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OVERVIEW
F. O. Matthiessen's The American
Renaissance (1941) not only revolutionized American
literature by legitimating and solidifying the study
of this country's art, but it also reformulated
how nineteenth-century American literature would
be envisioned and periodized. If Matthiessen's work
now seems dated and attenuated in its expanse or
description, it continues to provide an invaluable
vision of American literature starting in the 1830s,
a vision that underpins my own understanding of
the myriad works of art giving shape to this period.
This vision also helps bookend my own field of study
for this oral exam, for the ideas, concerns, and
formulas circulating in the American nineteenth
century are revisited in the 1920s with what has
been termed the Second American Renaissance. The
birth of American Modernism and the American avant-garde
is in many ways a "rebirth" or radical
reworking of the same ideas, concerns, and formulas
that informed the literature of the 1830s and beyond.
One prevalent idea I see at the base of both American
Renaissances, and yet another reason why I find
Matthiessen's formulation so intriguing, is the
notion that these American Renaissances "re-conceived"
the notion of American identity, or, to borrow Stephen
Greenblatt's seminal idea, highlighted the "self-fashioning"
impulses that undergird these moments in American
cultural history. Emerson says as much when he quips
in "Self-Reliance" (1841): "Whoso
would be a man must be a nonconformist." While
conceding that Emerson may not be, in his own terms,
a "representative man" of the entire literary
period from the 1830s to the 1920s, I see in Emerson's
pithy statement a seed for understanding some of
the key cultural vectors of American literature
beginning in the first American Renaissance, recast
in the second, and developed afterwards in the American
avant-garde.
As cultural artifacts, the works on my lists, like
"Self-Reliance," reveal how one constructs
one's subjectivity through performance, through
ceaselessly refashioning oneself to insure one's
"nonconformity." These artifacts by extension,
therefore, privilege using those performative modes
of expression in this genealogy to unpack some of
the key strategies for self-fashioning prevalent
in both American Renaissances. Further, as cultural
artifacts, works like "Self-Reliance"
help sketch out the exact parameters of the development
of the American subject from the 1830s onwards:
after all, as Emerson's statement implicitly suggests,
self-fashioning is the prerogative and cultural
capital of those who "would be men." By
thus focusing on how the notion of manhood--the
self-reliant white man born in the West and "raised"
in the East--has been constructed, deployed, and
interpreted front Renaissance to Renaissance., I've
selected various useful instruments for dissecting
the following texts. These American .Renaissances
and the subsequent avant-garde aesthetics each respectively
created a cultural calculus from the nodal points
of race and class, knowledge and power, and by unpacking,
and comparing these separate calculuses along the
lines of performance and masculinity, the individual
psychologies of both periods--and the development
afterwards--become clearer.
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