Approaches to American Cultural Studies

Antje Dallmann, Eva Boesenberg, Martin Klepper, Antje Dallmann, Eva Boesenberg, Martin Klepper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317227731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Approaches to American Cultural Studies provides an accessible yet comprehensive overview of the diverse range of subjects encompassed within American Studies, familiarising students with the history and shape of American Studies as an academic subject as well as its key theories, methods, and concepts.

Written and edited by an international team of authors based primarily in Europe, the book is divided into four thematically-organised sections. The first part delineates the evolution of American Studies over the course of the twentieth century, the second elaborates on how American Studies as a field is positioned within the wider humanities, and the third inspects and deconstructs popular tropes such as myths of the West, the self-made man, Manifest Destiny, and representations of the President of the United States. The fourth part introduces theories of society such as structuralism and deconstruction, queer and transgender theories, border and hemispheric studies, and critical race theory that are particularly influential within American Studies.

This book is supplemented by a companion website offering further material for study ( www.routledge.com/cw/dallmann ). Specifically designed for use on courses across Europe, it is a clear and engaging introductory text for students of American culture.

Part I

American Studies as a discipline

1 History of American Studies

From its emergence to transnational American Studies

Matthias Oppermann

American Studies is a field of teaching and research that is primarily concerned with the interdisciplinary study of American cultures. People “do” American Studies in schools and universities, in museums and libraries, at national historic sites and in independent community projects. American Studies scholars examine rare manuscripts or viral videos, they write books or code databases, they create maps, collages, or performances. And when two or more practitioners meet, there is often very little agreement about what precisely they mean by “American,” and by “cultures,” and what an appropriate object of study may be, and which methods one should use.

Unfortunately, I cannot offer you a comprehensive history of American Studies as a transnational field of inquiry that would do justice to all of the specific political, economic, cultural, or historic conditions that have influenced the development of American Studies in very diverse national, regional, and local configurations. So in lieu of such a brief history of everything American Studies everywhere, I will concentrate on the development of academic American Studies in the United States. This limited focus does not suggest that the ways in which American Studies have developed in the United States are somehow exceptional or unique, but that their history in the United States is a particularly significant part of the many other cultural and institutional histories that continue to shape our current understanding of American Studies across a wide range of international and institutional landscapes.

In the United States, the development of American Studies as an academic field is often traced back to the 1920s when professors of English began to offer individual courses that combined the study of (US-)American literature and (US) history. It is important to note that at the time, these two subjects were not considered equals: The study of US-American history was already well established in academia, but the literature of the United States was just beginning to receive scholarly attention in English departments where it had thus far been considered a subordinate category of English literature (for an institutional history of American Literature Studies, see Renker; Graff and Warner). However, during World War I English departments began to emphasize the “American quality of American literature” (Crane 13), and the first courses appeared under the label “American Civilization” – a label you can still find in the name of certain university programs or course descriptions. World War I also made it very difficult for faculty to go on research visits to continental Europe or Britain, and so scholars increasingly focused on research dedicated to genuinely “American” subjects.

These developments coincided with a creative output (fiction, drama, poetry) that highlighted the progress of “civilization” in North America, and so the quality of American literature (almost exclusively by white male authors) became an indicator for the achievements of American culture. Still, by the end of the 1920s, only four percent of all literature courses dealt with texts from the United States; in English departments, more attention was given to Milton and Chaucer than to all US-American authors combined (Nuhn 329).

The economic disaster of the Great Depression and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s led a number of scholars to engage in curricular experiments and new modes of research that consciously crossed disciplinary boundaries. They approached questions about potential reasons for the social crisis from multiple angles, and they stressed the practical value of knowing about their nation’s cultural history in order to come up with practical solutions to the problem (see Cowan). The introduction of “regional courses” – the combination of American literature and history on a regional basis – was celebrated as a curricular innovation of the 1930s (Crane 19). A focus on regional histories and literatures promised to make the teaching of American literature more effective and more interesting to students. It also included internationalist (although almost exclusively European) perspectives and consciously moved beyond the restrictions of disciplinary conventions in English or history (Flanagan 517). Newly developed courses and programs in American Civilization at Harvard, Yale, or New York University equally moved beyond purely philological approaches to literature and offered students instruction in history, sociology, and fine arts to arrive at a more complete understanding of American culture. Here, the term “civilization” indicated not only a defense against criticism from the classicist disciplines that considered American culture to be inferior to their own objects of study. It also implied an outspoken dedication to specific US national literatures and cultural traditions, and it signaled the beginnings of interdisciplinary institutional arrangements out of which American Studies in US academia were to develop.

