How are we going to read literature in the future? What is the direction literary studies should take? The question has gained urgency in view of a growing dissatisfaction with the mode of reading that has dominated the field over the last decades, a method of critical unmasking that is based, in one way or another, on a hermeneutics of suspicion and its key premise of the all-determining power of an absent cause. Concepts like reparative reading, surface reading, distant reading, new formalism and postcritique signal a search for alternatives. This essay focuses on two books that have been especially influential in this search, Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), seen by many as a wake-up call to move beyond a stifling routine of suspicious readings, and Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), an original reconsideration of the matter of form and its possible political functions. Both of these books want to escape narratives of determination in which singularity and difference are lost, but both approach the challenge in strikingly different ways. Both tell stories of a liberation from determinations that are based on very different founding assumptions. This suggests to discuss them in the larger context of other narratives of liberation in literary studies, as this essay does in its conclusion.

When the study of American literature was established as a separate discipline of its own after World War II, the unique symbolic forms of writers like Hawthorne and Melville moved to the center. American realism and naturalism, on the other hand, were often seen as weak imitations of European models. In order to liberate them from the stigma of a minor tradition, one has to understand how their themes and formal choices developed out of new and advanced perceptions of American reality and a struggle about what America's values should be. In this overview, the terms realism and naturalism will be used in a broad sense that includes regional, women, black, and ethnic writers, and is extended into a transnational perspective.

Abstract:Every literary and cultural theory must be based on certain explicit or implicit assumptions about the human condition, about what the human make-up is, what humans want, what they need, how society responds to these wants and needs, and what role literature and culture play in this context. Willingly or unwillingly, but always inevitably, such assumptions form the basis of every theoretical approach, although critics often do not want to acknowledge their premises or may not even be aware of them. As a rule, when we interpret a literary text or a cultural practice, we do not first ask ourselves what our underlying philosophical or anthropological premises are. We simply apply a perspective or a method that we know and prefer. We can do this because these approaches come with the authority of an established critical convention, and that is also the reason why we may not feel the need for an analysis and justification of the tacit assumptions on which they are based.

In the past decades the topic of recognition has moved to the center of critical theories and philosophical debates. Can these theories be of use for literary studies? This essay discusses the relation between literature and recognition in five parts: first, a comparison of two different perspectives on recognition that are especially suggestive for possible uses of the concept in literary studies; second, a discussion of the question of identity, since, in current debates, recognition is inextricably linked with questions of identity formation; third, an overview of some of the dominant motifs and patterns in narratives of recognition in order to highlight the amazing centrality of the theme in a wide range of literary texts and literary genres and to regain an awareness of an imaginary core of literature that has often been forgotten in the professionalization of literary studies; fourth, a discussion to what extent recognition can also be understood and described as an effect of the reading experience (and of aesthetic experience more generally); and fifth, a return to the starting question of the relation between literature and recognition, focusing on the issue of reciprocity and on the challenge provided by normative theories of recognition.

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American art before 1945 has traditionally been considered a minor chapter in the history of art. In order to change this perception, American art historians needed a narrative that could make a convincing case for these paintings' significance. German-speaking emigre scholars, who went to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s provided a crucial contribution by drawing on the Hegelianism in which they had been trained in Germany. This essay argues that their Hegelianism provided a central theoretical underpinning for interpretations of American art based on the idea of American Exceptionalism that have continued to dominate professional views of American art even in its recent revisionist phase.

From its beginning as an academic discipline in the post-WW II years, the study of American literature (Amerikanistik) tried to distinguish itself from approaches to the study of English literature (Anglistik) by the promise of a new methodology, conceptualized as a combination of literary and cultural analysis. In order to justify American Studies' institutionalization as a separate discipline, American literature had to be read as an expression of American society and culture, but this had to be done on the basis of a close reading of literary form as propagated by the New Criticism. In the first part, my essay describes the problems arising from this linkage of cultural and literary analysis, leading, in the end, to the increasingly implausible claim that the cultural insights of major American works reside in the very quality that distinguish them as literary texts according to the New Criticism, namely their organic unity. In the second part, this essay traces the consequences of a growing critique of new critical formalism and the foundational myths of American Exceptionalism that provided the basis for cultural readings of American literature. The claim that literary texts can and should best be understood as an expression of national character was submitted to a scathing critique by the new social movements and their insistence on the key role diversity plays in American culture. This has led to new theories of literary effect, a redefinition of the relation between reading and identity formation, and, more generally speaking, to a pluralization of interpretive approaches that have undermined any attempt to define methodological standards and norms of the field. In their place, 'powerful' rhetorical performances often remain the only criterion for distinguishing literary interpretations.

