In a 1983 interview Michel Foucault characterized his work by connecting it with the complicated status of formalism in twentieth-century thought, claiming that the latter marked “one of the most powerful and complex forces in twentieth-century Europe” (FL, 234). Included under this rubric were a wide variety of expressions and esthetics, rational and political – all infinitely disrupting the continuities of tradition. The emergence of structuralism itself was equally aligned with this trend in an attempt to clarify its status (ibid., 235). The complicity between Michel Foucault's authorship and such formalism (like that with “structuralism,” equally itself a complex force ceaselessly claiming a mathematical base) is longstanding, and his major works attested to it from the outset (see OT, 384). It doubtless too figures Foucault's own complicity with modernism. Indeed, from the beginning to the end of his work Foucault was concerned with what he called in 1967 “the complex relations of forms” (FL, 27). Even his notorious denial of the subject for the sake of a certain authorial anonymity would not only be identified by him with the “revolutionaries” of esthetic modernism like Mallarme or Roussel but also with the discoveries of Bourbaki.

What ultimately distinguishes Michel Foucault's own commitment to formalism was doubtless its complexity: one uniting the complexity in the play between syntax and semantics, figure and constraint, discourse and event. Unlike the structuralists, who had platonized structure - and yet unlike the positivists, with whom he was, initially in any case, too often aligned — Foucault realized that were the analysis of language and language-like entities in terms of their formal properties to be carried out, the success of such projects depended upon realizing, as he had put it as early as 1967, that “discourses are unities of function” (FL, 26)

In retrospect the 1840s appear relatively undramatic in Norwegian literary history. Writers were mostly cultivating collective memories and giving written form to folk tales and popular ballads and in other ways working on the construction of a national mythology, in historical studies as well as in poetry. There was no permanent theatre established in the country, although several towns by this time had more or less appropriate theatre buildings where itinerant theatre companies, mostly Danish, could perform vaudevilles and plays according to the popular taste of the small bourgeois audiences.

Theatrical activity in Norway was nothing more than a pale reflection of a Danish tradition which seemed to be losing the vigour it had enjoyed in the early decades of the century. Under such circumstances it was understandable that practically nobody in Norway was giving much attention to the art of writing for the theatre. In Grimstad the young assistant pharmacist Henrik Ibsen had no chance to acquaint himself with the standards and techniques of professional theatrical performance, but he must have been an avid reader of classical and contemporary literature. His reading in those early years included dramatic works by Shakespeare, Schiller, Ludvig Holberg and Adam Oehlenschlager, and his literary talent and ambitions were clearly recognized by his few intimate friends. At this point it was not Ibsen's primary intention to earn his living as a writer. In his spare time he was busy preparing himself for the entrance examination to the University of Christiania, where he hoped to be accepted as a student of medicine.

Belles letters has become a vague term, collecting so broad a reference that it now designates the whole of “humane letters” (litterae humaniores) – that is, all imaginative literature or all writing evincing “literariness.” Prior to the term's semantic expansion in the 1760s, it had a precise employment, naming a mode of writing that subordinated the traditional tasks of edification, revelation, and memorialization to the work of stimulating social pleasure. Belles lettres was characterized more by its effects than its forms. “Ease” and “agreeableness,” qualities adjusted to the taste of the “gentle reader,” were the primary belletristic virtues.

Edmund Waller imported the mode from France into the literary communications of the Stuart court. Belles lettres flourished in England in conjunction with the rise of urban sociability in the 1670s. New communities based on shared taste, friendship, or common interest formed in postfire London and in the burgeoning resorts. In the mixed-sex assemblies at the spas and in the male tavern clubs of the metropolis, aspirants to gentility embraced the court's new sociable manner of wit. Writing served talk in these circles, providing scripts for oral performance (club disquisitions, vers de société) and recording memorable sallies of wit (bon mots, toasts, impromptus, epigrams). Belles lettres disavowed writtenness, adopting the guise of conversation. Concomitantly, conversation assumed great weight in thought about society and letters. As the preamble to the 1728 constitution of the Harvard Philomusarian Club declared, conversation was “The Basis of Friendship, The fundamental Principle of Society, The Great Prerogative of Mankind.”

