The American scholar claims for himself the forgotten wastes and undisclosed lands. Like a character from Cooper, he travels from the walls and academes into the burnings of a prairie, thence to return and publish his message, discovering the horrid and yet holy measures of controls, the ways of fencing the wilds, and the singular terrors of his mind. He demands not the allegory Bunyan offered, nor the timeless locations Bunyan portrayed, but that allegory be stripped, that dream and its terror be held to place, located exactly where the scholar stands. He demands a material, measurement, place—somewhere and sometime in which to describe his crisis. He demands a particular machine, some object foreign enough, lawful enough, against which to measure himself and then destroy himself unto another life. He demands a compulsion to declare compulsion is fatal. He builds control and provides structure and works thereby his irony, tearing apart his devices, declaring his strangeness, his living out of place, his sense of himself as removed, of himself as a holy or at least as a special seer. He conflates history to the point of himself, places a local or even a world economy within himself, locates in his own psychomachia the material history of his culture. His expression of history, whatever the material or “artifact” claimed, is psychological, for the generative force, the historical explanation, is one of terror and of terror's control, of building not from innate designs or material exigencies or clashes of class or movements of world and regional economies but from the terrors of a bewilderment, from horrors to be externalized in the uniqueness of the American place—for Cotton Mather, Satan's home, the most vile and holy of deserts.

Since its beginning, the American Studies community has been remarkably uneasy about the role and meaning theoretical thinking about its premises and objectives should have in its work. Even more than the individual disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, the American Studies movement has again and again felt compelled to justify its existence and its aims, to develop a “method” or “philosophy” for its pursuits. But these attempts at theory more often than not have resulted in a glorification of practical or substantive work, or in an identification of its rationale with a few books by its major scholars. In the most recent time of “crisis,” the traditional opposition of “theory” to “practice” seems to have been confirmed, in one way or another, not only on a national scale but in its international perspective. In a recent interview, Henry Nash Smith, using two articles by young German scholars as a starting point, endorsed the old view that “practice is much more important” in America and that, “almost by instinct, in this country we are less, far less theoretical than the Germans.” It should be mentioned that, ironically, contributions to a theoretical definition of American Studies became far more numerous in the United States just when the younger German scholars began to turn from theoretical debates to substantive work, which shows that Smith's “instinctual” distinction actually prevents us from realizing the fundamental historical differences in the development and the significance of the interaction of theory and practice in the two countries.

In recent years American Studies scholars have shown a growing interest in combining social-science methods with humanistic concerns. One aspect of this development has been an increased interest in anthropological-style fieldwork or ethnography. “Ethnography” can be broadly defined as the “work of describing a culture,” but in anthropology it usually consists of an attempt to describe the existing culture of a particular group or institution through the use of firsthand participant observation in its social life and intensive in-depth interviews with individual members. Traditionally, anthropological fieldwork has also connoted description of “other cultures”—often non-Western tribal cultures. But the ethnographic approach has long been used to study modern Western society, and over the last fifteen years it has been widely used to study subcultures in contemporary America. During the same period it has come into increasing use in American Studies as well.

“There's a Haynes-Cooper catalog in every farmer's kitchen,” remarks a Wisconsin woman in Fanny Herself, Edna Ferber's 1917 novel depicting the Chicago mail-order industry. “The Bible's in the parlor, but they keep the H.C. book in the room where they live.” Harry Crews, in his 1978 autobiography of his boyhood in Bacon County, Georgia, recalls a similar centrality accorded the secular “Big Book” or “Farmer's Bible” in his family's tenant-farmer shanty. The highest form of entertainment for him was to thumb through the Sears, Roebuck catalog with his black friend Willalee and make up fantasies about the models on the book's pages. Writes Crews, “Without that catalog our childhood would have been radically different. The federal government ought to strike a medal for Sears, Roebuck Company for sending all those catalogs to farming families, for bringing all that color and all that mystery and all that beauty into the lives of country people.”