From its beginning as an academic discipline in the post-WW II years, the study of American literature (Amerikanistik) tried to distinguish itself from approaches to the study of English literature (Anglistik) by the promise of a new methodology, conceptualized as a combination of literary and cultural analysis. In order to justify American Studies' institutionalization as a separate discipline, American literature had to be read as an expression of American society and culture, but this had to be done on the basis of a close reading of literary form as propagated by the New Criticism. In the first part, my essay describes the problems arising from this linkage of cultural and literary analysis, leading, in the end, to the increasingly implausible claim that the cultural insights of major American works reside in the very quality that distinguish them as literary texts according to the New Criticism, namely their organic unity. In the second part, this essay traces the consequences of a growing critique of new critical formalism and the foundational myths of American Exceptionalism that provided the basis for cultural readings of American literature. The claim that literary texts can and should best be understood as an expression of national character was submitted to a scathing critique by the new social movements and their insistence on the key role diversity plays in American culture. This has led to new theories of literary effect, a redefinition of the relation between reading and identity formation, and, more generally speaking, to a pluralization of interpretive approaches that have undermined any attempt to define methodological standards and norms of the field. In their place, ›powerful‹ rhetorical performances often remain the only criterion for distinguishing literary interpretations.

In recent years, debates about the theory and method of American studies have gone in a new direction called transnational American studies. This transnational project can be seen as a response to an impasse in the analysis of power effects that prior approaches in American studies had reached. Since the search for subject positions that would not yet be subject to the power effects of interpellation had already led to border regions and intercultural spaces, why not go beyond the border altogether into transnational spaces like the Southern hemisphere, the transatlantic world, the Pacific Rim or others? In this sense, transnational studies can indeed serve as a useful antidote to analyses of American society and culture based on the idea of American exceptionalism. However, to describe the potential of an interpretive perspective does not yet tell us for what purpose this potential is being used. This essay, therefore, focuses on the actual uses that are being made of a transnational perspective in current American studies. It identifies two major interpretive paradigms—aesthetic transnationalism and political transnationalism—and analyzes their underlying assumptions and characteristic narratives over a wide range of studies in the humanities and social sciences. In the final section, the political agenda of these approaches is discussed by focusing on the field's narratives about non-national and transnational forms of identity construction.

Does It Mean When American Studies Is Transnational?" Indeed, it is important to clarify what we are actually referring to when we use the term transnational, because at present three different meanings are often used interchangeably: an institutional, a conceptual, and a methodological one. In its institutional aspect, the term transnationalism emphasizes the desirability of increased international cooperation and exchange, so that scholarship in American studies will escape the parochialism that is one of the legacies of American exceptionalism. Conceptually, the goal is no less than the redefinition of the field of American studies as transnational, transatlantic, transpacific, hemispheric, or even global studies. On the methodological level, the term transnationalism is usually employed to support claims for a comparative perspective that will help to broaden our interpretative options in American studies. All three meanings carry welcome associations of disciplinary progress. This may be one of the reasons why they are so easily conflated. However, one can obviously support increased international cooperation wholeheartedly without subscribing to a transnational or hemispheric research agenda or even without committing oneself to the priority of a comparative perspective. It is necessary, then, to keep these different aspects of the term transnational apart and consider their usefulness separately. In his presidential address, Emory Elliott puts special emphasis on the idea of international collaboration and exchange. As an American studies scholar who has been involved in many international activities, I have had numerous opportunities to work with Emory on American studies projects and to observe his strong dedication to international cooperation from close range.

Chapter 33 Reading Early American Fiction Winfried Fluck, Winfried FluckSearch for more papers by this author Winfried Fluck, Winfried FluckSearch for more papers by this author Book Editor(s):Susan Castillo, Susan CastilloSearch for more papers by this authorIvy Schweitzer, Ivy SchweitzerSearch for more papers by this author First published: 01 January 2005 https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996416.ch34 AboutPDFPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShareShare a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat A Companion to the Literatures of Colonial America RelatedInformation