This multivolume History marks a new beginning in the study of American literature. The first Cambridge History of American Literature (1917) helped introduce a new branch of English writing. The Literary History of the United States, assembled thirty years later under the aegis of Robert E. Spiller, helped establish a new field of academic study. Our History embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries of the field and redefined the terms of its development. Trained in the 1960s and early 1970s, representing the broad spectrum of both new and established directions in all branches of American writing, these scholars and critics have shaped, and continue to shape, what has become a major area of modern literary scholarship.

Over the past three decades, Americanist literary criticism has expanded from a border province into a center of humanist studies. The vitality of the field is reflected in the rising interest in American literature everywhere, nationally and internationally, and at every level – in high schools and colleges, in graduate programs, in publications, conferences, and public events. It is expressed in the sheer scope of scholarly activity and in the polemical intensity of debate. Virtually every recent school of criticism has found not just its followers here but many of its leading exponents. And increasingly over the past three decades, American texts have provided the focus for inter- and cross-disciplinary investigation. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and popular-culture studies, among others, have penetrated to all corners of the profession, but their single largest base is American literature. The same is true with regard to controversies over multiculturalism and canon formation: the issues are transhistorical and transcultural, but the debates themselves have turned mainly on American books.

The people who already inhabited the North American continent had an old and richly developed oral literature; they did not write. To the diligent writers who proposed to colonize the New World the fact that its inhabitants had no system for writing was a definitive sign of their inferiority. In the eyes of the Europeans, the absence of indigenous writing among the Indians went far to vitiate their claim to the continent.

The first Native-American publication in North America, and until the nineteenth century almost the only one, was a sermon written and preached by Samson Occom (1723?–92) at the execution of a fellow Mohegan convicted of murder. Occom was a minister and worked with the educational mission of Eleazar Wheelock. The preface to the published Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian (1772), begins: ‘The world is already full of books.’ Why, Occom asks, add another, “since the most excellent writings of worthy and learned men are disregarded”? But he then reflects that these writings are “in a very high and refined language” beyond the comprehension of the common people. His “plain, everyday talk” is accessible to everyone; “little children may understand it; and poor Negroes may plainly and fully understand my meaning.” One last group will benefit from a simpler text: “my poor kindred the Indians.” There is a final reason for Occom to publish his “broken hints” and this has to do not with the sermon's readers but with its writer: “as it comes from an uncommon quarter, it may induce people to read it because it is from an Indian.”

Foucault's last attempt to situate his life's work in the Enlightenment tradition presumably laid to rest any lingering doubts about the rational basis of his work. Yet, Habermas and his sympathizers remained skeptical. The rational subject, they argued, was never adequately accounted for in Foucault's work.

Explanation for this discrepancy must be sought in Foucault's original disenchantment with the Enlightenment project – above all, his critique of modern humanism and the kind of subjectivity it entails. For the purposes of this essay, it will suffice to broach this topic by contrasting Foucault's critical method with the critique of ideology undertaken by members of the Frankfurt School (Part I). As we shall see, Foucault's critical method is more radical than theirs in that it brackets the emancipatory ideals underwriting reason itself. Stronger still, it allegedly shows the impossibility of the Hegelian categories of reflection in which these ideals are cast.

I shall argue that these categories are not as paradoxical as Foucault thinks. Indeed, I shall show that, mutatis mutandis, they inform the very hermeneutic circle in which he himself reformulated his understanding of the rational, self-empowering subject. The road leading to this conclusion must pass through the difficult terrain staked out by Habermas's theory of communicative action (Part II). The latter ostensibly redeems reason from its paradoxes while simultaneously demonstrating the self-referential contradictions attending its wholesale rejection.

Few events have captured the imaginations of Americans as powerfully as the Salem Village witchcraft trials of 1692. Assessments of the entire Puritan period have achieved their sharpest focus through an analysis of the Salem trials, which have served as a litmus test for theories about the nature of life in early America. Some social historians find the reasons for the trauma in economic causes, with the jealous resentment of the disadvantaged leading them to strike out against their circumstances as well as against particular social enemies. One localized version of this argument focuses upon the feuding factions of Salem Village, whose long-term battle seems to have predetermined the would-be accused and accusers. Cultural anthropologists and psychohistorians have read the Salem records as discursive expressions of anxieties brought on by the rapid succession of political and economic events in the 1680s, which were exacerbated by a series of crises, including fires, floods, disease, and Indian attacks. Other accounts emphasize the role of the common people, who discovered demonism to be a weapon with which to threaten the established powers. Because a high percentage of those tried and punished were women, a number of whom owned property under challenge, some interpretations present evidence of the efforts of jeopardized male authorities to repress rising female independence and economic autonomy. In different ways, most interpreters share the assumption that the Salem incident marks a critical turning point in New England history when old religious values were in question and new secular ones were being formed. Accordingly, the witchcraft delusion is most often perceived as the site of a profound cultural transformation.

