Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ttngx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-17T12:19:01.180Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

American Studies and the Radical Tradition: From the 1930s to the 1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Get access

Extract

During the last years scholars in American Studies have become more conscious of the methodological problems of their work and have made wide-ranging use of the developments in various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. They have also discovered the importance of a critical perspective on the history of their “discipline.” But there clearly is the feeling of a loss of direction, an uneasiness about the purposes and objectives of American Studies. Often the appropriation of new methods and approaches was pursued under the old premises, and awareness of the history of the field reduced to a stereotypical periodization of “phases” characterized by dominant “key concepts” or “methods.” Whereas during the late 1960s and early 1970s the work of the so-called myth-symbol school (from H. N. Smith to Leo Marx) was criticized as methodologically unsound (by B. Kuklick) and politically conservative (or reactionary) (by Lasch et al.), more recently some of its work, particularly by Leo Marx and Richard Slotkin, has been condemned (by Kenneth Lynn) as “regressive,” “reductionist,” or simply “anti-American Studies.” This confusion about the origin, the objectives, the political implications, and the “legacy” of the early period of American Studies, from the 1930s to the 1960s, and the development and changes in literary and cultural criticism and in historiography during these decades is, it seems to me, one reason for the precarious relationship between “history” and “theory” in American Studies today.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

Author's note: Earlier versions of this paper were read at Rutgers State University, New Brunswick, N.J.; the Biennial Convention of the American Studies Association, Philadelphia; Columbia University, New York; the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; and the University of California, Berkeley. I thank Leo Marx for his careful reading of my essay and George Abbott White for sharing his knowledge of F. O. Matthiessen's work and life.

1. See, for example, Wise, Gene, American Historical Explanations: a Strategy for Grounded Inquiry (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1973, rev. ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980)Google Scholar; “Some Elementary Axioms for an American Culture Studies,” Prospects 4 (1979): 517–47Google Scholar; Mechling, Jay, “In Search of an American Ethnophysics,” in Luedtke, Luther S., ed., The Study of American Culture: Contemporary Conflicts (Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1977), pp. 241–77Google Scholar; “If They Can Build a Square Tomato: Notes Toward a Holistic Approach to Regional Studies,” Prospects 4 (1979): 5977Google Scholar; and the essays by Wise, Mechling, Karen Lystra, and Kelly, R. Gordon in the “On the Shoulders of Giants” section, Prospects 8 (1983): 158.Google Scholar

2. See Tate, Cecil F., The Search for a Method in American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Wise, Gene, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly 31 (1979): 293337CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and two excellent review essays, Bledstein, Burton J., “American Studies: A Life and Times,” Michigan Quarterly Review 19 (Summer 1980): 410–20Google Scholar, and Gunn, Giles, “American Studies as Cultural Criticism,” Yale Review 72 (Winter 1983): 296305.Google Scholar

3. Lynn, Kenneth S., “The Regressive Historians,” American Scholar 47 (Autumn 1978): 471500Google Scholar (on Leo Marx, 480–89); “Looking Backward” (rev. of Lears, No Place of Grace), New York Times Book Review, 01 10, 1982.Google Scholar

4. See my essay “American Studies-Beyond the Crisis?: Recent Redefinitions and the Meaning of Theory, History, and Practical Criticism,” Prospects 7 (1982): 53113.Google Scholar

5. Cf. Bell, Daniel, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976)Google Scholar; Graff, Gerald, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Goodheart, Eugene, Culture and the Radical Conscience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973)Google Scholar, and The Failure of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1978).Google Scholar

See, for example, Pells, Richard H., Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973)Google Scholar, and Dubofsky, Melvyn, “Not So ‘Turbulent Years’: Another Look at the American 1930's,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 24/1 (1979): 520.Google Scholar

6. Bercovitch, Sacvan, “The Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Ideology of American Consensus,” in Girgus, Sam B., ed., The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981) pp. 542, esp. p. 29Google Scholar; cf. The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar, esp. “Epilogue: The Symbol of America.”

