Later thinkers stressedo the cosmopolitan blending of a hundred peoples into one – seen as

an open, inclusive society, melting pot, can’t be definedethnically, citizenship is not acquired by blood/birth, but afterfive years of legal residence

o or mechanical ingenuity – e.g. Benjamin Franklin and the kiteexperiment

o or devotion to business enterprise – the financial crisis has putthis in question recently

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- One of the most persistent generalizations is geographical determinism:American society has been shaped by the westward pull of a vacantcontinent; America is special because of its geographical position(revisionism: it wasn’t vacant & how can a continent pull?)

- The geographical determinism of American ID is closely related to thenotion of manifest destiny

o believing that America has been granted a destiny by God tofulfill an ancient prophecy, develop all the way to the Pacific,create a utopia out of this immense landscape of immenseprospects that was just lying there to be conquered

o revisionism: but this was actually achieved through practicalefforts – war, occupation, genocide, buying & selling, it servedas the driving force behind the American Revolution, the war withMexico, wars with Indians etc.

- The American Revolution was driven by the desire to fulfill an ancientprophecy, to attain a utopia, an, granted by God, to be conquered andinhabited

- The doctrine that the US is a continental nation rather than a memberof an Atlantic community together with Europe has had a formativeinfluence on the American mind an isolationist policy at times

- Stages: through the passes of the Alleghenies, across the MississippiValley, over the high plains and mountains of the Far West to thePacific Coast; some say it continued to Hawaii and Alaska; some evencount the American influence in Vietnam and Iraq

- Frederick Jackson Turner insisted in his 1893 essay “The Significanceof the Frontier in American History” (a founding text of Americanculture) that the westward movement had come to an end and the frontierhad disappeared

- Henry Nash Smith: Turner’s hypothesis that the frontier had dominatedAmerican development became so famous only because it reflected alreadyexisting ideas and attitudes

- The present study traces the impact of the West, the vacant continentbeyond the frontier, on the consciousness of Americans and follows theconsequences of this impact in literature and social thought all theway to Turner's formulation of it

THE PASSAGE TO INDIA- In the early days of colonial America, Great Britain discouraged the

agrarian expansion to the interior because the Americans would be outof reach of their administration and the transport of agriculturalgoods from the interior to the seacoast would drag down their worldtrade

- By remaining close to the sea, Americans could be useful to Britishcolonial economy and under control of their colonial administration

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- But the American West was nevertheless there, a physical fact of greatif unknown magnitude. It strongly influenced the debate over the natureof the Empire which preceded the Revolution

- Americans, e.g. Benjamin Franklin, soon began to note that if theiragrarian expansion to the west continued, America would become thefuture economic and political seat of the British Empire

- The American interior is presented as a new and enchanting region ofinexpressible beauty and fertility, an agrarian utopia

- The early visions of an American Empire embody two different if oftenmingled conceptions, both predict the outcome of the westward movement

o Thomas Jefferson envisioned America as an agrarian forceoccupying the interior of the continent – he believed ademocratic, egalitarian society could only consist of freeindividuals (yeomen) on small parcels of independent land

o Alexander Madison’s mercantilist concept based on trade, industryand business, centered around the Eastern seaboard, Americacommanding over the sea

- The version based on agrarian assumptions more nearly corresponds tothe actual course of events during the nineteenth century, butJefferson believed America would forever remain an agrarian country ofsmall, independent farms, he could not predict the industrialrevolution, that it would be the railroad contributing to theincorporation of the American continent

- Expansion to the west. Thomas Jefferson envisioned America as anagrarian force – he believed a democratic, egalitarian society couldonly consist of free individuals (yeomen) on small parcels ofindependent land

- He imagined that initially only fur traders and Indians would inhabitthe lands west of the Mississippi. He acknowledged, however, that oncethe lands on the eastern side of the great river were filled up, theindependent farmers would need more space.

- After his inauguration as President in 1801 he was at last in aposition to carry out the projected exploration of the Far West bysending Meriwether Lewis and William Clark up the Missouri and over theRocky Mountains to the mouth of the Columbia at the Pacific Ocean

- Although it was ostensibly as scientific expedition, it also aimed todiscover a route which would allow American fur traders to challengethe aggressive British traders' uncontested control of the upperMissouri

- It was also a drama, an enactment of a myth that embodied the future- The expedition could not be realized without the help of Indians

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- Although Lewis and Clark discovered no route which could be of useagainst the British traders, they proved that the continent wastraversable and resurrected the idea of a passage to India

- After the discovery of the Oregon Trail, many farmers moved to the westand soon the American agricultural frontier reached the Pacific

- Passage to India. Ever since Columbus, explorers had hoped to find a"passage to India," one which would open the way to the riches of theOrient when Lewis and Clark reached the western American shore in1804, they revived this vision in America

- Thomas Hart Benton, a fervent follower of Jefferson, advocated westwardexpansion because he believed access to Asia (trade) will emancipateAmerica from Britain and Europe, but his mercantilist vision wasarchaic because he preferred plain roads to a transcontinental railroad

- Asa Whitney, a New York merchant who had made a fortune in the Orient,realized they needed a transcontinental railway if they wanted to tradewith Asia and populate the trans-Mississippi region individualfarmers did no good, but a railroad could create markets that wouldattract them

- William Gilpin and the isothermal zodiac. William Gilpin was a followerand advisor of Benton who believed in the power of western expansionand trade with Asia, but also in the importance of a transcontinentalrailway

- He relied on Alexander von Humboldt's notion of the “isothermalzodiac,” that the greatest empires of the world (China, Persia, Greece,Britain, Spain, etc.) flourished in one particular zone centered aroundthe 40th degree of latitude (a temperate zone, favorable foragriculture), which meant a bright future for America

- This view supported the American prejudice against history and in favorof geography and adaptation to nature (geographical determinism):history is determined by geography, America’s geographic positionguarantees a bright future

- In Australia, the frontier (the Outback) is unusable, in Canada it’sfrozen and doesn’t allow for a civilizing process

- Walt Whitman was also in favor of western expansion, a passage to India(one of his poems), he celebrates democracy, separation from feudalEurope and living in harmony with nature

- He gave expression to the theme of manifest destiny, that Americanswere destined to conquer the continent

- “Leaves of Grass” was written for the trans-Mississippi region, hecelebrates the westward march of Adam’s children (the western hero) toAsia as their goal (“these States tend inland”), but more in the senseof brotherhood and peace and without imperial aspirations of Benton and

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Whitney (e.g. using the manifest destiny as an argument for the warwith Mexicans)

THE WESTERN HERO- There were two quite distinct Wests: the domesticated agricultural

frontier and the uncivilized wilderness, and each gave rise todifferent heroes

- One is the frontiersman / pathfinder / noble savage / hunter / scout /ranger, as exemplified by Cooper’s Leatherstocking and the authenticbut heavily fictionalized hero Daniel Boone, the other is the yeoman

- The function of the Western hero was filled by sea stories in the earlytimes, before the expansion to the west, when Americans were still tiedto the Atlantic coast

- The frontiersman is a virtuous child of nature fleeing society, he isnot tamed/restrained by civilization and the law, he representsanarchic freedom because he has gone native, he has no knowledge ofscience and cities but of the forest, of tracking people and animals,also no sense of collectivity and solidarity because he is anautonomous/self-contained individual without fear, an atom, an Adamichero