Understanding the American Revolution is a literary pursuit, and John Adams assumes as much in his own famous summary of the event. “The Revolution,” Adams insists in 1818, “was in the minds and hearts of the people,” and those who would seek it must collect and search “all the records, pamphlets, newspapers, and even handbills, which in any way contributed to change the temper and views of the people.” By concentrating on this change in ideas, Adams makes “the real American Revolution,” as he calls it, the central event of the American Enlightenment, and he turns comprehension of it into a permanent test of cultural well-being. In urging this understanding upon “young men of letters in all of the States,” he also warns them against superficial explanations that stress “the gloriole of individual gentlemen.” The transformations in thought that bind Americans together in 1776 and after take place beneath the surface of events. Only by a diligent search can one hope to find the deeper truth of “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people.”

This challenge, already problematic in 1818, remains the challenge of today. The task is to recover as much as possible of the Revolution, itself the greatest literary achievement of eighteenth-century America, while keeping in mind the gaps between surviving word and original thought, text and lost context, assertion and expectation, story and event. If “the real American Revolution” resists a narrative of heroics to reside elsewhere – in the minds and hearts of the people – how does one reach that level through extant writings?

First to study the Revolution, the historian David Ramsay also first proclaims the utter centrality of its writings. “In establishing American independence”, he observes in The History of the American Revolution (1789), “the pen and the press had merit equal to that of the sword”. Writings can equal events because events, small in themselves, often take their primary significance from the symbolism that language gives them. Five people die in the Boston Massacre; just eight, in the battle of Lexington. Clearly, it is not size and scale that shake the old order but something else. The international hue and cry of the Intolerable Acts in 1774 take place over 342 chests of tea dumped in Boston Harbor. In the war, General Washington's Continental army sometimes dwindles to fewer than four thousand soldiers, and that army's arduous retreat to Valley Forge in the winter of 1777 takes it only twenty miles from the British army in Philadelphia. Numbers are even smaller in the South. The battles of King's Mountain and Cowpens, major American victories in 1780 and 1781, engage fewer than three thousand at a time. Important in themselves, such incidents take their fullest significance from revolutionary ideology or from the way they contribute to a familiar sense of story and to an understanding of occurrence. Either way, the prime value of a revolutionary event is often in the telling.

It is doubtless too early to assess the break introduced by Michel Foucault, who has been Professor at the College de France (he holds the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought) since 1970, in a philosophic landscape previously dominated by Sartre and by what Sartre called the unsurpassable philosophy of our time, Marxism. From the outset, starting with The History of Madness (1961), Michel Foucault situates himself elsewhere. It is no longer a question of basing philosophy on a new cogito, or of developing a system of things previously hidden from the eyes of the world, but rather of interrogating the enigmatic gesture – a gesture that may be characteristic of Western society – through which true discourses (thus also those of philosophy) are constituted, with their familiar power.

If Foucault is indeed perfectly at home in the philosophical tradition, it is within the critical tradition of Kant, and his undertaking could be called A Critical History of Thought. This is not meant to imply a history of ideas that would be at the same time an analysis of errors that could be measured after the fact, or a deciphering of the misunderstandings to which they are related and on which what we think today might depend. If by thought is meant the act that posits a subject and an object in their various possible relations, a critical history of thought would be an analysis of the conditions under which certain relations between subject and object are formed or modified, to the extent that these relations are constitutive of a possible knowledge.

The Enlightenment in America is sometimes conveyed in a single phrase, the political right of self-determination realized. The reduction is possible because self-determination as a philosophical principle incorporates the basic eighteenth-century tenets of Enlightenment thought: the primacy of reason, the reliability of human understanding, the value of individual freedom, trust in method, faith in education, belief in progress, and a corresponding disregard for tradition, constituted authority, and received dogma. At the same time, the realization of self-determination in national ideology has tended to equate philosophical principle with political practice. Since the Revolution claims government by consent of the governed as the irreducible source of its achievement, self-determination becomes the sign and symptom of the Enlightenment at work in each succeeding generation. This is the legacy of the Revolution in daily life.

Not coincidentally, the Enlightenment has been a partisan concept in American historiography, one in which subsidiary notions of liberalism, progress, and rationality have shaped the character of historical reconstructions. Because the idea of an American Enlightenment coincides with national formation and a developmental sense of country, its proponents tend to dwell on the emerging prospect. They see and make use of the original aspiration of human freedom but lose all sense of the Enlightenment as a historical process with its own patterns of constraint. The result is a peculiar one-sidedness or intellectual vulnerability in critical inquiries about the subject.

