During the 1960s and 1970s, the American-Renaissance construction lost a great deal of its credibility; but its underlying notion of representative literariness has retained at least some of its rhetorical appeal. It seems that the post-Kantian Whitmanian moment is most adaptable to contemporary US studies when it is phrased in terms of negativity, disruption, and ‘thirdness’. Whitman's image of American poetry as a ‘lawless music’ already implies the figure of the sublime, as a reference to a ‘real’ America that in contrast to the ‘genteel’ America is always in process and thus eludes conceptual definition (hence the necessity of voicing it in the pre-conceptual language of a poetic ‘song’ that embodies democratic practices by formal parallelism). Whitman's trope of aesthetic revolution as a means of negative mimesis reappears in the post-1960s idea that authentic America expresses itself in the ‘exploded form’ of the literary postor late-modern avant-garde (Mellard 1980: ix.). Accordingly, Brian McHale writes that ‘postmodernist fiction’ is culturally relevant as it ‘turns out to be mimetic after all’, an ‘imitation of reality’ that takes place ‘not so much at the level of its content, which is often manifestly un- or anti-realistic, as at the level of form’ (1987: 38). This idea of a desirable stylistic correspondence between high art and radical democracy has also been crucial to the discourse of experimental poetics since the 1960s.