A Companion to American Literary Studies

Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine, Caroline F. Levander, Robert S. Levine

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781119062516, 9781405198813
• eBook ISBN: 9781444343786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A Companion to American Literary Studies addresses the most provocative questions, subjects, and issues animating the field. Essays provide readers with the knowledge and conceptual tools for understanding American literary studies as it is practiced today, and chart new directions for the future of the subject.

• Offers up-to-date accounts of major new critical approaches to American literary studies
• Presents state-of-the-art essays on a full range of topics central to the field
• Essays explore critical and institutional genealogies of the field, increasingly diverse conceptions of American literary study, and unprecedented material changes such as the digital revolution
• A unique anthology in the field, and an essential resource for libraries, faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates

Part I: Forms

1

Poetry, Prose, and the Politics of Literary Form

Russ Castronovo

The Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King’s Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech all exhibit poetic features in phrasing and cadence, but none is poetry. They are prose documents and it seems unlikely that their authors ever considered framing these great political statements as sonnets or sestinas. John Reed, best known for his journalistic tour de force of the October Revolution in Russia, wrote his fair share of sonnets, but few, if any, of his poems give off revolutionary sparks, whether as a matter of content or as formal experimentation. It is not that poetry is unsuited to politics – witness antislavery verse of the 1840s and 1850s or the poetry of the cultural left of the 1930s – but neither are odes to specific pieces of legislation common literary fare. And yet, when poetry does become outfitted for political purposes, the most significant work may be done not in terms of content but in terms of form.

This chapter seeks to unsettle such misleading oppositions about the supposedly conventional nature of poetic form versus the socially relevant and political possi­bilities of prose. In no less a defining statement than What Is Literature? (1948), Jean-Paul Sartre contrasted the prose writer, who uses words as tools for getting things done in the world, with the poet whose abstruse relation to language makes for compositions whose usefulness is puzzling at best. “Poets are men who refuse to utilize language,” writes Sartre (5). Poetry appears to Sartre an insular and reflexive métier, one that makes it seem as if the poet “did not share the human condition” (6). In this view, poetry – by its very nature – seems esoteric, removed from the public and collective settings that provide a necessary condition for politics. Although Theodor Adorno would counter that this emphasis upon worldly engagement forces literature into acceptance of the world as it is, the basic assumptions of Sartre’s view are reflected in certain implicit tendencies within American literary studies. Ever since the cultural turn in literary criticism emphasizing the historical and material contexts of writing, the field has prioritized prose, especially the novel, over poetry as though verse were somehow inadequate to representing political crisis. Never mind that writers as diverse as Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frances Harper, Walt Whitman, Claude McKay, and Margaret Atwood have taken up poetry and prose with equal facility. Never mind that for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, poetry written by such luminaries as Philip Freneau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lydia Sigourney enjoyed a popularity that often rivaled, if not surpassed, that of novels.

To make these points is not to intone a dirge for 1950s-style formalism or even for poetry. Rather, it is to consider how aesthetic choices become political choices, how opting for either poetry or prose itself constitutes a commentary on the social world and its attendant conventions and forms. Of course, it would seem that in some situations there is no choice at all. Opinions on taxes or the treatment of prison inmates demand everyday expression associated with prose. Philip Freneau, a poet of the American Revolution, did not give into these demands, and such poems as his “Occasioned by a Legislation Bill Proposing a Taxation upon Newspapers” and “On a Legislative Act Prohibiting the Use of Spirituous Liquors to Prisons in Certain Jails of the United States” would seem to test not only the distinctions between poetry and prose but also the assumptions about the politics conveyed by each form. While titles such as “The Wild Honey Suckle” or “To a Caty-Did” reveal that Freneau composed verses on traditional lyric subjects, he also wrote poems on a range of nonpoetic subjects in order to express political views beyond the limits of prosaic wisdom. To be sure, Freneau appears in most anthologies of American literature, but he does so only as a poet. The effect of ignoring his prose is significant, not because his essays and newspaper articles have any special significance themselves, but because Freneau’s ability to work in both forms, in tandem with his lifelong indecision about, changing attitudes toward, and strategic deployments of each, suggests something about the nimbleness that political engagement requires. His occasional but sporadic reflections on prose and poetry – What does it mean to frame an appeal in verse? Is prose somehow more democratic than poetry? In the world of public opinion, is poetry an inherently oppositional form? Is prose an accommodation to the world as it is? – offer something like a theory of political form.