MARXISM, PROPAGANDA AND SHAW: VARIETIES OF IBSENITE CRITICISM

'I feel I must do something to make people understand our Ibsen a little more than they do,' wrote Eleanor Marx to Havelock Ellis in late December 1885. So invitations went out to a 'few people worth reading Nora to'; and on 15 January 1886, in their flat in Great Russell Street, Karl Marx's youngest daughter and her common-law husband, Edward Aveling, played host to one of the first readings in England of an Ibsen play - A Doll's House in the Henrietta Frances Lord translation. Bernard Shaw was a favoured invitee, playing the part of Krogstad to the Mrs Linde of William Morris's daughter, May. And the evening turned out to be an auspicious one for 'Ibsenism', a meeting point for the plethora of '-isms' - Marxism, Socialism and Fabianism - that hailed Ibsen as a spokesman of their cause.

Before the Great Russell Street soirée, Ibsen had been the subject of articles by proselytizing but generally apolitical English Scandinavianists, like Edmund Gosse, who were intent on making him known beyond the boundaries of Norway. Now Aveling was giving rabble-rousing papers on Ghosts and stirring up debate in the Playgoers' Club at which (writes Shaw) 'Mrs Aveling and I, being of course seasoned socialist mob orators, were much in the position of a pair of terriers dropped into a pit of rats.' Eleanor Marx was spreading the Ibsenist gospel beyond the confines of Bloomsbury to the working-class districts of London and the Midlands.

FREEDOM, TRUTH AND SOCIETY - RHETORIC AND REALITY

During the night of 9 January 1871, a young Dane lay awake in his hospital bed in Rome writing. He was committing to paper a poem to which he had given the title 'To Henrik Ibsen'. He had recently received a letter from Ibsen - a letter carrying a powerful appeal to him to put himself at the head of the 'revolution of the human spirit' which the age cried out for. In the poem which formed his enthusiastic response, the young Dane - the critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927) - described how all those mendacious and authoritarian forces of the contemporary age would be brought low when 'the intellectuals' made their revolt. And he raised the banner of freedom and progress with the words: 'Truth and Freedom are one and the same.'

Time after time in the years that followed, Ibsen was himself to raise this same revolutionary banner - with truth and freedom as the central watchwords. In later years these concepts could sound both abstract and ambiguous; nevertheless, within their historical context, they served as a battle cry in the struggle against the prevailing situation. 'Truth' alone - that truth of the new age such as a Brandes and an Ibsen saw it — could achieve liberation. Without truth there could be no change, no genuine 'freedom'.

Because the New England Puritans radically distrusted the senses and the imagination and were highly suspicious of all forms of art, most literary scholars either have ignored their poems or have treated them as curiosities. The advocates of Anne Bradstreet continue to construct an image of her as a cultural rebel who produced poetry in spite of the religious and social forces against her as a woman and as a Puritan. Similarly, when the poems of Edward Taylor were discovered and published in the late 1930s, many literary historians explained that his self-conscious artistry violated Puritan doctrines and that his poetic impulses suggested that he was by temperament more Catholic or Anglican than Puritan. The long disappearance of his work prompted a conclusion that he had feared exposure of his artistry and thereby enjoined his heirs to suppress his poetry. Not only, in this view, did theology prevail against Puritan art but the harsh physical conditions of New England life left no time for aesthetic indulgences. Bradstreet's productions were attributed to the leisure available to a woman of her high social standing and Taylor's to the quiet life in his wilderness parish of Westfield, Massachusetts.

To be sure, there are many valid historical reasons for assuming the term “Puritan poetry” to be an oxymoron. In England from the late sixteenth century, Puritan theologians and ministers had warned that the senses were unreliable, that appeals to the imagination were dangerous, and that the use of figurative, imagistic, or symbolic language bordered upon idolatry. Reasoning that God had inscribed all the truth that humanity needed in the scriptures, they held that plain and direct discussion of His word was the only truly legitimate and humble mode of verbal expression.

By the time of the Restoration of Charles II in England in 1660, Puritan New England had developed into a relatively prosperous, stable, and independent colony. Some who had left for England during the Protectorate returned to New England after 1660, and other English Puritans, like Edward Taylor, fled to America to escape renewed Anglican persecution. With the native tribes still traumatized by the violence of the Pequot War in the late 1630s, Puritan villages proliferated, and different local governments, customs, and economies replicated the various peasant cultures of places such as Yorkshire, Kent, East Anglia, and the West Country of England. On the whole, travelers in New England in the 1650s described flourishing agricultural communities of pious, hardworking families where the churches and the state appeared to cooperate in governance.

In larger cities such as Boston and Salem, there arose a merchant class based upon manufacturing, the fishing industry, and foreign trade, while the rural villages remained dependent upon farming. Open-field farming continued in some areas until the late seventeenth century, but most land was converted to small individual holdings. Because Congregationalism encouraged village independence, forms of government were quite varied, with selectmen sometimes possessing broad powers, and in many the influence of the ministers upon civil decisions was diminishing.