7. Bercovitch, Sacvan, “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986): 635ff, 639, 642, 648, 650CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his “Afterword” in Bercovitch, Sacvan and Jehlen, Myra, eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 427, 431ff., 437ffGoogle Scholar. I am indebted to Sacvan Bercovitch for making a copy of his afterword available to me before publication of the book.

8. Two recent collections, in addition to Ideology and Classic American Literature, contain revisionist studies by literary scholars mostly related to the project of the new Cambridge History of American Literature: Michaels, Walter Benn and Pease, Donald E., eds., The American Renaissance Reconsidered, Selected Papers from the English Institute 1982–83, New Series, no. 9 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, and Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed., Reconstructing American Literary History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, which is dedicated “To the memory of F. O. Matthiessen and Perry Miller.” Two essays in The American Renaissance Reconsidered offer revisionary readings of Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Arac, Jonathan, “F. O. Matthiessen: Authorizing an American Renaissance”Google Scholar (pp. 90–112), and Pease, Donald E., “Moby Dick and the Cold War”Google Scholar (pp. 113–55). Both essays ask important questions and offer valuable suggestions, but unfortunately are seriously marred in their overall interpretive endeavor by a reductive reading of Matthiessen's work. These readings rely on the hostile and superficial “analysis” of Matthiessen's “politics” in O'Neill, William L.'s book A Better World: The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectual (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 173–83Google Scholar, that has been repeated, in a less polemical form, in Rosenberg, Karen's “Stalinism, Democracy, and Commitment: Remembering F. O. Matthiessen,” Harvard Magazine (0304 1983): 5154Google Scholar. Arac and Pease argue in terms of a crude distinction between “two Matthiessens” (Pease), collapse critical distinctions and historical dialectic (e.g., Pease's constant use of “became indistinguishable from”), and provide versions of a “repoliticization” that reify Matthiessen's understanding of “wholeness” (Arac) and then directly confront it with ideological constructs or “positions” such as the “Popular Front” (Arac) or the “Cold War” (Pease).

9. The importance of the World War II years is emphasized in Philip Gleason's recent review essay, “World War II and the Development of American Studies,” American Quarterly 36 (1984): 343–58Google Scholar. Cf. also Richard Pells's new book quoted in n. 13.

10. I discuss these questions more generally in another essay that focuses especially on the more recent work of Graff, Gerald, Lasch, Christopher, Bercovitch, Sacvan, Trachtenberg, Alan, Said, Edward W., and Jameson, Fredric: “Tradition, Discontinuity, and Counterdiscourse: Some Problems in American Radical Cultural Criticism since the 1960s,” in Lenz, Günter H. and Shell, Kurt L., eds., The Crisis of Modernity: Recent Critical Theories of Culture and Society in the United States and West Germany (Frankfurt: Campus; Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1986), pp. 191249.Google Scholar

11. Cf. Ryan, Michael, Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and “Literary Criticism and Cultural Science: Transformations in the Dominant Paradigm of Literary Study,” North Dakota Quarterly 51 (Winter 1983): 100–12.Google Scholar

12. See Jameson, Fredric, “The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis,” Critical Inquiry 4 (Spring 1978): 507–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the debate in Critical Inquiry 5 (Spring 1978): 401–22Google Scholar; Lentricchia, Frank, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).Google Scholar

13. Pells, Richard H., The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: A merican Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), pp. 149ff.Google Scholar

14. Matthiessen, F. O., From the Heart of Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), p. 13.Google Scholar

15. Matthiessen, F. O., American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. ix, xvGoogle Scholar; rev. of Arvin, Whitman (1938)Google Scholar, rpt. in The Responsibilities of the Critic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 217.Google Scholar

16. Matthiessen, , American Renaissance, p. xviiGoogle Scholar; The Responsibilities of the Critic, esp. pp. 189–99Google Scholar (rev. of Hicks, The Great Tradition).