- A shift occurs in the Wild Western literature, the scene shifts fromthe deep fertile forest east of the Mississippi into the barren plains,nature is no longer benign, the landscape is a “dreary waste”

- When placed in this environment, the successor to Daniel Boone andLeatherstocking in the role of Western hero was the fur trapper /mountain man

- Kit Carson is the essence of and the best known mountain man, he ismuch more uncivilized than Leatherstocking, a monster produced by theanarchic freedom of life in the wilderness, stoically suffers hardshipand completely relies on his own physical prowess and cunning tosurvive, a paragon of untutored nobility divested of virtually all theinfluences of the East

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- Nature. As early as 18th century literature there was a cult of the noblesavage, of moving back to nature

- Civilization is seen as artificial, not natural, not the truth, theopposite of nature (=authenticity) and culture

- Other antipodes to nature: science, cities (only a copy of reality, realityis nature), the urban

- Although America has declared itself a city on the hill, there is anegative streak towards cities in American culture: they are seen aswicked, bad, something to stay away from, one has to leave the city inorder to achieve an authentic existence (paradox: the probably most urbanculture has an anti-urban streak)

- Charles W. Webber was one of the first writers to exploit the two attitudestoward civilization and the wilderness of the West: wicked civilization vs.innocent nature, an unsullied source of strength and virtue

- He centered mainly on a primitive vision of nature, honor, justice and thenatural physical freedom of the West vs. the moral bigotry of the urbansociety

- Webber's later unsuccessful efforts to thematize the positive primitivenessof the wilderness reveal that this conception of nature was losing forceand vitality

- Henry David Thoreau also contrasts the wildness of nature with thelifelessness of civilized society and envisioned a rejuvenated society ofpeople more in touch with a primitive existence

- Herman Melville, by contrast, moved away from the simple primitive perceptionof nature and thought of nature as not necessarily good or evil, but asterrible and magnificent

- Dime novels. Miller and Lewis base their findings on the errand into thewilderness and the American Adam on canonical literary texts, but for hisexamination of the quintessential Western hero Nash is expanding the bodyof evidence and incorporating popular culture and literature, dime novels since then, AS has expanded the idea of culture, moving from strictlyhigh art & a humanistic base to popular films, dime novels, cartoons etc.

- Erastus Beadle was a pioneer in writing cheap, mass-audience dime novels(priced at 10 cents), the first ones appeared in June, 1860 and they soonreached revolutionary sales

- This fiction was produced hastily and in great quantities, was formulaic,predictable and subliterary, but it reflected the dream life of the readingpublic

- It usually dealt with Western adventure and produced the myth of theWestern hero – this myth is a kind of a fabrication adapted to appeal tothe reader’s fantasies

- Some heroes were of the Leatherstocking type: aged, celibate, benevolenthunters, skilled in trailing, marksmanship, and Indian fighting, with anaccent

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- Other heroes were (e.g. Deadwood Dick??) younger, more genteel versions ofLeatherstocking, virtuous, self-made men, ideal hunters and scouts, with alove story as a key part of their development, able to marry a woman of ahigher social status

- the Western dime novel got more and more violent and sensationalist, by the1890's, it almost entirely focused upon conflicts between detectives andbands of robbers that had little to do with the ostensibly Western locales,the genteel heroes became bandits who did as they pleased the westernstory lost its social significance

- Buffalo Bill is another popular semi-fictional character of dime novels, he isthe fictional persona a real man, William F. Cody created for himselfthrough Wild Western literature and through touring America and Europe withhis Wild West circus

- Despite the fact his portrayals of great battles and historical events wereheavily fictionalized, they were exactly what the public wanted to see,they were so famous, influential that they left a lasting impact on howpeople perceive the West, on later literary works and films about the West

- The cowboy as the Wild Western hero has become the dominant type in the 20th

century, but he emerged in the wake of Buffalo Bill in the late 1880s, evenbefore he became celebrated, American readers were familiar with hisprototypes: Mexican rancheros and vaqueros in California and Texas

- As late as the early 1870s, cowboys were known as herders, usually imaginedas semibarbarous laborers who lived a dull life of hard fare and poorshelter

- But it was Henry King's description in “Scribner’s” of a picturesque, braveand honor-bound figure which resonated widely in Western attitudes towardthe cowboy

- The dime novel heroine. The early heroines of Western literature, asportrayed by Cooper, were unyieldingly genteel, sentimental and passive,always played the role of a sexual object and prize for the male hero;later they were allowed some transformation by being captured by Indians

- This was dramatically challenged in Beadle’s Wild Western dime novels ofthe late 1870s: heroines began to dress as men, became violent, shot otherswith pistols and were distinguishable from their male counterparts only bythe physical fact of their sex, sometimes they even outmaneuvered men

- They made aggressive sexual overtures to male characters, many had beenwronged by a man and desired vengeance

THE GARDEN OF THE WORLD – THE YEOMAN HERO- The myth of the Garden of the World depicts America as an agrarian

paradise and glorifies the interior valley as an area of fecundity,bliss and virtue

- From the 1750s and over a long period of time, America was devoted toagriculture, the agrarian ideal supplanted mercantilism

- In the writings of Ben Franklin, St. John de Crevecoeur and ThomasJefferson, the agrarian social theory was formulated agriculture

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will be the dominant force in future America, agriculture is the onlysource of real wealth and value (not financing, manufactures orindustry), every man has a natural right to take empty land own it,work on it to produce no more than needed for a frugal lifestyle,constant labor in the soil yields independence and virtue

- The agrarian theory celebrated America as a self-reliant, democraticand classless agrarian society of rich opportunity in opposition to thepoverty and urban depravity of Europe America developed a policy ofisolationism

- The representative figure that emerged in the 19th century as a resultof this 18th century agrarian theory was the idealized yeoman frontierfarmer / freehold farmer / freeman / husbandman / cultivator, who waspart of an agricultural society, plowed the virgin land, transformedthe interior of the continent into the Garden of the World and wasrewarded for his efforts and virtue

- Although he was seen by Jefferson as the rock on which the Republicmust stand, he only slowly became a distinct figure for theimagination, in the 18th century he was still negatively likened to theEuropean peasant or common laborer, but he eventually became a myth ofpatriotism and democracy

- The social imaginary: the idea was based on geographical reality ofempty land with no villages, in England the feudalism was prevalent,serfs toiled for their masters and received barely anything in return,villages

- This myth presented a different picture of America than the Adamicmyth: it calls for a simple existence based collectivism, agrariancommunities that cultivate the earth

- Nash admits that the garden of the world is only a poetic idea, ametaphor, it doesn’t reflect reality, it’s in many ways a paradox, theexact opposite of what agrarian life was really like it ignoredhistory and the tragic aspects of human experience (disaster andsuffering), it promoted a static conception of the West

- By 1830 the west had two distinct agrarianismso the society of yeoman farmers – the ideal of the yeoman toiling in

the Garden of the Worldo the slave-holding plantation system of the Deep South – the ideal

of pastoral and feudal romance, cotton & tobacco- The yeoman as the symbol of American identity played an important role

in the development of democratic ideas in the United States theyrepresent economic and social opportunity for settlers of all classesto own land and live in prosperity

- This ideal had antislavery overtones and clashed with the Southernproponents of slavery the Southerners argued that only their

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landowners (who lived in leisure and had slaves do the work for them)could develop and preserve political principles