This slow process of secularization was hastened and became more dramatic when two serious difficulties arose that would precipitate drastic changes in the social and religious order between 1660 and 1690: a land shortage and growing religious uncertainties among the young. Word of the prosperity of the early colonists attracted to New England growing numbers of less pious immigrants who primarily sought financial opportunities.

Brand is a work that has invited terms of discontinuity. It was Ibsen's response to what Halvdan Koht called the volcanic events of the year 1864, an eruption of bitterness over the death of his National-Romantic illusions about a modern Scandinavian brotherhood to match the heroic past. Georg Brandes, Ibsen's Danish critic and ally, referred to 'a shocking, yes overwhelming, impression of having come face to face with a strong and indignant genius, before whose penetrating gaze weakness feels constrained to lower its eyes'. Bjorn Hemmer has identified it as a milestone in Scandinavian literature, leading away from the current aesthetic and idealistic tendency into new fields, committed and contemporary; Brand became, and has remained, the most powerful drama of ideas in the whole of Scandinavian literature. And it is primarily by the ideas that criticism has been at once inspired and divided.

Brand has been taken to be a Christian and an anti-Christian work; the enactment of a specifically theological debate between Old and New Testament concepts of divinity; the story of an individual fighting an existential battle to define his own religious identity; a celebration and an expose of idealism, secular or religious. It has been derived, for approval or blame, from different philosophical systems - Kierkegaard, Hegel, Nietzsche - and related to mythic patterns of universal extent. Brand has been seen as both a vindication of Romanticism and its indictment; or, more recently, as the victim of psychological or socio-psychological conditioning. The ambivalence concentrates, finally, on the meaning of the last scene; does it imply Brand's acceptance or rejection, and in what terms?

fougault among the historians – part i

Foucault's work always had an ambivalent relation to established academic disciplines, but almost all his books are at least superficially classifiable as histories. His first major work, in particular, seems to proclaim its status in the title: Histoire de la folie à l'age classique. One plausible way of trying to understand and evaluate this seminal book is by assessing its status as a work of history.

The reactions of professional historians to Histoire de la foile seem, at first reading, sharply polarized. There are many acknowledgments of its seminal role, beginning with Robert Mandrou's early review in Annales, characterizing it as a “beautiful book” that will be “of central importance for our understanding of the Classical period.” Twenty years later, Michael MacDonald confirmed Mandrou's prophecy: “Anyone who writes about the history of insanity in early modern Europe must travel in the spreading wake of Michel Foucault's famous book, Madness and Civilization.” Later endorsements have been even stronger. Jan Goldstein: “For both their empirical content and their powerful theoretical perspectives, the works of Michel Foucault occupy a special and central place in the historiography of psychiatry.” Roy Porter: “Time has proved Madness and Civilization far the most penetrating work ever written on the history of madness.” More specifically, Foucault has recently been heralded as a prophet of “the new cultural history.”

To many of his readers, Foucault's preoccupations with subjectivity and practices of the self in his later writings have been puzzling and disappointing – even embarrassing. His turn toward an esthetics of the self appeared on the surface to fly in the face of his earlier proclamation of the death of man and his anti-authoritarian predilections for anonymous authorship. Moreover, it seemed to mark a retreat into the self and away from the more politically engaged texts such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Had Foucault, the notorious “post-humanist” critic, recanted? This very question manifests a now outmoded concern for coherence and continuity – in short, for identity – in an author's work and life. Yet, if we are to take Foucault at his word, each of his works can be understood as “part of [his] own biography.”

A dominating frame of reference assimilates the crises in meaning and the contradictions in practice that it generates. The Enlightenment shapes early republican culture in just this way. It is both the source of ideas and the boundary placed upon them in revolutionary America, both the expression of broad aspirations and the enforcement of narrow instrumental controls. The literature of public documents offers a proximate case in point. The Federal Constitution of 1787 embodies the central aspirations of the Enlightenment. In daring to know and then in imposing their knowledge, the framers assume the capacity of reason to define and control human society. Their text, the Constitution, celebrates the association between correct human mechanism and universal improvement. Knowledge, through mechanism, forms a more perfect union that will establish justice, insure tranquillity, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for the people of the United States. Yet, at another level, the body and mechanics of the Constitution take back the scope and sweep of its preamble.

Not everyone in America is so insured, so promoted, so secured, so blessed. Quietly but emphatically, the Constitution eliminates whole categories from the rubric of “we, the people.” In a shocking adaptation of the mathematical penchants of the Enlightenment, the Constitution, in Articles 1 and 4, perpetuates the institution of slavery and reduces all individuals who are not “free” to three-fifths of a person. Again in Article 1, it excludes Native Americans from the apportionment of representation and gives Congress an exclusive power in commerce over them.