17. Matthiessen, F. O., The Achievement of T.S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935, rev. and enl. 1958), p. vii.Google Scholar

18. See, for example, Matthiessen, , American Renaissance, p. ix.Google Scholar

19. Quoted in George Abbott White's important essay “Ideology and Literature: American Renaissance and F.O. Matthiessen,” Tri-Quarterly 23–24 (1972): 447.Google Scholar

20. American Renaissance, pp. xv, xGoogle Scholar. Matthiessen, F. O., Henry James: The Major Phase (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. xiv.Google Scholar

21. Matthiessen, F. O., “A Teacher Takes His Stand: The President of the Teachers' Union Contributes a Harvard Credo,” The Harvard Progressive 5 (09 1940): 13.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., 14; cf. American Renaissance, p. xvi.Google Scholar

23. American Renaissance, pp. 78, 307, 312, 313Google Scholar (on “allegory today”), 336, 546, 589, 629ff.

24. See McDowell, Tremaine, American Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948)Google Scholar; Smith, Henry Nash, “The American Scholar Today,” Southwest Review 48 (Summer 1963): 191–99Google Scholar; Marx, Leo, “The American Scholar Today,” Commentary 32 (07 1961): 4853Google Scholar. Cf. also Smith, 's early “Emerson's Problem of Vocation: A Note on ‘The American Scholar,’” New England Quarterly 12 (03 1939): 5267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. See Sweezy, Paul M., “Labor and Political Activities,” in Sweezy, Paul M. and Huberman, Leo, eds., F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), pp. 6175.Google Scholar

26. Matthiessen, , “Teacher,” p. 12Google Scholar; From the Heart of Europe, p. 194.Google Scholar

27. Matthiessen, F. O., “The Humanities in War Time,” The 1943 Harvard Album, p. 34.Google Scholar

28. American Renaissance, pp. 134, 313–15.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., pp. xivff.

30. Ibid., pp. xvff.

31. Matthiessen, F. O., “Needed: Organic Connection of Theory and Practice,” Monthly Review 2 (19501951): 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. See Sklar, Robert, “American Studies and the Realities of America,” American Quarterly 22 (1970): 597605CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Berkhofer, Robert F., “Clio and the Culture Concept: Some Impressions of a Changing Relationship in American Historiography,” Social Science Quarterly 53 (1972): 297320.Google Scholar

33. Kazin, Alfred, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), pp. 485ff., 518Google Scholar; Susman, Warren I., “The Thirties,” in Coben, Stanley and Ratner, Lorman, eds., The Development of an American Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 179218Google Scholar. Susman's important essays have been collected (and supplemented) in his book Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984).Google Scholar

34. American Renaissance, pp. 589, cf. 543Google Scholar; 630, 542, 633, 635, cf. xiii; 593, 616, 633, 651, 647, 634, 654. Matthiessen refers to Constance Rourke (p. xix and note p. 637). Cf. Rubin, John Shelley, Constance Rourke and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).Google Scholar

35. Cf. Brooks, Van Wyck, “What Is Primary Literature?Yale Review 31 (19311932): 3437Google Scholar, and the “Irresponsibles”-debate (MacLeish).

36. “The Humanities in War Time” p. 36.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., pp. 35, 37; The Responsibilities of the Critic, p. 193Google Scholar. Cf. Stern, Frederick C., F. O. Matthiessen: Christian Socialist as Critic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 95ff.Google Scholar

38. Cf. Stern's study; Gunn, Giles B., F. O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Ruland, Richard, The Rediscovery of American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 209–73.Google Scholar

39. “A Teacher Takes His Stand,” p. 12ffGoogle Scholar.; “The Humanities in War Time,” p. 37Google Scholar; American Renaissance, p. 336Google Scholar; The Responsibilities of the Critic, p. 198.Google Scholar

40. Henry James, pp. 80, 151Google Scholar. Cf. the more explicit earlier version of the conclusion to the book quoted in Reiko Maekawa, “F. O. Matthiessen: After American Renaissance” (doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1985), p. 152. I thank George Abbott White for bringing the thesis to my attention. Both Gunn and Stern extensively treat the role of religion in Matthiessen's thinking.