- The literature of the South was filled with aristocratic masters, sweetheroines, devoted slaves, heavily relied on the tradition of pastoraland feudal romance, but had no imaginative symbol which could serve asan opposition to the vital yeoman farmer and could only appeal to theharmonious social relations of a feudal society

- In contrast to the yeoman ideal of the NW expansion, the Southernerswanted to expand to the south, develop a tropical Amazonian empireworked by African slaves and control the trade of the Pacific

- The South’s refusal to build railways failed to establish a connectionwith the NW and the NW allied itself with the Union Forces

- Since the North was victorious in the Civil War, the yeoman myth wasimposed on the country as a whole

- After the Civil War, there was a surge westward into the barren plainsof eastern Kansas and Nebraska, that called for new the cultivationmethod of “dry farming” and special seeds the myth of the gardenneeded to be revised and strengthened to combat the myth of the GreatAmerican Desert

- Some researchers attempted to destroy the myth of the desert bydeveloping pseudoscientific methods which could supposedly increaserainfall and put the hard-working yeoman farmer back into focus

- The myth in politics. Lincoln’s Republican Party wanted to appeal tothe Northwest for votes, so they softened their antislavery policy tomerely being against its extension and, in 1860, they officiallyadopted the homestead principle as their policy (appealing to Westernersbecause relied on the garden and yeoman myths)

- The Homestead Bill was enacted in 1862 – it made public lands in theWest available to settlers without payment, usually in lots of 160acres, to be used as farms

- But the Homestead Act failed in its goal to benefit individual farmers,it only gave rise to land speculators and railroad monopolists as wellas expressions of Industrial Revolution such as the machine

- The homestead principle was supported by George Henry Evans’s safety valvetheory, of which Horace Greenly was the most prominent exponent – theavailability of free land in the West would encourage unemployed orunderpaid laborers to leave industrial cities, eliminating the surplusof workingmen and lessening the possibility of social and economicunrest in the East

- The safety valve theory was influential throughout the 19th centurybecause it was related to the garden myth – the nature will providewhat industrial cities can’t, otherwise America would become anotherEurope

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- But the safety valve theory didn’t help unemployment and socialproblems very few settlers on the agricultural frontier came fromeastern industrial centers because they lacked both the money needed totransport their families and the needed farming skills to survive oncethey got there

- Southern apologists for slavery were concerned with the protection ofthe property of the rich against the poor, so they wanted to useslavery to control the laboring class

- The new calculus. Opposition and value judgment against the Easternurban seaboard: associated with idleness, extravagance, merchants, whoaren’t really workers but dubious people making money out of nothing

- But the land in the NW was so fertile that soon yeomen could no longerlive a primitive life of subsistence agriculture, they startedaccumulating goods, creating surpluses and had to sell them, they hadto connect with markets, merchants and bankers, economic laws began toundermine the agrarian ideal

- By the 1830s the technological revolution and growth of cities hadbrought steam power in boats, later in railways and factories, andtook farmers out of a primitive agricultural economy into the contextof larger industrial and market forces they needed roads andrailroads to bring their goods to the market, need for a capitalistsystem, accumulation of capital, growth of cities

- Bankers and merchants flourished, the individual farmer could notcompete and became subordinate to them, he was no longer an independentworker who produced sufficient goods for his family, eventually he wastransformed into a producer of staple goods for distant markets andthus placed at the mercy of freight rates and the fluctuations ofinternational prices

- The yeoman ideal was put in question but was so strong and static thatcouldn’t disappear and had to be reinterpreted, the railroad and thenew technology emerges as the villain who destroyed the agrarian ideal

- But the 1870s, it became clear that the myth of the garden presented astatic conception of the West that failed to reflect new conditions,that despite the promotion of the garden myth and the yeomano the ones that were really in the focus of the national eye were the

speculator, the tycoon, the banker and the merchant o there was an obvious contrast between longtime agrarian aspirations

and the actual, poverty-stricken lives of farmers and the resultingdisillusionment fueled the agrarian revolt of the late 19th-century

o the frontier period of American history came to a close- Some, like Adam Hewitt, wished to reform the land laws and restructure

the ways of doing business in the West

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- Any proposed land reforms were met with opposition from Westerncongressmen, who stuck too close to the national garden myth andrefused to acknowledge the failure of the Homestead Act

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- The agricultural West in literature. The myth of the garden and the figureof the Western yeoman proved extremely difficult to bring into fictionalexpression because the yeomen were determined by their degraded classstatus (as opposed to the Leatherstocking-type of hero, who was outsidesociety) The prejudice was such characters were of no interest torefined, civilized readers

- James Fenimore Cooper's stringent conservatism prevented his charactersfrom crossing class lines, he believed every society should evolve towardsa wealthy and leisured gentry class

- There is a semi-convincing treatment of the yeoman character in Cooper’s“The Prairie”: Ishmael Bush, an unrefined, wandering man at war withnature, demonstrates an Old Testament sense of justice, much different fromLeatherstocking's intuitive virtue, that springs from the primitivelyagricultural West

- Other authors failed to make the yeoman characters believable, they usedbland pastoral and sentimental conventions which clashed with the yeomen’scoarse, unrefined nature

- The second half of the 19th century reveals a gradual change in literaryattitudes toward the Western farmer

- Caroline M. Kirkland's novels reveal in precise journalistic observationsmany traditional aristocratic attitudes toward the West although she hasambivalent feeling toward the Western indifference to class lines andrelies on sentimental literature stereotypes, she is interested in folkloreand does laud the kindness, simplicity and trustfulness of the farmers andtheir families

- In this period, a number of women wrote love story with a Westernbackground that had a cultivated person from the East and an uncultivatedperson from the West fall in love the East is always presented as havingsuperior values, the West is primitive

- Although some writers (like Alice Cary) did depict the West relativelypositively and not really as inferior to the East, others (like EdwardEggleston) depict the Westerners as lawless savages, profit-oriented andcorrupt

- A perennial hallmark of the lower-class character in literature had beendialect speech, which indicated their illiteracy but this began to change their speech later became a new subject of literary interests

- Hamlin Garland criticized the myth of the garden and the virtuous yeoman inhis novels, arguing these images were propagated by politicians andspeculators for their own purposes he stressed the sufferings andhardships of farmers, their manipulation and oppression, but his farmercharacters are more human and dignified than the primitive or haplessstereotype, with a direct relation to nature

- Turner’s frontier hypothesis. Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay"The Significance of the Frontier in American History," presented in

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Chicago before the American Historical Association, is one of the mostimportant pieces of nineteenth century writing about the west

- Turner's "frontier hypothesis" American development could be explained by the existence of an area of

free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of Americansettlement westward

The West (rather than the proslavery South or the antislavery North)was the most influential among American regions and that the frontier(rather than an imported European heritage) was responsible for thenovelty of American attitudes and institutions

his hypothesis emphasized geographical determinism, agriculturalsettlement, and the affirmation of democracy, all of which can betraced back to the myth of the garden of the world

But his essay presented an idealized version of reality, it expressedthe aspirations of a people rather than their actual situation

He defines the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery andcivilization,” the frontier fostered democracy through smalllandholdings

But his theory was contradictory· it relegated the frontiersman to primitive status and directlycontradicted the image of the virtuous yeoman laboring in thegarden of the world

