When the American Studies Association chose “Boundaries of American Culture” as the theme and San Diego as the site of its 1985 biennial convention, it made a particularly appropriate match between theme and site. Seen from my hotel balcony in a hazy autumnal glow, San Diego appeared a boundary city in at least three senses of relevance to the Association's work. First, lying at the border of the United States and Mexico, it hinted at the rich possibilities available to an American Studies willing to reach imaginatively beyond national boundaries, both north and south, toward a genuinely pan-American studies. Second, as a three-block walk to the beach from the convention hotel amply confirmed, San Diego borders what several commentators have called “the Mediterranean of the future”–a major arena of the globe too long and too much neglected by most Americans and Americanists. It was stimulating to welcome to the convention distinguished visitors from a dozen Asian and South Pacific countries, and more than a few speakers expressed the hope that such interaction would significantly further the comparativist and internationalist perspectives that they believed increasingly incumbent upon a nonparochial American Studies. Certainly the heartening presence in San Diego of both long-time and new colleagues from Europe, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and the South Pacific reflected a slowly but steadily growing impulse in the Association, a concrete dramatization of the premise that ideas and values, not to mention trade and power, do not stop at a nation's borders, although they may be often slowed down or even transformed at those borders.

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.

On November 19, 1911, Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952), the “photohistorian” of American Indians, wrote to his friend Edmond S. Meany, Professor of History at the University of Washington, about his latest triumphs. “Dear Brother Meany,” he began, “I think we can say that my lecture entertainment ‘arrived’. I wish you could have been present at the Carnegie Hall affair. The tremendous auditorium was filled to overflowing, a sea of people from the stage to the very ‘sky’ itself.” Curtis had been introduced by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Director of the American Museum of Natural History; just before they stepped into view Osborn looked through the foliage and, according to Curtis, had remarked, ‘“Do you realise that that is almost an appalling audience, and one that few men in their life-time have the privilege of facing?’” “I think,” Curtis added, “he was a little nervous on his own account and slightly so on mine, [but] rather than causing nervousness … it gave me courage and I was absolutely certain of myself after my first two words.” “Osborn's voice,” Curtis explained, “lacks the carrying power and his slight nervousness meant a rather halting introduction. This was evidently greatly to my advantage, as the minute I spoke I reached the farther-most corners and my voice caught and held the people.”

Three years after the start of the Great Depression, and shortly after A Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency, Terry Ramsaye, editor of the motion picture industry's major trade journal, wrote an editorial entitled “New Deal, Superman and Today.” No doubt many readers thought the world had turned upside down. For years civic reformers had attacked the movies for incarnating the dangers of city life: consumption, class mixing, and a sexual revolution. Now Ramsaye assumed the critic's stance, seeing hard times as divine retribution for the industry's folly. Atop the editorial pulpit, he condemned the Hollywood producers as equal to the monopolists whose speculation and grandiose illusions brought about the stock market crash in 1929. Even more dangerous, film producers spread lavish ideals through the powerful medium of sound films, which were displayed in sumptuous theatres that corrupted public life. After three years of bankruptcies and theatre closings, Ramsaye saw a New Deal pointing the way toward business and cultural reform. Like an old-fashioned revivalist, he then exhorted Hollywood to shed the foreignstyled theatre and create models more in touch with national traditions, “more a part of the town and less something that was imposed by outside Supermen.”

During the decade prior to World War II, James Guy (1910–1983) achieved a substantial reputation in the New York art world. He was one of the earliest American exponents of surrealism, adopting it years before the abstract expressionists responded to the aesthetic. Guy used surrealism as a vehicle for social criticism, creating some of the most pungent attacks on the societal ills of his day. The Depression was a period when many American artists became socially and politically concerned and viewed their art as an instrument of change. Most of these artists have been labeled social realists. While recent literature on socially conscious artists of the 1930s has expanded the term to include artists who do not exactly fit the definition of social realists, no reference to Guy has been given in any of these surveys.

American psychiatry, perhaps more so than other medical specialties, has had a troubled and ambivalent past. For much of its history its members were employed in public mental hospitals and thus lacked the autonomy and independence of their colleagues in private practice. More significantly, psychiatry was indissolubly linked with the fate of public institutions, whose image and reputation often left much to be desired.