Examining the work of this revolutionary-era writer thus supplies much more than a new perspective on the boundaries of eighteenth-century discourse; returning to this “lost” American poet enables a broader consideration about forms of expression within democratic public spheres. Or, as Freneau rhymed near the end of his life, “A poet where there is no king / Is but a disregarded thing,” bemoaning that the imaginative, creative qualities associated with poetics seemingly have no place in American democracy (Last Poems 31). His lament remains an instructive provocation to examine how literary form – such as the choice of poetry or prose – engages the nature and meaning of politics at a vital level. This focus on form opens out into a reconsideration of the relationship of literature to propaganda, of art to popular culture, and of aesthetics to oppositional politics, and other issues central to American literary study in the twenty-first century. If Freneau’s placement in anthologies suggests that he is a writer who is supposed to help us make sense of national literary traditions, then this renewed attention to the productive tensions between his poetry and prose offers a perspective for reevaluating how form has played an often uncertain but no less determining role in creating the political valences of American literature.

Before undertaking this investigation, a few remarks are necessary to set some parameters about the terms prose, poetry, and politics, especially in their relationship to one another. Rather than separating these terms, the next section suggests why discerning their overlap is crucial to understanding the politics of American literary form.

No matter how much contemporary culture shies away from explicit political discussion as a show of aggression or bad taste, politics are likely to spring up in unexpected contexts from the dinner table to the office water cooler. But while politics have seemingly unlimited range and can appear just as easily in the private space of the bedroom as the public setting of the classroom, politics are not naturally occurring phenomena that simply appear. Thomas Hobbes and other social contract theorists stressed this point by viewing the state of nature, with its unceasing violence and war, as a pre-political setting lacking compacts, covenants, or other forms that give shape and security to political life. This point might be elaborated in terms of the settings thus far invoked – dinner tables (the domestic), bedrooms (the intimate), water coolers (the economic), and classrooms (the institutional) – and by remarking that the communication of politics in each of these zones demands still more forms, from table manners to scheduled coffee breaks. These forms are no guarantee that discussion will adhere to a predictable pattern of style; politics in these settings can be avoided or directly confronted, whispered or shouted, delivered as a confidence or as a rant.

In American literature, the forms for communicating politics are infinitely more varied and complex, ranging from a story of whaling to a fanciful tale about a Kansas farm girl in search of an emerald city. The first example is, of course, Moby-Dick (1851), which, starting with readers in the 1960s, was often taken as a commentary on the problem of slavery and the threat of national disunion. The second and equally obvious example is The Wizard of Oz (1900), which in its depiction of yellow brick roads, a blustering lion that behaves like a populist orator, and a magical city whose name is the standard abbreviation for “ounce,” recalls the charged political debates over the gold standard at the turn of the twentieth century. With little effort, we might compile a list of novels and poems laden with political messages. In the wake of ideological critique in general and New Historicism and cultural studies in particular, it would be difficult to attempt the opposite and name works that did not communicate some political content. Nevertheless, in making claims about the politics of any poem or novel, we would just as quickly want to stipulate that any truly creative work is more than a crude delivery system for an author’s political objectives. The choice of form is paramount not just in conveying content but also in shaping it. To run back through our examples: Why not choose a series of cantos for a whaling saga? Why not choose a realist novel – certainly there were plenty of examples around when Baum was penning Dorothy’s story – to articulate a perspective upon currency debates? Although we know that form matters, authors themselves provide little help in figuring out why one situation calls for poetry and another for prose. Many have speculated, but no one knows precisely why Melville, soon after the commercial failure of Moby-Dick and his subsequent novels, turned to an arguably less popular form than the novel by writing poetry in Battle-Pieces (1866). Is killing men in a bloody civil war somehow a more poetic subject than killing whales?

In short, any effort to correlate form and political content must recognize the initial conflict and tension that surround the unavoidable use of a particular form. Literature necessarily begins with this gesture, which, however, is not the same thing as saying that literature lacks form until it takes shape as a sestina, sonnet, or short story. As Fredric Jameson points out, “[T]he essential characteristic of literary raw material or latent content is precisely that it never really is initially formless.” Instead of being purely organic, the building blocks of literature – sounds, words, and images – spring from social considerations shot through with history and concrete material reality. Literary raw materials are “meaningful from the outset, being neither more nor less than the very components of our concrete social life itself” (Jameson 402–3). Whether expression congeals as a poem, novel, or other form entails any number of considerations: the circulation of styles and conventions, the literary historical status of genres, the institutions of print culture, patterns of reception, the specifics of the occasion, popular tastes, an author’s talents or predilections, and so on. These aesthetic concerns could be augmented with broader factors stemming from general economic conditions or historical epochs. Since each of these considerations is likely in flux, conventions or tastes are never fixed or static.