· belief that the highest social values were to be found inagricultural frontier communities with his equally firm convictionthat society improved as it evolved out of pastoral simplicity andtoward industrialization

- Later in his life, Turner placed his faith not in nature orcivilization but in the common people of the United States by doingso, he admitted that American agricultural theory was of no help inunderstanding an industrial, urban America

- Ignorance toward the industrial revolution and isolationist distrust offoreign influences (cities in the urban East, Europe) had impededcooperation between farmers and factory workers in numerous crises ofAmerican history

Chapter 5: Daniel Boone: Empire Builder or Philosopher ofPrimitivism?- There were two quite distinct "Wests": the domesticated agricultural

frontier and the uncivilized wilderness different heroes- The most interesting of the Western 'pathfinders' is Daniel Boone, who

had led settlers to Boonesborough in 1775 and defended this outpostagainst Indians during the Revolution

- Portrayals of Boone reflect the duality of the Wets: they alternatedbetween an empire-building guide and spokesperson of civilization,leading families into the Kentucky wilderness, and a noble savage, achild of nature fleeing civilization

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- The irony/paradox of the frontiersman: he cherishes the wilderness butalways ends up destroying it or at least preparing the ground for theother (agrarian) lifestyle

Chapter 6: Leatherstocking and the Problem of Social Order- There is a similarity between Boone and Cooper’s Natty Bumppo a.k.a.

Leatherstocking - like Boone, Leatherstocking seeks refuge in theunsettled west from the vexations of civilization, both are hunters andserve as symbols of anarchic freedom

- “The Pioneers” - issues are raised by the advance of agriculturalsettlement into the wilderness, and about the tension between thefreedom of the frontier and the necessary order of society

- ultimately social status triumphs over the possibilities ofLeatherstocking's 'natural' status. Paul Hover and Ben Boden,characters in later Cooper novels, are younger doubles ofLeatherstocking with the more genteel occupation of bee-hunting. Haveno overt hostility toward civilization

Chapter 9: The Western Hero In The Dime NovelI. From Seth Jones to Deadwood Dick- Erastus Beadle was a pioneer in writing cheap, mass-audience "dime

novels" (priced at 10 cents), the first ones appeared in June, 1860 andsoon reached revolutionary sales

- This fiction was produced hastily and in great quantities, wasformulaic, predictable and subliterary, reflected the dream life of thereading public, usually dealt with Western adventure

- some heroes were of the Leatherstocking type: aged, celibate,benevolent hunters, skilled in trailing, marksmanship, and Indianfighting, with an accent

- other heroes were (e.g. Deadwood Dick) younger, more genteel versionsof Leatherstocking, virtuous, self-made men, ideal hunters and scouts,with a love story as a key part of their development

- the Western dime novel got more and more violent and sensationalist andby the 1890's, it almost entirely focused upon conflicts betweendetectives and bands of robbers that had little to do with theostensibly Western locales, the genteel heroes became bandits who didas they pleased the western story lost its social significance

II. Buffalo Bill and Buck Taylor- The literary character of Buffalo Bill is based on an actual man,

William F. Cody, the star of his own Wild West show- The stories of him heavily fictionalized his life, yet the fictional

version of Buffalo Bill was so accurate an expression of the readingpublic's demands that it shaped an actual man in its image

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- Just like Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, he was canonized in the ranks ofAmerican Western heroes, he is similar to Leatherstocking, but doesn’tspeak in a dialect and rides a horse

- The Wild Western hero as cowboy, who in the twentieth century hasbecome the dominant type, first appeared in the wake of Buffalo Bill inthe late 1880's

- The term initially referred to a rather crude class of common laborerswho posed a threat to law and order

- But it was Henry King's description in Scribner's of a picturesque, braveand honor-bound figure which resonated widely in Western attitudestoward the cowboy

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Leo Marx: “The Machine in the Garden”

- When we do literary studies, we are often blind to certain things if weclosely stick to the literariness of the text one such theme is therelevance of technology to ID

- Machine has been used to produce, but there is always the fear of machinesbecoming uncontrollable monsters

- In Ireland, technology was for a long time identified with EnglishProtestantism, it was considered patriotic to be against technology andproject the archaic pastoral image

- Croatia has had an uneasy relationship with technology and prefers topresent itself as a pastoral land of tourism

- AS scholars use different terminology to denote the same thing: metaphor,metaphoric design, paradigm, pattern, ideal, myth, symbol, cultural symbol,fable, imaginative expression establishing meaning in a haphazardreality, not an objective truth

- Technology/the machine belongs to this category, it does not exist merelyas something objectively readable and taken for granted, it is culturallyreadable/mediated/encoded and has different significance in differentcultures at different times

- Pastoralism is also one such paradigm, America took the pastoral poeticfantasy and used it for various utopian schemes to define itself as an exnihilo land with promises of being different from Europe, a new beginningfor Western society

- Marx states his purpose as describing and evaluating the uses of thepastoral paradigm in the interpretation of American experience, one ofwhich is to stress American exceptionalism, and showing how this idealstill persists in national imagination

- He stresses that he is not doing a comprehensive study, he is not usingquantitative scientific methods, but choosing examples that are of use tohis study, which is also why he’s including works of little or no literaryvalue, like Nash the inclusive method, both popular and elitist culture

- AS is not about literature only, all great American fables were made intofilms and have retained the strength of powerful cultural symbols in othermedia, Marx uses Sigmund Freud and Ortega y Gasset as a theoreticalbackground AS often uses the whole continental historical tradition, itresorts to interdisciplinary borrowing of theories it didn’t develop itself

- Marx wants to show how literature, general ideas and cultural symbols(products of collective imagination, in this case the machine in thegarden) meet, he is interested in the interplay the literary imaginationand general culture, in the pastoral idea as a metaphor of contradictioneven today

- His writings are still relevant today, more for studying technology thatfor the pastoral ideal

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- He distinguishes between two kinds of pastoralism: - The popular and sentimental one – the pastoral ideal Marx’s value

judgment is visible here: it’s more of an expression of thought thanfeeling, less complex, simple touristic/voyeuristic enjoyment of nature, akind of escapism from the harshness of reality (a psychoanalyticalresponse), an urge to withdraw from civilization’s growing power andcomplexity into nature

- It’s a movement to a symbolic, idealized landscape away form the antipodesof nature – civilization and cities – which are seen as artificial it’sparadoxical that the most urban country in the world has a powerful anti-urban mentality

- Marx admits America didn’t invent these ideas, but it did invest them witha peculiar intensity, hey have often been used by a reactionary or falseideology to mask the real problems of an industrial civilization (the samecould be said for Croatia)

- One example is the flight from the city – anti-urban attitude, longing fora simpler, more harmonious life, for natural environment, ideal life in thesuburbs, the American city center is a business district, not a culturedistrict this is not comparative to the urban experience in Europe,where the city center is the most popular location and the suburbs are seenas poor and neglected

- “Localism” of the national educational system, the power of the farm blocin the Congress, farming gets a lion’s share of government subsidies, therural population has an enormous say in elections in proportion to itssize, propensity for outdoor leisure activities & the wilderness cult(camping, hunting, fishing, picnicking, gardening)

- This was written 50 years ago, does it still hold? Are these activitiesreally peculiarly American? Today, it is the progressives/leftists thatstress the importance of nature and preserving it. There is a strong anti-urban theme in 19th century Croatian novels.