41. Wise, Gene, A merican Historical ExplanationsGoogle Scholar; Curti, Merle, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1943; 3rd ed., 1964), p. xiGoogle Scholar; cf. Skotheim, Robert Allen, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (Princeton: Princeton Universitp Press, 1966)Google Scholar, and Higham, John, Writing American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

42. Preface, , The Growth of American Thought, 1951 ed., p. xviiiGoogle Scholar; Introduction, 1943, p. xvi, 1964 ed. Cf. Skotheim, , American Intellectual Histories and Historians, p. 149.Google Scholar

43. Ware, Caroline F., ed., The Cultural Approach to History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940)Google Scholar. Cf. my essay “American Studies-Beyond the Crisis?,” pp. 8890.Google Scholar

44. “Educating Clio,” American Historical Review 45 (1940): 505.Google Scholar

45. See Brinton, Crane's review in Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1942): 228–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. The Cultural Approach to History, pp. 911Google Scholar, hereafter with page number quoted in the text.

47. Gutman, Herbert G., Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Knopf, 1976), pp. 378.Google Scholar

48. Matthiessen, F. O., From the Heart of Europe, p. 57.Google Scholar

49. The Responsibilities of the Critic, p. 9ff.Google Scholar

50. Ibid., pp. 10ff.

51. Ibid., pp. 14, 6, 7, 5, 8.

52. Ibid., pp. 6, 8, 10.

53. Ibid., p. 13.

54. Ibid., p. 11. Cf. his note “Marxism and Literature,” Monthly Review 4 (19521953): 398400.Google Scholar

55. From the Heart of Europe, p. 79.Google Scholar

56. Ibid., p. 83, cf. 89.

57. Ibid., pp. 90, 177.

58. Ibid., p. 90.

59. Ibid., p. 57, and The Responsibilities of the Critic, p. 7Google Scholar. Cf. the quotation from Malraux in American Renaissance, p. xv.Google Scholar

60. From the Heart of Europe, p. 44Google Scholar (my emphasis).

61. Matthiessen, F. O., Theodore Dreiser (New York: William Sloane Assoc, 1951), pp. 4, 7, 59, 65, 83.Google Scholar

62. Ibid., pp. 85, 120, 129, 135, 157ff, 190ff, 236–38.

63. Ibid., pp. 219, cf. 201, 206ff.

64. Ibid., p. 240; for the comparison to Whitman cf. esp. pp. 239ff.

65. Ibid., p. 250. Cf. Matthiessen's statement in the 1947 introduction to The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: “I believe that it is possible to accept the ‘radical imperfection’ of man, and yet to be a political radical as well, to be aware that no human society can be perfect, and yet to hold that the proposition that ‘all men are created equal’ demands adherence from a Christian no less than from a democrat” (p. ix). Cf. Gunn, , F. O. Matthiessen, pp. xxi, 157Google Scholar; Stern, , F. O. Matthiessen, pp. 18, 31, 200, 240, 242Google Scholar, but with a stronger emphasis on unity/totally unified sensibility, cf. pp. x, 18, 39, 43, 103.

66. From the Heart of Europe, p. 193.Google Scholar

67. Howe, Irving, “The Sentimental Fellow-Traveling of F. O. Matthiessen,” Partisan Review 15 (1948): 1125–29Google Scholar, cf. 1256; cf. Howe's letter to Matthiessen quoted in Stern, , F. O. Matthiessen, pp. 19ff.Google Scholar

68. Trilling, Lionel, “Literature and Power,” Kenyon Review 2 (1940): 439, cf. 442.Google Scholar

69. Trilling, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking, 1950)Google Scholar, quoted from Doubleday Anchor Books ed., 1957, p. xiif.

70. From the Heart of Europe, p. 50.Google Scholar

71. Read, Conyers, “The Social Responsibility of the Historian,” American Historical Review 55 (1950): 284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

72. The Liberal Imagination, pp. 179, 181Google Scholar; Trilling, Lionel, “The Sense of the Past,” Partisan Review 9 (1942): 231ff., 240Google Scholar; “The Situation in American Writing,” Partisan Review 6, no. 5 (1939): 108–12Google Scholar.

