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• W2024973338 abstract "American Studies: A Not So Unscientific Method Brian Attebery (bio) It has become commonplace in recent discussions of cultural studies to refer to American studies as an unsuccessful predecessor, something born in a burst of postwar enthusiasm about 1945 and then collapsed by the mid-1960s. The main reason for its collapse, according to commentators like Jeffrey Louis Decker and Patrick Brantlinger, is a lack of theoretical rigor that led to unconsidered humanist and empiricist postures. 1 Regardless of the political convictions of early practitioners of American studies, for example Henry Nash Smith’s left-liberal and Leo Marx’s more radical views, their assumptions of historical continuity, American exceptionalism, national consensus, and the existence of the self-contained and rational individual are said to have led inevitably to a reaffirmation of the bourgeois capitalist state and its white male elite. Rather than looking to American studies for insights or examples, therefore, even a sympathetic critic like George Lipsitz suggests that we must invent a wholly new interdisciplinary study of culture using the theories of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Gramsci, and so on. 2 This critique is quite different from earlier attacks on American studies as unsystematic, subjective, and belletristic, most prominently Bruce Kuklick’s “Myth and Symbol in American Studies,” 3 but two weaknesses within the American studies tradition give credibility to both readings. The first is the absence of a satisfactory articulation of [End Page 316] the principles from which Marx, Smith, and other Americanists worked—not that they necessarily lacked such principles but that they could never describe them in terms acceptable to either the dominant historical and literary schools of the postwar academy or the cultural theorists of the present. Any theoretical perspective, whether the New Critical and historical-empiricist views of the 1950s or the Marxist-Freudian-deconstructionist views of the 1990s, makes certain insights possible while rendering others effectively invisible and unutterable. When Leo Marx attempted to defend his and Smith’s practice in 1969, he was reduced to calling it an “unscientific method,” defining it by negatives because he had no theoretical language to express his intentions and intuitions in positive terms. 4 If this was true in 1969, it is all the more true today, when the word theory itself has become the property of a single, albeit a complex and extensive, philosophical tradition. In effect, commentators like Decker, Brantlinger, and R. C. De Prospo are asserting that if it is not their theory, it is no theory at all. 5 This attitude merely reinforces the impression frequently fostered by American studies scholars themselves that their work is ad hoc, eclectic, and inductive, with no governing assumptions to speak of. 6 The second weakness in the American studies tradition is a tendency to express findings in the form of apparently fixed and absolute theses that do not reflect the complicated and dynamic interpretive procedures that led to the published versions. Both Marx and Smith were aware of this problem. Smith attempted and Marx continues to attempt to surround their best-known works with reconsiderations and revisitations that undercut the apparent definitiveness of the original utterance. 7 However even these amendments do not convey the continual adaptation and adjustment out of which Virgin Land and The Machine in the Garden were born. Such is the case with every critical or historical work, of course, but the academic discourse of the 1950s and 1960s was particulary ill-suited to represent multiple or shifting perspectives, since it generally involved an anonymous scholarly voice proclaiming and “proving” a single hypothesis. Although Virgin Land and The Machine in the Garden are not especially authoritarian by the standards of their time, they do not admit to any doubts and alternatives that might have been in the writers’ minds, nor do they attest to the writers’ personal involvement in the materials they studied and the impingement of present concerns on perceptions of the past. [End Page 317] To articulate the theory underlying the work of earlier generations of American studies scholars requires two things. One is a body of evidence attesting to the actual practice that lay behind the published statements. The second is a perspective that can reveal, rather..." @default.
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• W2024973338 title "American Studies: A Not So Unscientific Method" @default.
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