In American literary studies, particularly the literature of the early national period, claims about the politics of form lend nuance to what people usually mean by “politics” at the time of the Revolution: the struggles of the Constitutional Congress, diplomacy with France, the danger of factions, the rise of the Federalists, and the opposition of Democrat-Republicans. Considerations of form expand the range of the political. To speak about form and politics, as Jameson does, is not to suggest that literature properly belongs in the domain of what historians or political scientists consider political. Jameson is not asking that literature be classed with more empirically minded disciplines. The goal is not to change the look and feel of literature so that it can appear as social science. Rather, the goal is to shift definitions of politics so that matters like choosing to express one’s thoughts via a poem or a pamphlet are themselves seen as a commentary on social content.

In other words, settling on a form is neither a matter of stylistic idiosyncrasy nor a purely creative decision but is instead a political act par excellence. Jameson underscores this point by reversing the conventional wisdom about form and content. As opposed to viewing form as something that sets the initial pattern to be filled by content as, say, when wine is decanted into a Grecian urn or words arranged into a sonnet, we should see what happens if we consider form “as that with which we end up, as but the final articulation of the deeper logic of the content itself” (Jameson 328–9). One might go farther still: form is a dynamic process, an ongoing adjustment to and engagement with social and historical content. The choice of the sonnet is itself political even if selecting one form over another seems primarily a question of either functionality (“A sonnet is the best way to express my love”) or taste (“I just like sonnets”) that can be easily put to rest. Just as it makes a difference whether talk of politics at the water cooler or in the bedroom comes as a screed or as a supplication, so too the most fundamental consideration for critical readers is whether literature’s engagement with taxation, prisons (to allude once more to the somewhat mundane range of Freneau’s poetic topics), love, or other issues takes shape as a poem or a treatise.

But in what ways do such choices make a difference? If the preference of one form over another itself stands forth as an expression of social content, if the choice of poetry over prose resonates with potential political significance, then what content is being expressed and what sort of politics are being signified? These questions are potentially rather incautious ones, leading to dubious but familiar assertions about the reactionary nature of diatribes or the progressive nature of the avant-garde. Still, such questions need to be asked lest criticism and interpretation seem mired in an approach to form that proceeds on a case-by-case basis, much as New Criticism often tended to fixate on a poem or New Historicism regularly zeroed in on the cultural history of a novel without treating form as a matter of cultural history, too. In his work on “the sociology of literary forms,” Franco Moretti has undertaken this task by linking literary and social convention. Literature, for Moretti, seeks to “secure consent” (Signs 27), and aesthetic forms are useful precisely in shaping and smoothing conflicts and tensions striating the sociopolitical sphere. Form bends people to the bitter facts of existence: it makes us contented, but with the important proviso that since happiness “is increasingly hard to attain in everyday life, a ‘form’ becomes necessary which can in some way guarantee its existence” (33). From this perspective, form is the afterimage of conflict that has been reconciled and managed; it marks a social suture, indicating the “spot” where aesthetic techniques have been called into the service of restoring an image of consensus. The overall thrust of this argument is that literary form serves a generally conservative function, not by eliminating social tensions altogether, but by expressing them in ways that allow people to adjust themselves to economic, political, social, or existential unpleasantness. Literary form, in short, teaches us that everything is copasetic, and if we accept that proposition then, we are more likely to be happy with the existing state of affairs and our place within it.

Since advancing these claims, Moretti has approached literary form with more nuance, no longer treating it as pure or unchanging to the point that all form fulfills a more or less univocal political mission of exemplifying consensus. Seeking to understand the distinction between novelistic and poetic form, he poses a question so simple and fundamental that it is often left unasked: “Why are novels in prose?” (“The Novel” 111). He begins with some broad observations about the political and formal differences between poems and novels, which bear upon the politicized readings that are so central to American literary study. Like Jameson, Moretti is not focusing on politics at the level of legislation or other specific is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Forms
• Part II: Spaces
• Part III: Practices
• Index
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