The following three essays were read as papers at the biennial meeting of the American Studies Association held in Minneapolis in September 1979. The panel went under the conventional rubric of “Criticism, Biography, and Popular Culture,” but its main theme is probably best conveyed by V. P. Bynack's title, “Signs of the Times.” All three essays assault traditional methods in American Studies. Their tone is iconoclastic; their defiance, supported by a roll call of new authorities: not Lovejoy but Saussure, not Miller and Matthiessen but Geertz and Kuhns. Andere Zeiten, andere Lieder. Just what was being affirmed remains hazy, even in retrospect; but it made for an extraordinarily lively discussion, and signs are that the discussion will continue, in one form or another, for some time to come.

In The Song of the Lark (Willa Cather's third novel, published in 1915), Thea Kronberg goes to one of her father's regular prayer meetings in Moonstone, Colorado, and hears an old woman who “never missed a Wednesday night [and] came all the way up from the depot settlement.” Cather describes the woman this way:

She always wore a black crocheted “fascinator” over her thin white hair, and she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad terminology. She had six sons in the service of different railroads, and she always prayed “for the boys on the road, who know not at what moment they may be cut off. When, in Thy divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may they, O our Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to Eternity.” She used to speak, too, of “the engines that race with death”; and though she looked so old and little when she was on her knees, and her voice was so shaky, her prayers had a thrill of speed and danger in them; they made one think of the deep black cañons, the slender trestles, the pounding trains. Thea liked to look at her sunken eyes that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves, much too long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over the other. Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks are worn by water. There are many ways of describing that colour of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or like any of the things it is said to be like. That brownness and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old human creatures, who have worked hard and who have always been poor.

American Studies has traditionally been suspicious of biography. Early works of the myth-and-symbol school, such as John William Ward's Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age, recognized the existence of a radical disjunction between public images and private realities, and focused almost exclusively on the images. Recent scholarship suggests that the myth-and-symbol school did not go far enough, and that its recent critics have erred in their attacks. Using biography as a focus, this essay will argue that in cultural studies there is no private reality and that documents are necessarily misused when regarded as clues to the existence of other lives. Rather, all documents are so separated from their reference points, or signifieds, that they are best studied as fields of relations and displacements.

The topic “Criticism, Biography, and Popular Culture” raises issues that epitomize current intellectual possibilities and problems. As Emerson said of his own time in “The American Scholar,” this is a moment when “the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of men are being searched by fear and hope.… This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” If anyone's “energies” are being “searched by fear and hope” today, it's because we face a similar situation. The two preceding essays brought to bear in rapid succession two historically different models of how the world works. These models, which I will follow Fredric Jameson in calling the “organic” model of the nineteenth century and the “linguistic” model of the twentieth, imply two different versions of the character and status of language, two different versions of what literature is, two different versions of what the self is, and two different versions of what we could mean by saying that we use these things to study American “culture.”

The preceding essays by David Stineback, David Nye, and V. P. Bynack argue that there is a crisis in our discipline and proceed to make, or at least imply, suggestions for the future of American Studies.

1. We have failed to do justice to authors like Willa Cather; we have, in fact, not even approached the achievement of popular newspaper reviewers.

2. We have indulged in the old “pretense of biography” and overlooked the most significant sources while looking for such dubious entities as the one called, for example, “Thomas Edison.”

3. We are incurable nineteenth-century organicists and don't even know that we should know that we don't know what we are talking about.

One of the great intellectual debates in the nineteenth century in the United States concerned the American preoccupation with European culture and, perhaps more important, the continued use of European critical standards to judge the quality of indigenous American culture. There is a great deal of truth in Walt Whitman's lament above, for a truly American high culture had yet to emerge, and American popular culture was still very much in its formative stages and under the influence of European trends (witness the enormous popularity of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott). Only in the realm of folk culture had a rich, and by now Americanized, tradition emerged in the period before the Civil War. This is an interesting point, for after nearly two hundred years in the New World, American folk culture (especially folk humor) was now quite independent, whereas American high culture was still beholden to Europe for its inspiration and ideals. This clearly demonstrates that folk culture emerges from an affinity with everyday cultural expression and is closely identified with its creators, whereas high culture is based on a rigid set of (sometimes arbitrary) standards, which can be imposed from outside, with little regard for community cultural needs. Thus, the existing folklore was the result of the unique American experience, and while elements of the older European folk cultures were still visible, these had undergone the transformations caused by a new environment and were now fully integrated into the “frontier” culture of the new land.