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- The imaginative and complex one – the pastoral design a larger, morecomplicated structure of thought, not simple touristic/voyeuristicenjoyment of nature

- It shows a situation that is more real, where nature is mediated by humanpresence, it juxtaposes the idyllic vision of nature with a counterforcefrom real life and thus creates a complex state of mind

- This motive recurs in American literature, the counterforce is often themachine, seen as an intruder upon a fantasy of idyllic satisfaction, oftenencoded with the masculine gender (crude, aggressive), while nature isfeminine (tender, submissive)

- The response to the machine is so negative because of the attachment to theopposite – the landscape – but this shocking intrusion raises ourconsciousness, elevates us to a higher, more complex plane of thought,unlocks greater potentials than simple sentimental feelings ever could

- The quintessential example is Hawthorne’s event from the Sleepy Hollow in1844, when his immersion into nature is broken by the sudden arrival of thelocomotive such instances have no direct/overt original statements thatwould be of interest to a sociologist, but they show inherited/attitudesand conventions

- Virgil’s “Eclogues” also use the complex notion of pastoralism, this timewithout the machine: the shepherd who is enjoying a carefree life in naturemeets a dispossessed herdsman

- Hawthorne’s use of the railroad as a counterforce reshapes thisconventional design to meet the circumstances in 19th century America it’s a new, distinctly American, post-romantic, industrial version of thepastoral design

- Even the Native American experience in nature is not simple primitivevoyeurism, as it is often described, it’s complex but again without themachine

- Tourism often works the sentimental pastoral image that falsify reality,e.g. Dalmatia is depicted as a pastoral utopia devoid of human presence, nomention of the harshness of the sea outside the bathing season

“The Tempest”- Since America is an offshoot of the British culture, when studying the

prehistory of America, we go to British texts, because at the time Americahad no native culture or literature, Marx chooses Shakespeare as thebeginning of his canon of texts that project the American ID

- “The Tempest” focuses on a highly civilized European – Prospero, the Dukeof Milan – who finds himself living in prehistoric wilderness of anisolated island a typical situation of voyagers in newly discoveredlands, Shax might have been influenced by Elizabethan travel reports

- Islands are often used as experimental stages to develop new ideas (e.g.Robinson Crusoe)

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- It’s about the hero’s struggle between two opposing forces, the corruptcivilization/city and the untamed wilderness, resulting in a generalreconciliation between the two – it’s the complex pastoral design, it’sclear that a permanent retreat from the city is not possible (in contrastto Gonzalo’s sentimental pastoral vision)

- It is a kind of rite-of-passage with three stages: begins in a corruptcity, passes through a raw wilderness, and finally leads back towards thecity with extra experience learned in the wilderness

- Although this is not a uniquely American situation, Marx tries toreconstruct this primordial scene by invoking the notion Americanexceptionality: he claims that the discovery of the New World and theAmerican experience invested this scenario with new relevance/peculiarityand fresh, vivid symbols

- Marx reconstructs even older traditions of European utopian aspirations –idealized, imaginary worlds of abundance (Arcadia, Elysium, Atlantis,Eden…) In Shax’s time, America was mostly presented as such a land ofplenty, of immediate pleasure/leisure, a paradise regained, a site for anew golden age

- Paradox: in Marx’s time (the 60s), the idea of American abundance isassociated more with science and technology that landscape, it’s clearlyproduced by effort, not an immediate pleasure, as a result of the intrusionof the machine into this idyllic scene

- From our point of view, the notion of America as a land of abundance hassort of lost its power

- There is also another image of the New World as a harsh, raw wilderness,devoid of civilization, full of deprivation and suffering

- The New England Puritans embraced this image of America, the believed thatby taming the harsh wilderness, they would create a disciplined societywith a demand for labor, mobilization of energy, diligence (paradox: laborended up destroying the garden)

- Both are only ecological images, root metaphors and poetic ideas of a valuesystem, each embodies a different notion of American destiny, a differentsocial ideal, both accounts, although contrary, are used by Marx toreconstruct the prehistory of America

- Marx prefers the contraction of these images to simple, non-contradictoryaccounts, in the same way he prefers complex pastoralism, he believes 19th

century writers were able to develop this paradox in all its complexityThe Garden- Robert Beverly: “History and Present State of Virginia” (1705) – one of the

first to reveal the affinity between life in America and the pastoral idealo geographic determinism, America as a utopia, praises the Indians for

being pure, simple, generous, uncorrupted by civilization, free fromcare this primitive Utopia can redeem the Europeans

o but near the end he is sort of disappointed that the lush gardenseems to be influencing the English in a bad way, it has turned them

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into slackers, he still values discipline and work even though headmires the Indians

o Without comprehending it, Beverly is uncovering the contradictionbetween two images of the garden: a wild paradise of abundance and aman-made, cultivated piece of ground

o What he unconsciously wanted was a reconciliation between nature andart, a middle landscape this soon became a commonplace theme inwritings about America

- A fully articulated pastoral idea only emerged at the end of the 18th

century (definitely by 1785, when Thomas Jefferson first printed his “Noteson Virginia”), the literary device became an ideology

- This ideology tended to invoke Nature as an universal norm, it becomes arhetorical/persuasive force to denote the normal/correct/universal, theunnatural is abnormal/particular

- There was the cult of the Noble Savage on the one hand and doctrines ofprogress & perfectibility on the other

- There were three closely related preoccupations of the age: the landscape,agriculture and the notion of the middle state as the desirable humancondition

- Landscape. The interest in landscape is a historical phenomenon, it wasespecially prominent in the 18th century, starting with classicism andreaching its climax near the end of the century (as opposed to the turn-of-the-century modernism, which focuses on the city and urban experience)

- The landscape is seen as an object of aesthetic interest and delight,complex distinctions were made between beautiful, picturesque and sublimelandscape the b&p are aesthetically pleasing and don’t frighten, thesublime landscape is immense, enormous, frightening and awe-inspiring, ittranscend human labor (the Rockies, the Mississippi River)

- Agriculture. In the same period, the aesthetic interest in landscape wasenriched by a sociological and economic interest, the agrarian ideal cameinto force, farms and soil were seen as God-given

- The praise for agriculture/husbandry can be traced back to ancient Greekand Roman writers (Hesiod, Xenophon, Cato, Cicero, Varro, Horace) and wasalso a ruling motif of Elizabethan literature: the appeal of a happy,bucolic rural life against the corrupt, self-seeking and disorderly urbanlife

- Croatian literature also often praises and privileges a natural and healthyrural life, cities are often depicted as corrupt, especially in the 19th

century novel- The middle landscape/state. It has a philosophical background: the great

chain of being, originating from the Middle Ages- The middle state/link in the great chain of being is the best possible

state for humans, between animal and godly forms of being, we are mediatingbetween these contraries and have to learn to live in the uncomfortablemiddle

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- As the sociological corollary of the great chain of being, the preferencefor a rural/agrarian existence is a reconciliation between the wild and theurban, it was especially popular during the 18th century as a compromisebetween the primitivist and progressivist views on human nature

- The stock figure of the noble savage became popular, it resembled the goodshepherd of the old pastorals

- Americans have always preferred towns and the suburbs to cities, thesuburbs always have lawns (nature) that are tended (human intervention),there are no villages, while in Europe, city life is the privileged way oflife