The 1940s, and especially the 1950s, saw a sharp increase in American Civilization programs, with twenty-eight established in the 1940s and forty-eight in the 1950s (Bassett 306). As the academic establishment began to declare the “universal principles of democracy” as an official learning goal shortly before the United States entered World War II, knowledge about the national cultural past gained ideological relevance (Gleason 348). Subjects like American literature and American history were needed, Robert Spiller claimed in 1942, to “define the American way, tell its history,” and to distinguish it from “the way of dictatorship” (295). Spiller argued that the study of American culture did not only deserve the same academic rigor as the emerging Foreign Area Studies, but should become the center and guiding principle of liberal education in the United States (269).

The availability of substantial financial support after World War II and the political and cultural climate of the Cold War are often seen as the primary catalysts for the growth of American Studies programs in the United States. However, American Studies after World War II were still a rather marginal subject area in US academia. In 1948, around sixty undergraduate programs were in existence, and no more than fifteen of those programs also offered graduate courses (McDowell 26). Most programs were so small that by the early 1950s, only five programs had more than one professor who taught special courses in American Civilization (Grier 182). Most of the newly institutionalized inter-departmental programs, which now also began to appear under the name American Studies, depended almost entirely on voluntary contributions from traditional departments like English or history.

American Studies courses of the 1950s were dedicated to a homogenous national consensus culture that continued to neglect the contributions of women and ethnic minorities (Harders). At the same time, many American Studies faculty saw internationalist and comparative approaches to the study of literature, music, and art as an effective teaching strategy against the dangers of national chauvinism. In a widely read article of 1952 entitled “The Study of American Civilization: Jingoism or Scholarship,” Arthur Bestor claimed that “any serious attempt to understand our national life must carry the student into investigations of things happening far outside our geographical boundaries and long before the beginning of our separate chronology” (Bestor qtd. in Turpie 520). For students, American Studies could thus function as a “door” to foreign backgrounds – “a door opening outward upon the universe of human endeavor” (521). This points to an understanding of the complexities of American cultures that goes beyond national borders and transgresses an isolationist notion of national history. In this sense, Bestor’s position could be read as a harbinger of the post-nationalist research agendas that became very influential for American Studies more than four decades later.

The development of American Studies from the early 1950s until the 1970s is closely linked to the work of the so-called Myth and Symbol School (Oppermann 75–85). The group of scholars commonly associated with this school includes R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century, 1955), Leo Marx (The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 1964), John William Ward (Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age, 1955), Alan Trachtenberg (Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, 1965), and Henry Nash Smith. Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) is generally considered a milestone for American Studies and for the development of the Myth and Symbol School in particular. Virgin Land is a study of the imaginary aspects of the “Western Frontier” and of the effects of these myths and symbols for an American national identity and culture.

The premises of Virgin Land are symptomatic for approaches of American Studies scholarship during the 1950s: National cultures (and especially US-American national culture) are unique and all expressions of a national culture share a common basis. Myths and symbols are an expression of a national culture’s ideals and values; at the same time, they strongly influence the behavior of all Americans who recognize dominant myths as part of their national ideal. In other words: The national culture consists of an – albeit heterogeneous – community of consensus whose identity is firmly based in common myths and symbols. To study this national culture, Myth and Symbol scholars focused primarily on symbols in literary texts and cultural artifacts and brought these to bear on each other in the context of larger national myths. In hindsight, this approach has since been criticized for methodological shortcomings, for neglecting categories like “race,” class, and gender, and as an example of American Exceptionalism.

In the early 1970s Bruce Kuklick argued that the direct link between social experience and literary symbols was theoretically unsound and that Myth and Symbol research focused primarily on the literary work of white males. Throughout the next decade, scholars like Annette Kolodny also criticized the male bias of the pastoral ideal in American Studies and made gender a central category of analysis.

In the 1960s and 1970s, quantitative growth in the number of programs and students coincided with a large number of theoretical publications that expressed a growing concern about methodological uncertainties. Americanists grappled with the question of how adequately texts could be used as evidence for cultural processes. Expertise in American Studies was located somewhere between anthropology, literary criticism, and a general humanities skill set. An “inclusive principle of operation” (a unifying method for an emerging discipline), which Roy Harvey Pearce (179) and others had still hoped for in the late 1950s, was certainly not on the horizon.

