The Novel of Purpose, By Way of Introduction

(x-posted from the Valve, which is currently hosting an event on Claybaugh's excellent book)

No one here needs me to tell them that disciplines are odd beasts, but I will anyway.  Jobs are apportioned on the basis of small slices of time and big swaths of land.  For example, I’m an Americanist. Practically speaking, this means I can only apply for Americanist jobs.  I’m also a 19^th century Americanist, further limiting my possibilities.  These disciplinary demands shape my dissertation—whatever I write, I need to know it can be published in American Literature or American Literary History.  (English Literary History claims to publish works on “major works in English and American literature,” but when I opened my latest copy, I was not shocked to find five essays on George O’Brien Wyndham, Earl of Egremont, and one on Nathaniel Hawthorne.) For a project like mine, such professional imperatives chafe like an angry sea.  How do I write a proper Americanist dissertation about the reception of Anglo- and Continental evolutionary theory?  Do I give the source material—Darwin, Lamarck, Spencer, &c.—short shrift, and focus instead on the aesthetic and moral theories American authors built on them?  But what if those theories are themselves indebted to Anglo- and Continental thought?  (As was the case with Silas Weir Mitchell, whose thought owes more to Keats and Ruskin than Emerson and Howells.)

To the lay reader, addressing Anglo-American literary and intellectual culture through a nationalist paradigm must seem the height of academic parochialism.  On my side of the pond, the legacy of American exceptionalism and the culture of specialization disfigured national and literary history, slicing away until the face in the mirror resembled a disciplinary ideal more than the historical record.  Over the past decade, the situation has improved.  Most scholars date the change to the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), but I suspect the real impetus was a collective awakening, a recognition that the effort it took not to admit Dickens into a study of American literature was expenditure wasted.  Whatever the cause, the last ten years has been a boom-time for studies of transnational literary cultures (broadly defined).  Still, the title of Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner’s important anthology, The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800 (1996) points to one blind spot of post-national critical discourse: the 19^th century.  (It looms, but for reasons I will discuss during the event, rarely does it enter the frame.) So it goes without saying that Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose is a welcome addition to an already lively conversation. 

Over the next few days, I’ll address Amanda’s argument in more detail. For now, I only wanted to explain why I think the book important enough to be subjected to an event.  Wait, did I say “subjected to”?  I meant “the subject of.” I can’t imagine anyone would find the experience unpleasant.  (He says, crossing his fingers.)

Comments

[The Constructivist]

Dewd, aren't you overstating the 19th C transnational lacuna just a tad? Or am I wrong that Looby's Voicing America (1996), Schueller's U.S. Orientalisms (1998), Jones's Strange Talk, and Brickhouse's Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (2004) aren't doing what you're praising? And our historian pals are all over the story.

Even granting this, I agree with your general point. I'm interested in why. I don't think it's just because the American Renaissance became the core of the American exceptionalist argument (even though it wasn't in the original scholarship). It may just be because people have stopped reading Matthiessen's American Renaissance and Colacurcio's The Province of Piety (to pick two previous generations' classics) and therefore don't notice how big a role British lit plays in their arguments. But I wonder if there's a more historical explanation--that between Colacurcio's generation, which was a bit obsessed with establishing the disciplinary and literary authenticity of American Studies in general (from his accounts) and the feminists/multiculturalists who followed them (who took the authenticity for granted but wanted to turn the spotlight onto the previous generations' blind spots), looking to a transatlantic Anglo culture for context began to seem passe.

But that's probably wrong, too--I mean, there's a million studies of the transatlantic abolitionist movement, and Black Studies (both before and since Gilroy) had its England-Africa-Caribbean-connectors.

What do you think?

[SEK]

But I wonder if there's a more historical explanation--that between Colacurcio's generation, which was a bit obsessed with establishing the disciplinary and literary authenticity of American Studies in general (from his accounts) and the feminists/multiculturalists who followed them (who took the authenticity for granted but wanted to turn the spotlight onto the previous generations' blind spots), looking to a transatlantic Anglo culture for context began to seem passe.

[snip]

What do you think?

I think you wrote in a sentence something I spent about four hours trying to organize yesterday. I'm not sure whether I want to thank you or cry.

[The Constructivist]

Hmm, maybe I should treat my book manuscript the way I treat commenting in others' blogs rather than the way I treat my Hawthorne blogging.

Hoping you bring Giles and Peyser into the mix in future posts, as I've only read bits from the first and none from the latter--looking forward to learning about matters postbellum!

[SEK]

If by "bring Giles into the mix" you mean "have him write a post himself," well then, your wish is my command!

[The Constructivist]

An act of geni(e)us!