The single most comprehensive reference work for the English-speaking student of Ibsen's plays is the eight-volume The Oxford Ibsen (1960-77). Edited by James McFarlane, the set comprises translations by McFarlane and others of all of Ibsen's plays, based on the Norwegian texts in the standard edition: Henrik Ibsen, Samlede Verker, Hundreårsutgave, Oslo, 1928-57 (Henrik Ibsen, Collected Works, Centenary Edition), and includes translations of extant drafts, fragments and the 'Epic Brand'. As well, each volume begins with a lengthy, authoritative critical essay by McFarlane, situating its plays in Ibsen's life and times and setting out significant lines of interpretive inquiry. Each volume concludes with appendices and a selected bibliography. The appendices include for each of the plays in that volume: discussions of dates of composition; draft manuscripts; some relevant comments by Ibsen and his contemporaries; and contemporary reception of book sales and play productions.

All of Foucault's major works are histories of a sort, which is enough to make him a historian of a sort. The challenge is to determine what sort of history he does and thus what kind of historian he is. It is fortunate that Foucault has adopted distinctive terms for his specific approaches at different phases of his career. His early works, the ones that earned him his reputation, were called “archaeologies,” the subsequent ones “genealogies”; and the volumes on the history of sexuality that appeared at the time of his death he called “problematizations.”

These approaches do not exclude each other. Rather, like successive waves breaking on the sand, each is discovered after the fact to have been an implicit interest of the earlier one, for which it served as the moving force. Thus Foucault insists that the question of power relations, which characterizes his genealogies, was what his archaeologies were really about and, subsequently, that the issue of truth and subjectivity, the explicit focus of his final works, had been his basic concern all along. Although these avowals reveal a greater desire for consistency and coherence than Foucault is supposed to have possessed, much less to have been able to warrant, they hypothesize a unity among the three approaches that enables us to present each in more than sequential order. Accordingly, after a survey of these three modes of “history” in their turn, I shall address four issues that give Foucault's approach to history its distinctive character, namely, the topics of nominalism, the historical event, the spatialization of Reason, and the nature of problematization.

Rebecca, Ellida, Hedda: the three heroines of Ibsen's plays from this period, Rosmersholm (1886), The Lady from the Sea (1888) and Hedda Gabler (1890), have names which have a similar ring to them; all sound slightly unfamiliar to a Norwegian ear, have an air of 'otherness' which marks them off from convention. The centrality of the heroines in these plays is underlined by the fact that two of them give the plays their titles, the only Ibsen plays where this occurs apart from the early Lady Inger (1857) - whereas as many as ten plays refer to the names or functions of male characters in their titles (Catiline, OlafLiljekrans, The Pretenders, Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder, Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman).

The otherness of these heroines is apparent from the beginning of the action; all are outsiders in their society, at odds with the mores of the community in which they find themselves, unhappy with an environment which forces them to live inauthentically. They have all to a greater or lesser extent tried to conform, but at the cost of the repression of their 'wild side'. They are pagans living in a Christian society. All are passionate women who, it could be argued, have got themselves involved with the wrong man. Neither Rosmer, Wangel nor Tesman are as their partners would have them be; they lack the passion to respond to their women's needs. As a result all three women have focused their sensuality on a substitute figure. Rebecca has invented for herself an idealized 'Rosmer' who bears little resemblance to the actual man, Ellida recalls her dream lover from the past and Hedda turns her energies to rekindling her highly charged relationship with Lovborg. The clash between aspiration and reality drives them all to breaking point.

'I have to keep working - creating one work after another - until the day I die.' When Ibsen gave these words to Arnold Rubek, to define what it means being an artist, he did not know, nor intend, that When We Dead Awaken was to be his last play - the Epilogue to the whole long row of 'one work after another' created over fifty years. To us the irony is twofold: Rubek is to die that very night, in his attempt to awaken, as a man and as an artist, from the 'dead'; Ibsen was to become too ill or frail to keep working until the day he died. For all that, Rubek's words may serve as a paradigm of the extraordinary drive which was an essential part of Ibsen's creativity, which had resulted in a regular output of 'contemporary' plays from Pillars of Society (1877) onwards, and which did not slacken when he returned to live in Norway in 1891, there to produce that series of plays which he somewhat grudgingly admitted to having had in mind when he used the term 'A Dramatic Epilogue': The Master Builder (1892), Little Eyolf (1894), John Gabriel Borkman (1896) and When We Dead Awaken (1899).