73. The Liberal Imagination, p. 181Google Scholar; “The Sense of the Past,” 234.Google Scholar

74. “The Sense of the Past,” 233Google Scholar; The Liberal Imagination, p. 199.Google Scholar

75. The Liberal Imagination, pp. 191, 7.Google Scholar

76. Trilling, Lionel, “Parrington, Mr. Smith and Reality,” Partisan Review 7, no. 1 (1940): 2440Google Scholar, and “Dreiser and the Liberal Mind,” The Nation, 04 20, 1946, 467–72Google Scholar. The essays do not contain the paragraphs on the “dialectical theory of culture.” “Politics of culture”: The Liberal Imagination, p. ixGoogle Scholar, cf. 9. Trilling defines “dialectic” as “a developing series of statements” and “another word for form” in “Contemporary American Literature in Its Relation to Ideas,” American Quarterly 1 (1949): 195208Google Scholar, rpt. in The Liberal Imagination.

77. The Liberal Imagination, p. 7.Google Scholar

78. Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), pp. 10ff., 15, 27ff., 206ff., 214, 224, 293, 302.Google Scholar

79. Ibid., pp. 204ff., 220, 228, 236ff.

80. Ibid., p. 32.

81. Ibid., pp. 14, 20ff.

82. Ibid., pp. 5, 285, 287, 305, 32. Cf. Hartz's later book The Founding of New Societies (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964)Google Scholar. Cf. Dorothy Ross's important essay “The Liberal Tradition Revisited and the Republican Tradition Addressed,” in Higham, John and Conkin, Paul K., eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 116–31.Google Scholar

83. The Liberal Tradition in America, pp. 306, 308.Google Scholar

84. Ibid., pp. 14, 226.

85. Susman, Warren I., “History and the American Intellectual: Uses of a Usable Past,” American Quarterly 16 (1964): 243, 263.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

86. Marx, Leo, “Comment”Google Scholar on Woodward, C. Vann's lecture “The Aging of America,” American Historical Review 82 (1977): 597.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

87. Ward, John William, “History and the Concept of Culture,” Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 317.Google Scholar

88. Cf. Trachtenberg, Alan, ed., Critics of Culture: Literature and Society in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: John Wiley, 1976).Google Scholar

89. Modern Monthly 2 (10 1950)Google Scholar. Edited as a book by Sweezy, Paul M. and Huberman, Leo, F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950): A Collective Portrait (New York: Henry Schumann, 1950), pp. 59ff.Google Scholar

90. Marx, Leo, “The Teacher,”Google Scholaribid., pp. 39ff. Cf. also Lynn, Kenneth S.'s later portrait “Teaching: F. O. Matthiessen,” American Scholar 46 (1977): 8693.Google Scholar

91. Marx, Leo, “Double Consciousness and the Cultural Politics of F. O. Matthiessen,” Monthly Review 34 (02 1983): 3456, esp. 40, 42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

92. Lydenberg, John, ed., Political Activism and the Academic Conscience: The Harvard Experience 1936–1941Google Scholar, A Symposium at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Dec. 5 and 6, 1975 (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 1977), esp. pp. 31–42 (Marx), 43–54 (Smith), 84–86 (Marx), 92–94 (Marx), 95–98 (Smith). Cf. also Smith's various essays and statements against McCarthyism and so-called loyalty oaths in the state universities, for example, “Legislatures, Communists, and State Universities,” Pacific Spectator 3 (1949): 329–37Google Scholar, and rev. of The Year of Oath: The Fight for Academic Freedom at the University of California, American Quarterly 2 (1950): 372–75.Google Scholar

93. Smith, Henry Nash, “American Emotional and Imaginative Attitudes Towards the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains 1803–1850,” Ph.D. dissertation, (Harvard University, 1940).Google Scholar

94. Smith, Henry, “The Dilemma of Agrarianism,” Southwest Review 19 (04 1934): 215–32.Google Scholar

95. Ibid., p. 231.

96. Smith, Henry Nash, “The West as an Image of the American Past,” University of Kansas City Review 18 (Autumn 1951): 29, 33.Google Scholar

97. Ibid., p. 35.

98. Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The A merican West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950)Google Scholar, quoted from Vintage Paperback edition (New York, n.d.), pp. 3ff., 182ff., 291–305. Cf. Smith's introduction to his important anthology Popular Culture and Industrialism, 1865–1890, Documents in American Civilization Series (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1967).Google Scholar