By the early 1960s, one hundred undergraduate American Studies programs and twenty graduate programs were in existence (Cohen 550). During a decade of rapid expansion, this figure would double to two hundred undergraduate programs until the early 1970s – roughly the same number of programs exist today (Bassett 308). Students chose courses from various departments and “core seminars” in American Studies. In theory, these core courses employed interdisciplinary methodologies and introduced students to various culture concepts and their possible applications in American Studies scholarship. In practice, even core courses usually retained a bipolar literature–history concentration and operated with a holistic concept of a homogenous and unique national culture.

During the 1960s, diverse social movements and identity politics demanded to be recognized as integral parts of the cultural fabric of the United States and radically challenged the notion of a holistic and homogenous US national culture that was dominated by white, heterosexual, protestant men. The political, social, and cultural climate of the 1960s led to vibrant debates about traditional subject matter and methodologies in American Studies and had a genuinely transformative effect on the field. Informed by political agendas and social activism of the late 1960s, a new generation of Americanists of the 1970s insisted that practitioners in the field should take a much more politically committed and critical stance toward the dominant culture in their teaching and scholarship (see Robert Merideth’s pamphlet “Subverting Culture: The Radical as Teacher,” 1969, qtd. in Wise 185). At many universities, younger faculty rejected the role of professors as politically neutral transmitters of knowledge, and graduate students successfully pressed for representation in the national council of the American Studies Association (Cowan; see Chapter 13, 150–52).

In the late 1970s, newly institutionalized interdisciplinary programs and sub-fields emerged in the academy. Programs and curricula like Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Asian American Studies, African American Studies, Chicano and Chicana Studies, Ethnic Studies, or Postcolonial Studies contributed to a new understanding of American society and culture that emphasizes various dimensions of cultural difference in terms of “race,” class, ethnicity, or gender. Despite differences in degree and direction, these projects were concerned with critical interventions into racist or sexist societal structures and modes of representation, and brought subject matters to the fore that had been largely neglected by American Studies in more traditional configurations.

The critiques of social movements and emerging interdisciplinary programs broadened the subject matter of American Studies and challenged core epistemologies: American society could not be sufficiently analyzed if culture was understood as the “realm of artistic and intellectual activity” (Klein 160) or the “complexities of everyday behavior” (Shank 101). In the multicultural realities of the United States, culture was a site of conflict and struggle, and power was unevenly distributed. Marginalized groups and minority subject positions revealed dynamic dimensions of difference in American society and culture.

The influences of various intersecting and overlapping programs and research agendas continued to transform the American Studies project during the 1980s. European critical theory and the success of British Cultural Studies played a crucial role in re-locating American Studies in a force-field between more strictly academic work and a commitment to progressive politics and social change (Pease 23). Since then, American Studies have continued to build on the work of minority discourses and interdisciplinary programs and have responded to the challenges that Critical Theory and Cultural Studies posed to earlier concepts of an imaginary national consensus culture.

Throughout the past three decades, so-called “New Americanists” have been a dominant group of critics working within American Studies, among them Robyn Wiegman, Donald Pease, and John Carlos Rowe. New Americanists have situated the work of the field at the conjuncture between progressive social movements and the academy, have actively challenged national meta-narratives, and highlighted the explicitly dialogic, international, and comparativist nature of American Studies. In the mid-1990s, the German American Studies scholar Günter H. Lenz formulated a vision for an “American Culture Studies” that foregrounded the importance of “border discourses” and “contact zones” (Pratt) as two key discursive formations that are central to more comparative versions of multicultural critique. For Lenz, the dialogic contact zones that are involved in the historical construction of multicultural communities of difference must take precedence over the traditional centrality of isolated and representative literary works, authors, periods, or events. Also in the mid-1990s, Lenz’s US-American colleague Rowe called for the creation of “comparative US cultures courses” that should be based on a canon of social situations (rather than texts) in order to fully realize the theoretical and pedagogical implications of Pratt’s concept of the contact zone and Lenz’s notion of the dialogics of American Culture Studies qua border discourses (Rowe, “A Future”). Within this framew...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: American Studies as a discipline
• PART II: American Studies and Cultural Studies
• PART III: Concepts of nation building in American Studies
• PART IV: Theories in American Studies
• Index