The Machine- Marx explicitly states that geography played a significant role in American

development: Thomas Jefferson and other politicians of the late 18th andearly 19th century believed America would for a long time remain anagrarian state without the need for manufactures and machines or to expandto the west of Mississippi

- The reason for this: most of the continent was unsettled and unexplored,most of Americans lived on dispersed farms, too dispersed for markets, landwas free/cheap, capital was scarce

- One of the reason why Jefferson failed to predict machines will threatenhis rural ideal is the lack of semantic anchorage, the notion of technologyas an agent of change barely existed, the word technology was coined in1829 by Jacob Bigelow, the process of industrialization had already begunbut it needed some time to be recognized because there was no term todenote it

- However, there were some Americans, like Tench Coxe, who recognized thatthe machine would make a decisive different in the nation’s development

o Coxe (1780s) believed political independence would require greatereconomic self-sufficiency, there would be a need for nativemanufactures, the abundance of land and scarcity of labor would actuallyintensify the demand for machinery

o the New World environment and nature will purify the inhuman feudalEuropean factory system (the middle landscape), machine power as well asagriculture naturally arise from the divine purpose of Americanlandscape

- In 1829, the English writer Thomas Carlyle published his essay “Signs ofthe Times” – machine as the most telling sign of modern times, recognizesthe machine both as technology and as a metaphor, system of values, hefears that too great an occupation with machines will upset the balance ofhuman life (the middle landscape), men will become mechanical in head andheart, the society will lose its moral force (later known as alienation,self-estrangement, detachment – Carlyle also lacked the vocabulary toclearly express his doubts, he first used the term industrialism in 1831)

- By 1829, the machine had been recognized as a force of change, new roadsand canals were already transforming the landscape, the steamboat had

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appeared, the railroad contributed to the incorporation of the continent everyday life rather than politics causes differences and transformations

- As Coxe has predicted, the abundance of land and scarcity of labor hadactually intensified the demand for machinery

- By 1829, Coxes idea that the nation’s aims would be realized throughmachinery were evolving into the official American ideology ofindustrialism, constant progress, expansion, improvement and perfectibility(of machines among other things), controlling nature and history

- The agrarian ideal has to be modified, a rhetoric was developed to enableAmerica to continue defining its purpose as the pursuit of rural happinesswhile devoting itself to productivity, wealth and power

- Timothy Walker: “The Defence of Mechanical Philosophy” (1831) – criticizesCarlyle’s skepticism of machinery, the machine is an instrument ofprogress, of transforming the wasteland into a garden, it fulfills theegalitarian aims of the American people (political value),emancipates/liberates the mind rather than enslaving it (machines do allthe work, people have more time to think), enables all people to share theplenty

- Later Carlyle’s suspicions will resurface, the efficiency of the machinewill be put into question, fear of becoming controlled by the machine,nature can’t be totally controlled (Titanic)

- By 1844, the machine had captured the public imagination, the railroad hadbecome central to the 19th century, it was often focused on in everydaylife and in literature (the rhythm/syntax of literary works changed, quickmontages, modernism)

- Prevalent thoughtso The machine and nature – the machine transformed the relation between

man and nature, unprecedented harmony between art and nature, man isdominating nature

o The machine and history – history is seen as everyone as continuousprogress of mankind, inventors are uncovering the ultimate principles ofthe universe

o The machine and mind – all arts (e.g. poetry) rest upon the mechanicarts, the machine has liberated the mind by relieving man from physicalwork, writings about machine power fulfilling an ancient prophecy, somesnobs say mechanic arts are degrading to arts in general

o The machine and America – the raw landscape is an ideal setting fortechnological progress, the machine has transformed America from awilderness into the most elaborate civilization, and can liberate therest of the world, but this is not only due to geographical determinismbut also due to a democracy which invites everyone to invent and pursuetheir happiness

- Daniel Webster – the nation’s foremost political rhetorician, in a 1847speech he neutralizes the conflict between the machine and the rural ideal,national unity through the machine, breaching of regional barriers, thelandscape lovers who demonize the machine (undemocratic, monopolistic,

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destructive) need to stop being trivial and enjoy the changes brought bythe machine

- John Orvis – one of such small ineffectual groups (socialist,transcendentalist, literary, religious) who believe the machine willendanger the pastoral ideal, give place to oppressive factory life like inEurope, destroy equality and create the castes of capitalist and laborers

- George Inness: “The Lackawanna Valley” (1855) – a picture that depicts themachine (locomotive) as a proper part of the landscape, it doesn’t intrudebut unify, the contradictions come together to create a complex/middlelandscape

- Thomas Buchanan Read, Emerson, Whitman – poets who pay tribute to theindustrialized version of the pastoral ideal, the middle landscape

The Two Kingdoms of Force- The Sleepy Hollow episode: a clash of opposites, belief in the rural

myth & awareness of industrialization as the counterforce to the myth- Marx chooses a couple of canonical American works to illustrate three

outcomes/interpretations of the Hawthorne’s Sleepy Hollow episode, i.e.of the intrusion of the machine into the garden: transcendentalist,tragic and vernacular

- Taken together, they exemplify how complex roman American pastoralismis, says Marx

- Transcendentalist. Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the philosophy ofromantic American pastoralism, adapts the rhetoric of the technologicalsublime for his own purposes, joins the enthusiasm for technologicalprogress with a love of nature and contempt for cities, the forces ofnature can now be controlled through technology, he uses technologicalprogress to illustrate human possibilities, technological progress willimprove human morality

- “The Young American” (1844) – a distinctive national culture isemerging due to the combined influence of technology (transportationrevolution) and geography (virgin land), it annihilates distance,accelerates the opening of the Wets and weakening the influence ofEurope and its inhuman conditions

- Denunciation of cities – they drain the country of the best part of thepopulation and leave the countryside to be cultivated by an inferior,irresponsible class

- Geographical determinism: like Thomas Jefferson, Emerson believestechnology under native conditions can serve the rural ideal, thevirgin landscape has sanative, therapeutic effect on the machine, itwill lead them to a simple, contemplative life instead of lust forwealth and power

- Henry Thoreau – “Walden” can be read as a report on his experiment(1845) in transcendental pastoralist theory of Emerson, he puts aliterary theme/symbol into practice, withdraws himself from society

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into nature, a simple life, awareness of nature and its order, freefrom the dull routine of an economy-orientated society

- He concludes the pastoral ideal is all about consciousness and hasnothing to do with social and natural facts

- In his birth town of Concord, the machine creates a dull, mechanizedlife, but at the Walden pond it promises new power, infinitepossibility, it represents the destined advance of history, Waldencannot provide a refuge from it, agrarian pastoralism is doomed

- It’s a distinctively American version of the pastoral ideal, notprimitivist, a blend of myth and reality, a middle ground

- Tragic. A darker sense of the widening gap between the facts and idealsof American life, technology will ultimately be destructive

- Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Ethan Brand” (1850) – a variant of the Faustlegend, about the search of the eponymous character for theUnpardonable Sin, his desire for knowledge is expressed through anobsession with fire (represents technology), his quest has turned himfrom a kind man into a cold, inhuman, mechanized man

- For this short story, Hawthorne relied on his notes made during avacation journey in the Berkshires in 1838, he is stricken by theviolent change of the place through industrialization, it’s so suddenthat there is no possibility for a middle landscape like later in theSleepy Hollow episode (1844)