Professor Cornelius Felton of Harvard University, reviewing Emerson's Essays, First Series in 1841, predicted that self-reliance “if acted upon, would overturn society, and resolve the world into Chaos.” Since then a long line of Emerson critics have shared Felton's concern over Emerson's radicalism. The more temperate modern version of Felton's charge is that Emerson “brought to full consciousness … the antinomianism latent in the thought of his Puritan forbears.” According to these critics, Emerson is the spiritual descendant of Anne Hutchinson. Removed outside the constraints of seventeenth-century dogma and liberated by Romantic thought, he gives free play to the antinomianism she so cautiously denied. Antinomianism, in this view, lends unity to the disparate writers of the American Renaissance and continuity to the whole of early American literature.

No scene in Faulkner is more compelling than the one that transpires on a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon” in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, toward the end of the first decade of this century. Quentin Compson sits with Miss Rosa Coldfield in a “dim airless room” still called “the office because her father called it that,” and listens to Miss Rosa tell her version of the story of the “demon” Sutpen and his plantation, Sutpen's Hundred. As she talks “in that grim haggard amazed voice”—“vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand”—the 22-year-old Mississippi youth discovers he is hearing not Miss Rosa but the voices of “two separate Quentins.” One voice is that of the “Quentin preparing for Harvard in the South, the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous baffled ghosts.” The other voice is that of the Quentin “who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South the same as she [Miss Rosa] was.” The two Quentins talk “to one another in the long silence of notpeople, in notlanguage: It seems that this demon—his name was Sutpen—(Colonel Sutpen)—Colonel Sutpen. Who came out of nowhere and without warning upon the land with a band of strange niggers and built a plantation”.

In the face of William Carlos Williams's achievement in Spring and All (1923), In the American Grain (1925), Paterson (1946–58), and The Desert Music (1954), among other acclaimed works, readers must find it inconceivable that the young and poetically misguided Williams could have continued to labor at the genteel verse of his medical-school and interning years (1906–9). When a growing number of distinguished critics find Williams's place in twentieth-century poetics to be “revolutionary,” it seems pointless even to imagine the young Williams perennially separating his life from his vague “ideals” of beauty and ethical purpose, and thus going on to become, in maturity, another Joyce Kilmer. To date, scholars of Williams's early work, especially James Breslin and Rod Townley, have revealed the psychological change by which Williams's repressed self became free “to re-enact fully the process of release and reformation that Whitman had started” and have shown, as well, that between 1909 and 1919 Williams underwent an “agonizing process of cultural divestment” as he gradually shed his belief that poetry was a sacred trust of moral idealism and noble purposes couched in truth and beauty. Sloughing off his post-Victorian ways, and immersed in the responsibilities of marriage, mortgage, parenthood, and medical practice, Williams seems inevitably to have been prepared to “weld his artistic and psychological allegiance to the cult of experience.”

Despite its European provenance in a romantic revitalization of surviving vestiges of the medieval past, the gothic novel has a long and honorable New World history. It was one of the first fictional forms borrowed from the burgeoning eighteenth-century English novel. Along with a few other newly transplanted varieties of fiction—for example, the sentimental novel, the picaresque adventure, and the travel narrative—it also thrived in the newly independent Republic. That first flourishing is attested to by such noteworthy early American Gothics as Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) and Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811)—the former one of the best novels of the period, the latter one of the most popular. The form then reached what was surely an artistic apogee when, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne labored in its haunted gardens. This full flowering has in our time become, to alter the metaphor, a flood. In drugstore and supermarket, wherever inexpensive paperbacks are sold, book racks abound with almost identical volumes, their “covers featuring … gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns.” Clearly, Americans still have an affinity for castles in literature, particularly if those castles ominously loom over young, beautiful, vulnerable heroines.

