Abstract
Ezra Tawil’s Literature, American Style confronts one of the most fundamental problems in the study of US culture: how and why do we claim ‘a national tradition’ of American literature that can be distinguished from other literatures in English? (p. 3). A great deal of scholarship takes as its unspoken premise the idea that an identifiable body of American literature exists. For most of the twentieth century, literary scholars focused on pinpointing the qualities that made this literature unique. Beginning in the 1980s, this search for an original American literature came under scrutiny for its exceptionalism and wilful ignorance of transnational cultural circulation. In our current political climate when American exceptionalism is again ascendant, Tawil makes it clear that he does not aim to revive the search for the distinguishing marks of American literature. Instead, Tawil asks, what gave rise to an aspiration for a national literature in the post-Revolutionary United States? How did Americans manage to ‘put a local stamp’ on the ‘borrowed’ forms with which they built their shared dream of originality (p. 6)? Tawil makes a convincing case that the logic of style – adopting something but ‘wearing’ it differently – allowed post-Revolutionary Americans to grapple with their cultural indebtedness while making the case for their national uniqueness (p. 21). Tawil defines style in the pre-romantic sense as a collective and national project rather than as a mark of personal distinction or choice. This notion of style, Tawil demonstrates, licensed a subtractive construction of an ‘American voice’ that used European cultural materials – particularly the aesthetics of the sublime and the rhetorical plain style – to claim its separateness from polished European literary traditions (p. 35).
Central to Tawil’s argument is the claim that American style is the product of a ‘negative dialectic’ that results in a ‘series of binary oppositions’ rather than in a greater synthesis (p. 193). Post-Revolutionary Americans took hold of tensions within British culture, embraced one side of the binary as the ‘supposedly American characteristic’ and abjected or negated the other side of the binary as the ‘British cultural stance’ (p. 12). For example, in his project to reform American spelling, Noah Webster adopted early modern efforts to spell English words the way they were pronounced and to make spelling more closely follow the language’s ‘purer’ Anglo-Saxon origins (p. 66). Webster turned Samuel Johnson’s efforts to standardise spelling in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) into his foil. Johnson used etymological derivation to determine a word’s spelling and, as a result, incorporated elements of Latin and French orthography. According to Johnson’s critics, including Webster, the Dictionary degraded English by making it less Anglo-Saxon. Yet both the idea that pronunciation should govern English spelling and the idea that etymology should guide English spelling reflected opposing views within British culture. Webster espoused the cause of pronunciation and deemed it ‘American’ while rejecting etymological spellings as a British ‘corruption’. Of course, as Tawil acknowledges, many scholars have demonstrated Americans’ Anglophilia and their cultural dependence on Britain and Europe. Tawil’s innovative approach is to use the scholarship on transatlantic cultural circulation to reexamine the invention of national originality (p. 13). American originality, Tawil shows, drew on Anglophobia as well as Anglophilia. Post-Revolutionary Americans constructed their fantasy of national distinction by simultaneously ‘abjecting and incorporating’ Britishness (p. 17).
Tawil’s study uses a wide range of scholarship in early modern aesthetic philosophy, rhetoric and literary criticism to reconstruct the cultural genealogy of Anglo-American literary expression between 1780 and 1800, when the idea of a distinctive American voice first emerged. He focuses on works that are often cited as examples of original American expression: Noah Webster’s Dissertations on the English Language (1789), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Edgar Huntly (1799), William Hill Brown’s novel The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Royall Tyler’s play The Contrast (1787). Tawil argues that these texts do not simply reflect thinking about ‘literary Americanness’, but engage in actively writing American literature ‘into existence as a style’ (p. 17). American-style literature emerges in texts that self-consciously articulate their relationship to the foreign models that they simultaneously emulate and define themselves in opposition to (p. 33). Crèvecoeur’s Letters, to take one example, asserts an American voice through a correspondence with a French interlocutor. Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James constructs his ‘American’ voice by disavowing European polish and fluency and deploying a different set of European literary tools: the georgic poetic mode, the rhetorical modesty topos and the concept that the ‘primitive’ expressions of the ancient bards are more authentic. The result is ‘a narrative voice that is supposed to mark a particularly American way of writing, formally lacking in comparison with British eloquence, yet more authentic and substantial’ (p. 107). Tawil compellingly demonstrates that Crèvecoeur’s self-consciousness about his aesthetic practices in relation to European and British models makes the Letters a significant contribution to the construction of an American literary voice.
Literature, American Style also makes a thoughtful intervention in more recent critical debates over how to understand American exceptionalism within transnational circulations of culture. Tawil makes extensive use of scholarship that challenges exceptionalism by demonstrating the transatlantic cultural relations of the early United States, such as Edward Cahill’s Liberty of the Imagination (2012), Elisa Tamarkin’s Anglophilia (2007) and Leonard Tennenhouse’s The Importance of Feeling English (2009). What these transnational studies have left out, Tawil shows, is a critical understanding of the origins and motives of the idea of American exceptionalism, an idea that is crafted on both sides of the Atlantic. We are used to thinking of American exceptionalism as the product of political nationalism and the need for a distinctive culture to unify the new nation. The fantasy of American distinctiveness, Tawil reveals, is also motivated by transatlantic debates over aesthetics: the ancient or the modern, the sublime or the beautiful and the plain or the eloquent. We need, Tawil argues, to ‘mind the gap between nationalism and exceptionalism’ that emerges in this richer understanding of the cultural genealogy of exceptionalism (p. 184).
Tawil’s study of the aesthetic motives that contribute to national exceptionalism is relevant to comprehending the cultural strategies of nations shaped by European settler colonialism. Tawil notes that American-style literature worked to define ‘America as ethnolinguistically English’ while keeping ‘Native Americans and African Americans at a cultural distance’ (p. 84). Further scholarship could profitably explore how indigenous and non-European people in settler colonial societies responded to this strategy for marginalising their cultural production, both in the United States and elsewhere. Although focused on the late eighteenth century, Literature, American Style can also speak to our contemporary moment when problems of authentic voice and exceptionalist views intertwine in public debate. Digital media scholar Tommy Shane argues, ‘Many voters now prize authenticity as more important than policies’. 1 Politicians appeal to these voters using a ‘rhetoric of naivety’ to signal their authenticity and to win votes for politically and culturally exceptionalist policies. 2 Literature, American Style provides a deeper historical, philosophical and literary context for the enduring allure of the unpolished voice on both sides of the Atlantic.