- This sense of loss, disorientation and anxiety can be felt in “EthanBrand,” Ethan’s village is obsolete, a relic of antiquity filled withbroken, unfulfilled men, (an expression of Hawthorne’s sense of doomawaiting the rural culture, rural happiness is not enough), Ethanbecomes alienated from them and commits suicide, the idyllic visionafter his death is ironic, no reconciliation between the opposites ispossible

- Herman Melville: “Typee” – the middle landscape is not a realizableidea, begins with Tommo aboard ship longing for green fields, shipboardlife (industrialism) is routinized and dull, his retreat carries himinto primal nature to a friendly native tribe, free of society, butthey turn out to be cannibals and Tommo escapes from the “freedom” ofnature

- Herman Melville: “Moby Dick” (1851) – begins with Ishmael on the shorelonging for green fields but he finds a hideous wilderness anddiscovers the dangers of romantic pastoralism

- Shipboard life is again represented as dull, a technological relationto nature, Ahab dominates the crew with his obsession with the whale(represents power, industrialism, the scorn for romantic pastoralism,domination of nature), he mechanizes them, turns them intotools/objects (based on the idea than machinery makes men mechanized in

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the heart), only Ishmael doesn’t share his goal, their opposing viewsare a metaphor of contradiction

- Still, in Ahab’s quest for revenge, Ishmael gives up on sentimentalpastoralism, he frees himself form his despair and is saved in the end,he locates the green fields in the principle of survival, for him themiddle landscape may be realizable, but the ship is not saved, nature,represented by Moby Dick, is neither good nor evil

- Comic vernacular. Works that use a native idiom, the hero narrates inhis own language

- Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens: “Old Times on the Mississippi” –reminiscences about Mississippi piloting, one has to learn the languageof nature, memorize the geography/landscape, but one can no longerenjoy the poetic beauty of the landscape

- Clemens longs to convey the joyous feeling for the landscape from hisyouth (when he was just a spectator/passenger) but can’t, neither thepilot’s (analytical, practical but without meaning) nor the passenger’s(aesthetical but illusive) language/mode of perception serve hispurpose, he wants to infuse both of them with a fresh feeling

- Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens: “Huckleberry Finn” (1884) – the machine-in-the-garden motif has the effect of a shattering childhood trauma,the promised resolution of comedy is unconvincing

- Begins with the hero’s urge to withdraw from a repressive civilization,flees to Jackson’s Island and enjoys a freer life with Jim, when it’sinterrupted by villagers who want to search the island, the raftbecomes an extension of the idyll but can only move with the current,it becomes apparent that it cannot shield them from the aggressiveworld, it gets smashed by a steamboat but survives (conflict of values)

- After the recovery of the raft, Huck is able to lyrically describe thenature through vernacular narration but is at the same time part of it,he isn’t a passenger but is able to enjoy the landscape, he belongs tothe terrain – Clemens had found an alternative to the passenger’s andpilot’s rhetoric, a unified mode of perception

- But the contrast with the tow worlds intensifies and the possibility ofa comic disappears, when Huck returns to civilization, he also returnsto the dark mood from the beginning (conflict of values)

The Garden of Ashes- F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The Great Gatsby” (1925) – the resolution of the

Sleepy Hollow episode is no longer possible, the model is exhausted- The suburban greenness where Nick and Gatsby live is a man-made

wilderness where natural objects have no value in themselves, a gardenof ashes

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- Gatsby lives by the notion that he can start again, re-invent himself,undo the past, he represents sentimental pastoralism, inability todistinguish between dreams and facts, which is what destroys him

- Nick represents complex pastoralism, he traces Gatsby’s “gift of hope”to the very beginnings of America when Europeans came to a green land,he is drawn to pastoral felicity, but acknowledges the counterforce,the reality of history, how dangerous pastoral felicity is when facedwith reality

- The metaphor of contradiction shows how American inherited symbols havebeen divested of meaning, the old symbol of reconciliation in pastoralfables is obsolete

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Alan Trachtenberg: “Brooklyn Bridge”

Preface- In opposition to Marx, Trachtenberg focuses entirely on the machine,

something that is man-made and celebrates labor and human industry- Trachtenberg states that his purpose is to study the importance of the

Brooklyn Bridge as a cultural symbol of America and to show how it became asymbol

- He distinguishes between two separate modes of existence of the BBo Fact – has a specific location in time and space, subsequent As works

increasingly focus on thiso Symbol – situated in the mind, in the collective imagination of

Americans, it articulating the important ideas of the Americanculture, to enhance what is being symbolized (change, enhanced modernAmerica)

- Since BB came into existence in a time America was changing from apredominantly rural to an overwhelmingly urban and industrial society, itrepresents than change, it became a vehicle for ideas and feelingsassociated with the new conditions

- If a nation is able to continuously question its inherited symbols from thecontemporary point of view, it remains active, fluid, vibrant andresponsive, doesn’t become fossilized, it may replenish the symbol’smeaning, not destroy it

- From BB, the viewer can also see other American symbols: the NY skyline,the Bay, the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, formerly WTC

Wilderness Transformed- The root of the conflict between the Native Americans and American settlers

is how they view natureo Indians live in harmony with it as its children, they don’t use it,

it’s an extension of themo The settlers inherited the whole Judeo-Christian tradition of seeing

it as a source of power and wealth, a conquered subject, wanting tosubdue it and control it, be its masters

- These economic motives / the economic reality of America often lay obscuredbehind a rhetoric of American myths, the Americans supposedly love the landbut are ready to transform it in the name of progress

- Today these myths are still powerful but can no longer contain real factsand be used by Americans to explain their identity, they have gone througha process of unconcealment (William Spanos)

- One of these myths was that God’s providence intended America to be a greatand united nation that extends over the whole continent (“manifest destiny”,geographical predestination/determinism), many, like Jefferson, interpretedthis as a great agrarian republic of small, independent farms as an oppositionto the corrupt, urban Europe

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- But Jefferson saw they needed to unite/integrate/master the continent in orderto benefit from the virgin land, there were many geographical barriers tofulfilling the manifest destiny (conquering and integrating the wholecontinent)

- Integration/internal improvement called for transportation, building roads andcanals, Jefferson believed they would protect the agrarian republic, but roadseventually resulted in agrarian activity creating markets, farmers wanting todo business, commercialization, manufacturing, capitalism, land being givenreal value instead of symbolic

- Then in building railroads, uniting the two coasts through atranscontinental railway, industrializing the land and the ultimate demiseof the agrarian republic

- Transportation represented change, it’s the railroad that united thecontinent, says Trachtenberg, and struck down regional barriers, did away withregional multiplicity, tied down regions to their major market cities it’s acriticism of the earlier paradigms of Am being history-less, transportationbrought the tradition and commerce

- Walt Whitman – celebrated transportation as a means of bringing people fromthe city into nature, but he failed to consider that transportation willinevitably change that nature, he recognized that the rural past wasdisappearing, which was deplorable

- Thomas Ewbank – foresaw endless progress through machinery, he didn’t wanta reconciliation between agrarianism and industrialism but a completedomination of the machine to establish capitalism

- BB was a symbol of unity, a force of the incorporation of the continent,the peaceful mastery of nature, it embodied the forces that pruned the wildforest (the middle landscape) and set a city upon the hill (before BB onehad to take the ferry in order to reach Manhattan and Long Island)