The two versions of The Abduction of Daniel Boone's Daughter by the Indians by Charles Wimar (1828–62) reveal a remarkable alteration in conception in the span of only two years. The earlier version (Fig. 1), painted in 1853, is a rather unimaginative picture rooted in an overworked tradition. In 1855 Wimar produced a much more original painting (Fig. 2), which reflected an enlightened approach to the myths of the American West. Although the two works were painted while Wimar was studying at the Düsseldorf Academy, he gained his knowledge of Indians from firsthand experience while growing up in the frontier city of Saint Louis, to which he had emigrated from Germany at the age of fifteen. Wimar devoted the bulk of his oeuvre to Indian subjects, mostly portraits and genre scenes. A narrative subject dealing with a specific and, by that time, legendary figure such as Daniel Boone's daughter was atypical for Wimar. By probing the background and sources of this theme, both literary and pictorial, one can bring to light the aspects of frontier mythology embodied in these paintings.

The Union and Confederate soldiers who moved south from Gettysburg in July 1863 left behind thousands of fallen comrades, a devastated Pennsylvania landscape, and the basis for one of our most powerful patriotic legends. Almost at once the battle was recognized not merely as a crucial Union victory but also as an event with broader cultural significance. In its bloody way the engagement clearly seemed to have enhanced America's position in the wider sweep of Western experience. “Waterloo Eclipsed!!” announced a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer three days after the fighting ended. On the same day, a New York Times correspondent, whose eldest son had been mortally wounded at Gettysburg, assured his readers that “there never was better fighting since Thermopylae.” In the years that followed, such comparisons—which contributed to national self-importance—were often repeated, as Americans demonstrated an almost insatiable interest in the three-day struggle and in Abraham Lincoln's two-minute address at the consecration of the Soldiers' National Cemetery.

The following photographs have been selected from a group of twenty-five prints by Doris Ulmann documenting the original Broadway production of Hall Johnson's musical drama Run, Little Chillun, which opened at the Lyric Theatre on March 1, 1933. The pictures provide an unusual record of the interest in regional American cultures and the resulting stylized revival of traditional regional customs characteristic of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Run, Little Chillun, named after a famous spiritual and based on the conflict between Christian and pagan religious forces in a small Southern town, was the most important black example of the folk-theater movement of the period. Doris Ulmann, a fashionable portrait photographer of New York's moneyed literary and scientific intelligentsia, was also—and more importantly—passionately devoted to documenting isolated rural communities and the efforts to preserve their cultural heritage. Despite her intense interest in the theater, this collection is probably her only extensive series based on a theatrical production that has been preserved, and it may be the only one she ever made. The collection derives from the estate of Oliver M. Sayler, the press representative for the production.

In different ways, James Agee and Lacy Wright questioned the importance and influence of public schooling. Learning continues beyond, and perhaps despite, formal school attendance. This seems like common sense. Schools can also be harmful and destructive to children and society. This, too, seems clear. The trend in recent decades, however, has been to extend the years of formal schooling, putting more and more emphasis on degrees and credentials as passports to the future. What this will mean to our children and grandchildren is hard to say. But how we got to this point is rather clear. Simply, schools have been the most visible manifestation of the continued development of age grading in American society since Independence, and age grading has been a vital component of what we broadly term “modernization.”

The Historical study of the American character has been hobbled for several reasons, many of which are summarized by David Stannard in “American Historians and the Idea of National Character: Some Problems and Prospects.” Stannard emphasizes that America has always been too complex a sociocultural system to have produced a uniform national character or a typical personality. He notes that cultural anthropologists have not found psychological uniformity even in small, preliterate communities. If scholars would study the variety of the nation's psychological characteristics instead—if they would search for the modal personality (most frequently occurring type) and the distribution of other personality types rather than only the basic personality type—then, at least in Stannard's opinion, they would avoid oversimplification, the most serious conceptual error. But even this more realistic approach retains methodological problems that are so serious that he suggests historians concentrate on understanding “deeds and events” and leave the study of national character and characteristics to the social and behavioral scientists. (Philosophers of history might deny that the study of deeds and events is less troublesome than the study of national character, but that is another matter.)