In 1789, when he was just eighteen, Charles Brockden Brown published a poem in honor of Benjamin Franklin, only to find that an erring printer, “from zeal or ignorance, or perhaps from both, substituted the name of Washington.” The blunder, Brown relates in his journal, converted the Republic's military savior into a mere philosopher and “made the subject ridiculous. Every word of this clumsy panegyric was a direct slander upon Washington, and so it was regarded at the time.”

This early incident from Brown's career can be read as a parable of his difficulties in trying to become a self-supporting author – a Franklin of letters – in a society dominated by republican ideals. Multiple lines connect the nation's first “canonical” novelist to the self-made Philadelphia printer who delighted in novels and adopted a female persona in his earliest publication. Like Franklin's Autobiography, Brown's fictions declare themselves to be acts of writing and hence products of print culture in contrast to the oral modes that previously held sway in America. In Brown's hands, the native novel realizes its identity as a middle-class genre overtly concerned with social mobility and individual self-fulfillment. A recurrent motif in his work, as in Franklin's, is sympathy for women and for the liberal project of female rights. Determined to treat literature as an occupation, not a gentlemanly pastime, Brown struggled to achieve independence by his pen. He was defeated in this goal most obviously because of his society's inability to support a class of professional authors, an understandable deficiency in a predominantly agricultural people. But beyond this, Brown's ambitions as a novelist foundered because he was reconceptualizing his medium as a private rather than a civic form. And in 1800, the public-spirited and corporate orientation of American culture still outweighed its individualistic side: the spirit of Washington overshadowed that of Franklin.

Many commentators have noted a marked change of emphasis in Foucault's later thinking about issues of truth, ethics, and social responsibility. For some, this change was characterized chiefly by a certain relaxation of the skeptical rigor – the attitude of extreme Nietzschean suspicion with regard to truth-claims or ethical values of whatever kind – that had hitherto played a prominent role in his work. Thus, according to Roy Boyne, the shift can be located with a fair degree of precision as occurring between Volume One of The History of Sexuality (where Foucault's genealogies of power/knowledge seem to exclude all notions of truth, enlightenment, self-understanding or effective political agency) and the later, posthumous volumes where this doctrine gives way to a sense of renewed ethical and social engagement. In this work, as Boyne reads it,

This is not to deny that there remain great problems – especially from the standpoint of present-day cultural and gender politics – with Foucault's appeal to those techniques of self-fashioning that he finds best embodied in the ethos of Classical (Graeco-Roman) sexual mores. Although it offers an escape-route of sorts from his earlier outlook of cognitive and ethical skepticism, it still leaves certain crucial questions unanswered.

In certain passages of the story of America's exploration and colonization, literature has history coming and going. If, as we suggested earlier, literature in the sixteenth century often instigated history, sometimes the major legacy of the history was the literature it produced. The unsuccessful attempt to establish an English post on Roanoke Island left not even a significant ruin, but it did give rise to the first book about the New World written in English: Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588, 1590). Harriot's book is an objective account of conditions in the New World; rather, it means to be objective. John Smith produced the first writings in a more subjective mode, which would become equally important in the literature. For Smith the New World was not only a site for imperial development but a theater of self-development as well. His major work, The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624), also claims to be a “true report,” but along with accounts of natural resources and local hazards, it interweaves a narrative of Smith's career, often told in the third person. Finally, the most likely candidate for first American book written in English (Smith was not an American) is Roger Williams's 1643 A Key into the Language of America. These three works are the focus of this chapter.