99. Cf. Burke, Kenneth, “Ideology and Myth,” Accent 7 (Summer 1947): 195205Google Scholar; Mannheim, Karl, Ideology and Utopia, trans. (New York, 1949)Google Scholar; Merton, Robert K.'s “rediscovery”Google Scholar of the concept of ideology in his essays “Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge” (1941)Google Scholar and “The Sociology of Knowledge” (1945)Google Scholar, rpt. in his Social Theory and Social Structure, enl. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1968), pp. 543–62, 510–42.Google Scholar

100. Smith, , Virgin Land, p. 138.Google Scholar

101. Ibid., pp. 139, 178ff., 223ff, 240, 283, 301. Noble, David W., Historians Against History: The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing Since 1830 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965).Google Scholar

102. Susman, Warren, “The Useless Past: American Intellectuals and the Frontier Thesis: 1910–1930,” Bucknell Review 11 (03 1963): 120.Google Scholar

103. Virgin Land, pp. 232ff., 238ff.Google Scholar

104. Ibid., p. 217, cf. p. 227 on the “timelessness” of “myth.”

105. Ibid., pp. 246ff., 251, 261, 282. Cf. Smith's later book Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. Ch. 1 defines the “issues” in relation to “Matthiessen's program” in American Renaissance.

106. Virgin Land, p. 303 (my emphasis).Google Scholar

107. Ibid., p. 304.

108. Marx, Leo, “Hawthorne and Emerson: Studies in the Impact of the Machine Technology Upon the American Writer,” Ph.D. dissertation, (Harvard University, 1950), pp. 11ff.Google Scholar

109. Ibid., pp. 37ff. and Appendix B; Bowron, Bernard, Marx, Leo, and Rose, Arnold, “Literature and Covert Culture,” in Kwiat, Joseph J. and Turpie, M. C., eds., Studies in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), pp. 8495.Google Scholar

110. “Hawthorne and Emerson,” p. 12.Google Scholar

111. Ibid., pp. 20, 25, 28.

112. Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 3ff.Google Scholar

113. Marx, Leo, “The Machine in the Garden,” New England Quarterly Review 29(1956): 27 n.2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

114. The Machine in the Garden, pp. 130, 255, 4, 236, 28, 229.Google Scholar

115. See Trachtenberg, , “The American Way of Life,” The Nation, 07 19, 1965, 4245.Google Scholar

116. The Machine in the Garden, p. 73.Google Scholar

117. Ibid., pp. 342ff., 347; for more extensive comments on Trilling's critical method see Marx's early essay “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn,” American Scholar 22 (19521953): 423–40.Google Scholar

118. The Machine in the Garden, pp. 7, 141–43.Google Scholar

119. Ibid., pp. 226, 265, 302, 318, 364ff.

120. Cf. “American Institutions and Ecological Ideals,” Science 170 (11 27, 1970): 945–52Google Scholar; “Susan Sontag's ‘New Left’ Pastoral: Notes on Revolutionary Pastoralism in America,” Tri-Quarterly 23–24 (1972): 552–75Google Scholar; “American Literary Culture and the Fatalistic View of Technology,” Alternative Futures (Spring 1980): 4570Google Scholar; “The Puzzle of Anti-Urbanism in Classic American Literature,” in Jaye, Michael C. and Watts, Ann Chalmers, eds., Literature and the Urban Experience (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981), pp. 6380.Google Scholar

121. Cf. Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publ., 1982).Google Scholar

122. Marx, Leo, “Notes on the Culture of the New Capitalism,” Monthly Review 11 (0708 1959): 111–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

123. Ibid., pp. 111, 112, 113, 116.

124. Ibid., pp. 113, 116.

125. Potter, David M., People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), pp. 168, 173, 176.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

126. Marx, Leo, “The American Scholar Today,”Google Scholar and “‘The Long Revolution’ and the British Left,” Commentary 32 (12 1961): 517–23Google Scholar, a review essay of Raymond Williams's book.

127. The Machine in the Garden, p. 217.Google Scholar