The ambivalent character of psychiatry has given rise to two distinct and polar interpretations of its past. On the one side is a Whiggish scholarship that indentifies the evolution of psychiatry with scientific progress. The barriers to the creation of a psychiatric utopia result from the actions of malevolent or narrow-minded individuals and groups unwilling to provide appropriate resources. Furthermore, there is a presumption that psychiatric scientific and objective knowledge provided the basis for policies capable of resolving many of the troublesome problems associated with mental illness. On the other side are those who maintain that psychiatrists were involved with the social control of deviant and troublesome individuals. Mental hospitals, therefore, were simply institutions that confined and brutalized individuals whose only crime was their inability to conform to traditional behavioral norms. Embedded in this approach is the assumption that mental disease is a social rather than a medical category.

Hurled into the vortex of a whirlpool, Edgar Allan Poe's protagonist in “A Descent into the Maelström” hangs suspended on a wall of water. A deafening roar like that of Niagara Falls and a haunting moan like a “vast herd of buffaloes” resound as the fisherman and his brother watch pieces of society and nature float by: “Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves.” In the midst of this swirling rubble, Poe's hero survives on luck; clutching at a water cask, he hangs on the rim of the maelstrom until the cask's buoyancy lifts him from the water's depths. Punctuated by mere “intervals of tranquillity,” this chaotic landscape emanates violence and danger.

Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901) is one of the most famous American autobiographies, yet it is unfortunately also one of the least analyzed. Compared with the American autobiographies that we frequently study and teach, it seems meager and unchallenging. Unlike Whitman and Thoreau, Washington does not propose experiments in form, and he does not undertake a profound inner exploration as his text unfolds. He is not keenly conscious of his competitive relation to the autobiographical writings that have preceded his own and unlike Henry Adams and Henry James, he does not manifest a high degree of selfreflective awareness about the act of telling the story of his life. Nor does Washington's book display the sophisticated rendering of personal and public life that W. E. B. DuBois manages in Dusk of Dawn (1940), the subtle and disturbing account of black adolescence and early maturity that Richard Wright crafts in Black Boy (1945), the stylistic vigor and intelligence that James Baldwin demonstrates in Notes of a Native Son (1955), or the explosive energy that Malcolm X unleashes in his autobiography (1965).

One of the less publicized public events of that annus mirabilis 1968 was the annual meeting in November of a venerable academic institution, the Southern Historical Association. Convened in New Orleans was a group of intellectuals knit together by, among other professional ties, a common preoccupation with the Southern past. Prominent among these was C. Vann Woodward of Yale, arguably America's most eminent historian of the South. Also present were three famous novelists: Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, and William Styron. All native-born Southerners (if Oklahoma City, Ellison's birthplace, qualifies as a Southern city), they were there as participants in a panel, chaired by Woodward, on “The Uses of History in Fiction.” The session took place on November 6, the day after the election of Richard Nixon and seven months and two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was probably the liveliest, best-attended event of an otherwise staid meeting of professors. Much of the interest was generated by the topic and the distinguished panelists, but additional electricity was contributed by a cluster of young blacks in the audience. As passionately interested in the subject as were those on the platform, they were in attendance chiefly to question and challenge Styron. It was his use of history in fiction upon which much of the evening's discussion devolved.

It is one of the commonplaces of our literary history that Washington Irving's Sketch Book put America firmly and finally on the cultural map by pleasing the British reviewers. These arbiters of taste and upholders of cultural standards had long been savaging American publications, and even when they found one to praise, they were reluctant to consider it anything but an anomaly. The Sketch Book “is the first American work,” wrote Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, “of any description, but certainly the first purely literary production,” which rose to the level of the great English prose stylists. According to Jeffrey, it was quite “remarkable” that a book produced by an American, “entirely bred and trained in that country,” “should be written throughout with the greatest care and accuracy, and worked up to a great purity and beauty of diction, on the model of the most elegant and polished of our native writers.” Nevertheless, The Sketch Book was deserving of the praise, and the acknowledgment of the British literary establishment was one reason for its continued success. But as Jeffrey noted, even before Irving's sketches had charmed the British they had been “extensively circulated, and very much admired” among his own countrymen, so much so that two of our literary historians have claimed a place for The Sketch Book on the alltime American “best-seller” list. A close and careful scrutiny of the reasons for this success will reveal that Irving's famous book touched his American readers on a deep, subconscious level because Irving himself was an acute register of the anxieties of his age.