Thomas Harriot's A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia was published in haste to support Walter Raleigh's petition to the queen not to abandon the Virginia colony, whose first settlement had just failed. A second edition was brought out by the Flemish engraver and publisher Theodor de Bry two years later as part of a projected series entitled America, and it was multilingual (Latin, German, French, and English). Harriot had collected notes for a much more extensive chronicle, but most of his papers were lost on the return voyage.

Like the drama eighteenth-century poetry was a public and didactic art. The practice of publishing verse in newspapers, common throughout the formative period, bespoke both the topicality of poetic discourse and, what was closely related, its embeddedness in the life of the nation. Poetry seldom dealt with private imaginings and personal emotions. Rather, it concerned itself with the kind of widely known information that was reported in the press: warfare, politics, the deaths of eminent individuals, and other public matters. Poetry had a social identity, and it shared in communal existence as a regular feature in newspapers and magazines, at college commencements and Fourth of July celebrations, and on city streets where it was hawked in broadside.

This accent on the community was strengthened by the poetic influences Americans absorbed from the English tradition. Early poets who enjoyed special popularity in the Republic included William Shakespeare and John Milton, both of whom were interpreted by Americans as writing on public themes, Shakespeare as a foe of tyranny, Milton as a friend of religious liberty and the author of the modern era's greatest epic. The Augustan, or neoclassical, style, at its height in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, held sway in the United States throughout the early years of independence. Emerging after the pietistic extremities and startling linguistic turns of the metaphysicals, neoclassicism moved away from intense and idiosyncratic expression toward “correctness” and regularity. The poetry of Alexander Pope, James Thomson, John Dryden, and Jonathan Swift – the first in particular revered in America – addressed social and political issues with the goal of inculcating proper attitudes.

No American Writer was ever more conscious of founding a national tradition in letters than James Fenimore Cooper. As early as his second book, The Spy (1821), Cooper realized that in constituting himself the novelist equivalent of the Founding Fathers, he was making his principal bid for immortality. Yet few of Cooper's contemporaries in that era of new beginnings felt as uncertain as he did about the act of origination. In part his problem was the relatively simple one of finding a form and a setting for his fiction. But this problem encoded the more vexing one of whether Cooper – to schematize for the moment – was to be a “republican” or a “liberal” novelist, an author whose goals were social and patriotic or one who pursued primarily aesthetic ends. Behind this question lay the related issue of professionalization. How would Cooper accommodate himself to the commercial processes transforming the identity of the writer?

This literary pioneer reconceptualized his genre. Much like Irving, he reversed the emphases of the civic-humanist paradigm that governed the writing of fiction for the first quarter century of the Republic's existence. To the preceding generation, fiction was “truth” or history; to Cooper, history was fiction. By reimagining the novel as a subjective art form that would appeal to postrepublican readers, not as a moral discourse in narrative, Cooper affiliated his writing with the new social order.

Next to Shakespeare, Ibsen is undoubtedly the world's most frequently screened playwright. There are to date more than fifty film versions of Ibsen plays, and probably about twice as many television versions.

For obvious reasons, the earliest screened versions of Ibsen exist only in the medium of film; after 1950, however, when the first television broadcast of an Ibsen play took place, there was a distinct change of emphasis. Once the new medium had been introduced, the number of film productions dwindled quickly and television became the new partner to which the Ibsen play was wedded. In fact, most of the Ibsen films were produced during the 'international', silent, black-and-white era. With the arrival of the sound film around 1930 the number of film productions diminished.

Not surprisingly, the greatest number of screen versions concern A Doll's House and Ghosts, but many of the other social plays have also proved to be attractive to screen directors. As might be expected, little attention has been paid to the early plays and, as far as film is concerned, to the late ones.

Sending Farmer James to the frontier to escape the terrors of the forward march of American nationalism was an unlikely move; surprisingly, Crèvecoeur seems not to have recognized that the promise of western expansion was among the major inspirations for the Revolution. Jefferson openly regarded the territories beyond the founding states as prime development sites. The last narrative we will consider, and in many ways the definitive one, emerged from a survey he commanded of the land west of the Mississippi. The expedition to the Pacific coast that was led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark ended the era of exploration. It did so both by crossing the continent to its far coast and by demonstrating once and for all that there was no Northwest Passage through North America to the Pacific. One motive of all the previous explorations had been to fulfill the errand of Columbus by finding such a passage. It became clear that there was none just when America itself, having become the ground of an independent nation, was confirmed as a final destination in its own right. Indeed, the United States, once established as both a separate nation and as “America,” was not only a final destination but a point of origin. With this development, Buffon's “ungenerous sky” and “empty land” metamorphosed conclusively into the endless horizon and vacant wilderness of manifest destiny.