- It’s not the land nor the garden, it’s transportation, the road and thebridge that represent the American mentality, says Trachtenberg, Americansdon’t love the land but love transforming it for progress, for the future

- Revisionism: but the same protestant ethic of owning, using andtransforming land could also be applied to great European states, Americais West transported into primordial conditions

The Rainbow and the Grid- As early as 1800, they were plans to build a “rainbow bridge” from Brooklyn

across the East River to NY as a means of raising the value of lands on theeast side of the river at the very outset of the idea, the bridge wasalready viewed as a practical fusion of the visionary/“chimerical” (symbol)as well as public opinion and pecuniary value (fact)

- The Commissioners’ Plan for 1811 proposed the establishment of a gridironstreet plan for Manhattan, the plan is very 19th century, it’s an abstractgeometry system that has nothing to do with art and beauty, the soleconcern is efficiency and exploitation/mechanization of land/nature for the

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purpose of quick sale and private building lots, Manhattan transformed froma public institution into a private commercial venture

- It was a major step in transferring ownership of land of the island frompublic to private hands (private property) After 1811, municipalownership and the leasehold system slowly disappeared in favor of outrightsale, the remains of the inherited common land were auctioned off in 1844

- The grid system was an aesthetic symbol as well as commercial/acquisitivefact

An American Dream - The creators of BB were John Augustus Roebling and his son Washington, who

carried on with the project after his father’s death- Roebling was born in Germany in 1806 and saw America as the new hope of

mankind, where people are free of “unnatural” restraints and can realize theirfull potentials, as opposed to the his restrictive homeland (the restorationperiod after the fall of Napoleon), because it has a republican constitutionand a vast ocean of empty space

- In America he started as a farmer but soon recognized the need for roadsand mechanical links between ideals and realities, so he became amanufacturer-engineer, i.e. a civil engineer in 1837 and builder of bridgesin 1845, he struggled for economic independence from promoters andcommissioners

- He was a proponent of industrialization for the purpose of the Americanmanifest destiny, his arguments were historical necessity and moral duty,America was destined to benefit from modern improvements, the goal isharmony and order, there is no need for profit without a mission,selfishness and slavery

- He was also a spiritualist and transcendentalist, believing in the greatSpirit of Nature which is in constant operation, that in the end historywill eliminate evil and bring harmony, he needed these beliefs to explainto himself the disturbing aspects of America – greed, hunt for profit,wars, oppression, slavery

A Master Plan- For Roebling, the bridge’s reality was multiple: nationalist, theoretical,

physical, economic and historical, a fusion of symbol and fact, aharmony/balance of many opposite forces that constituted it, it was a“spiritual and ideal conception” but also embodied historical reality ofshifting the center of civilization from Eu to Am

- It acknowledges the movement of history, represents nature’s laws and man’shistory

- BB was to him a principle of order, it would create a control over millionsof people crossing the river and their everyday movements, createhomogeneity

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- But his technological knowledge wasn’t enough, he needed to promote theidea in the American network of social interest – these two factors createdthe bridge

The Monument- BB is regarded as an official national monument, just as Roebling wanted- he didn’t design the bridge for mechanical purposes only, he wanted it to

become a monument, he designed the towers and the anachronistic Gothic archfor symbolic rather than functional reasons, as an artistic addition, tobecome emblems of uniting Brooklyn and Manhattan and establish NY as thenew center of the world

- R’s wish to create a symbol is reflected in a number of avant-gardepaintings that thematize the bridge, it shows America as constantly on theroad, moving

History – and Secret History- In the long run the bridge was a social good, a public service, but in the

short run it seemed to be constructed only so some corrupt big fish of NYcould get rich, there was bribing, plotting and shady dealings involved

- The corrupt Board of the bridge Company wanted to replace WashingtonRoebling n the charge of him being an invalid because he obstructed them insecuring dishonest profit

Opening Ceremonies- The bridge was completed in 1883 by Roebling’s son Washington- The Opening Ceremonies of the Brooklyn Bridge were a unique, non-repeatable

event in the life of B and M, a public drama that united the people andrededicated the community to honesty and accomplishment, it placed theBridge in the popular conception of American life, in historical and moralexperience

- It was sees as an American version of man’s continuing victory over natureand its obstacles (geographical barriers), an emblem of modernity and theoutcome of constant human progress, it was built for peace, not war, forfree commerce between cities

- It belongs to the immeasurable communicating system that unites thedistributed imperial domain into one country, it was build by a German andstands next to the Statue of Liberty, the work of a Frenchman, so itrepresents the fellowship of nations

Two Kingdoms- By increasing the volume of traffic into Manhattan and helping to

concentrate wealth in the city’s business sector, BB indirectly promotedthe skyscraper (i.e. the Empire State Building), which overtook theBridge’s role as the ruler of the sky

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- Henry James – the bridge is a mechanical monster, skyscrapers are sublime- John Marin – paints the bridge and the city as an abstract form, a shape

expressing energy and movement, the vision of speed and frenzy- Joseph Stella – the bridge is a spiritual/divine presence, creates a

tension between the bridge and the tunnel in color and form, a physicalsense of simultaneously walking over and under the bridge, in laterpaintings the bridge has escaped the treacherous forms of the city andbecome a principle on its own

- James and Stella had opposing views of the bridge, but for both it was avehicle of powerful emotions towards the city and modern civilization:fascination coupled with horror or love

- Henry Adams – two kingdoms of force, the opposition between the Virgin andthe dynamo

o Virgin – idolatry of Mary, represented the submissive feeling towardsnature and its organic order, the result are cathedrals, somethingpermanent

o Dynamo – represented refinement and power, change and progress, thedomination of nature

o The bridge occupied both kingdoms: the dynamo as a highway, theVirgin as a form against the sky

- Lewis Mumford – wanted to condemn mechanization without condemning themachine, BB is a central monument in the usable past, a beautiful andprophetic form of service to humanity, the fulfillment of a prophecy

The Shadow of a Myth- Hart Crane wrote a poem called “The Bridge,” (first pub. in 1930) which is

an expression of the American myth/epic with the bridge as the symbol of AmID, a myth to manifest the divine, an epiphany

- The bridge is not found but made throughout the poem, it represents aninternal process, an act of consciousness, a paradigm of love and beauty,

- The poem is a sophisticated version of the archaic myth of return,according to which archaic men wanted to resist history and live in thecontinual present by recreating the events of their mythology

- Therefore, the poem draws on the legends of American history (Columbus,Pocahontas, Cortez, De Soto, Rip Van Winkle, the gold rush, the whalers)and the contemporary reality (railroads, subways, warplanes, officebuildings, cinemas, burlesque queens) with allusions to American artists(Whitman, Melville, Poe, Dickinson, Isadora Duncan) and world literature(the Bible, Plato, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Blake)

- The poet struggles with history and wants to learn the meaning of Amhistory, the action comprises one day of a dreamlike poetic journey throughhis consciousness to self-discovery, in order to overcome history andembark on a quest for a new world, to judge history from the point of viewof myth

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- There are two movements: first fragmentation (the center becomesweak/loosened), but at the end synthesis/harmony is achieved, the bridge isan axis which holds together the different narratives of the poem, it risesabove the wreckage of history as an eternal symbol

- But by abolishing the link between myth and history, Crane’s bridge is tornfrom history and actuality, it’s no longer the BB, it has no socialreality, it’s a detached symbol, a utopia

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