Recent literary theory has questioned the way we look at a text as the product of an individual “author.” But for William James—who was, like Emerson, a thoroughly nineteenth-century mind-any utterance, even the most complicated philosophical system, was at bottom the expression of the personality of the author. The history of philosophy, James believed, was in essence the “clash of human temperaments,” and temperament seems to gravitate to either the “idealistic” or what James denned as the “materialistic” pole:

Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution, materialism by another.… [I]dealism gives to the nature of things such kinship with our personal selves. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with, what we are least afraid of. To say then that the universe is essentially thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all. There is no radically alien corner, but an all-prevading intimacy. … That element in reality which every strong man of common-sense willingly feels there because it calls forth powers that he owns-the rough, harsh, sea-wave, north-wind element, the denier of persons, the democratizer-is banished because it jars too much on the desire for communication. Now, it is the very enjoyment of this element that throws many men upon the materialistic or agnostic hypothesis, as a polemic reaction against the contrary extreme. They sicken at a life wholly constituted of intimacy. There is an overpowering desire at moments to escape personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no respect for our ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over us. The strife of these two kinds of mental temper will, I think, always be seen in philosophy. Some men will keep insisting on the reason, the atonement, that lies in the heart of things, and that we can act with; others, on the capacity of brute fact that we must react against.

We have thought of whitman as an urban poet for so long-noticing how integral his Manhattan is to the imagery of Leaves of Grass – that we have lost sight of the deeper structure of urban popular culture lying behind the poem. As Remy G. Saisselin has recently argued, the city in the nineteenth century transformed the eye of the observer, and new kinds of urban spaces and entertainments—like the arcade, the panorama, and the department store—were created to satisfy a growing population of consumers. Saisselin affirms, moreover, that an unprecedented variety of aesthetic observer evolved along with these changes in urban experience: No longer was he “the man of taste in contemplation before a picture or a landscape. … He was the flaneur in the modern city.” And he associates this new observer with the photographer, whose urban gaze was also ubiquitous, surveying urban types and spaces. Saisselin is speaking here primarily of the European city, of Paris especially, but his observations are valuable in considering anew the sources of Whitman's art, for they point to a relationship between poetry and the urban milieu that has been generally overlooked. More specifically, they lead us to see the invention of Leaves of Grass as a way of organizing and perceiving reality that was new in the arts of the nineteenth century, yet one that was rooted in the popular urban culture of the time.

That there is a striking correspondence between the thinking of such A nineteenth-century transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and that of the twentieth-century American master of photography Edward Weston should come as no great surprise, for it is widely recognized that transcendentalism has been an essential ingredient in the lives and work of numerous major American artists. During the nineteenth century, this influence was most fully expressed by poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, by the painter Thomas Eakins, and by the architect Louis Sullivan. At the turn of the century, the composer Charles Ives and painters Robert Henri and his “Ashcan” colleagues John Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn continued to draw sustenance from the ideas and example of the transcendentalists. And during the early twentieth century, the brilliant architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the gifted painter Georgia O'Keeffe, and major poets Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams made clear through their work the looming presence of the transcendentalist tradition. Thus, well before the 1920s, when Edward Weston began making his most innovative photographs, transcendentalism consciously and unconsciously pervaded American intellectual and artistic life: It was something to absorb or reject-or both. “Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, the army of unalterable law,” was how Eliot put it. Weston was not exempt from this law.

Unfortunately for American letters, when F. Scott Fitzgerald died he left behind a brilliant and extensive but critically problematical set of fragments of a Hollywood novel, tentatively entitled Stahr a Romance or The Love of the Last Tycoon A Western, but published as The Last Tycoon. Although the published edition has been available for fortyodd years, the need to decipher its unfinished design persists. The plot is cut off; the disorderly notes provide contradictions and minimal help in interpretation; the extant texts exist in a number of states, none final; and Edmund Wilson's edition raises grave doubts. Nevertheless, Tycoon is a most ambitiously planned novel, conceived in the moral and metaphorical amplitude of Fitzgerald's full artistic maturity, assimilating at least as absolutely as elsewhere in the canon his cultural perceptions and ambiguities regarding the quality of American civilization.