In fascinating ways, the literature of the New England Puritans reveals – and at times conceals – the remarkable number of contradictions in their religious, social, and political ideas, and it demonstrates how they managed to balance opposing aspirations and ideals to sustain a society that was from the start fragmenting from internal conflicts. Despite their tenacious struggles to achieve clarity in their expressions of purpose and design, the Puritans were frequently ambiguous and paradoxical. This chapter attempts to account for the compulsions, dissensions, and convergences within their culture and to demonstrate the intellectual complexity of their thought and writing. Language and literary forms both generated and formulated narrative expressions of the experiences of individuals and their communities as the generations journeyed from the bleak landing at Cape Cod to the flourishing of the New England Federation in 1642 to the tragic events at Salem in 1692.

Over the past forty years, scholarship on the American Puritans has been so rich and various that there is hardly a statement one can make about the Puritans today without arousing controversy. Scholars in every area of the humanities and social sciences have employed new theories and methodologies in their studies of Puritan New England. Because many see the Puritans as having established certain ideas and structures that are fundamental to later American society – although even this point is much debated–scholars are attracted to the study of seventeenth-century New England, and interpretations of that culture frequently have larger political and ideological implications for the United States as a whole.

On the eve of leaving the known world to circle the globe in quest of an empire, Christopher Columbus decided to write a book. His decision foretold an important link between writing and colonizing, a link that entailed a redefinition of writing and of its relation to both the writer and history. That redefinition is the subject of this first, introductory chapter. In appropriating the New World, Europeans expropriated millions of prior inhabitants, and Chapter 2 interrogates the difficulties involved in recovering the historical substance of that expropriation today. The remaining five chapters seek to understand how the writing of books entered into the process of the conquest. Each chapter reads selected works very closely for what they reveal of the terms in which Europeans took possession of the New World, how they declared it new and yet timelessly theirs.

The emphasis throughout on the role of books and writing in the making of America does not imply a view that reality is the product of its telling. The literature of American colonization is a particular case characterized by its writers' conviction that writing could wield material power in shaping history. Only some thirty years separate the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible from Columbus's departure for the Canary Islands. In the late sixteenth century, the activities of writing and of publishing began to assume unprecedented social and political importance, and an assumption of new powers is evident in all the texts treated here. John Smith's tracts and histories intend to alter policies that the captain finds confoundingly resistant to more direct intervention.

Chapter 9 of William Bradford's (1590–1657) Of Plymouth Plantation (written, 1630–46; published, 1857) contains perhaps the most frequently cited passage in colonial American writing. The chapter is entitled “Of Their Voyage, and How They Passed the Sea; and of Their Safe Arrival at Cape Cod.” After describing the arduous Atlantic crossing that brought the Pilgrims to the New World, Bradford signals a touchstone moment: “But here I cannot but stay and make a pause, and stand half amazed at this poor people's present condition; and so I think will the reader, too, when he well considers the same.” A long descent of readers has stood amazed at a vision of the Plymouth landing that long ago moved from history into myth. Bradford's immediate readers did not have to look far back; for them it was barely yet history. Indeed, Bradford made it history by establishing in it the parameters of an American legend.

Bradford began writing his history in 1630. The passage at hand comes early in the narrative, which at this point still draws heavily on a journal until recently attributed to Bradford himself and Edward Winslow (1595 – 1655) – author of Good News from New England (1624) – that had been published in London in 1622. (The current view is that the author remains uncertain.) A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New England (generally referred to as Mourt's Relation, perhaps for George Morton, who saw it through the press) covers the events of the colony's first year, from September 1620 to March 1621, in a mostly matter-of-fact tone and with a good deal of concrete detail.