Between Experimentation and Tradition: Two Visions of American Identity

• Other Authors: Higgs, Christopher (authoraut)
• Format: Others
• Language: English; English
• Published: Florida State University
• Subjects: English literature; English language
• Online Access: http://purl.flvc.org/fsu/fd/FSU_migr_etd-9006

This study reexamines the unresolved American literary debate between traditional and experimental writing practices from the early twentieth century to today. By tracing what I consider to be the key episodes in this ongoing debate across three historical periods--The Modernist Moment, The Postmodernist Moment, and The Contemporary Moment--I demonstrate how this persistent antagonism is intrinsically linked to the construction and representation of American identity. I examine the origin of this debate by foregrounding "The Little Renaissance," a term I borrow from historian Arthur Frank Wertheim which he uses to describe the reconstruction of American culture that took place during the second decade of the twentieth century. As the catalyst for this cultural upheaval, I cite George Santayana's 1911 lecture entitled "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," which sets the terms of the debate for the first time by codifying the genteel tradition as the source of antagonism that engenders the proponents of the Little Renaissance. Through an analysis of the major figures in this often-overlooked strand of modernism, including Van Wyck Brooks, H.L. Menken, and William Carlos Williams, I demonstrate the emergence of a tension between those who desire to forge new literary terrain and those who desire to recuperate received terrain, and most importantly I show how this tension explicitly converges on issues of national identity. I follow the thread engendered by the Little Renaissance to investigate its instantiation in William Gass and John Gardner's public debate in 1978 and the publication of Tom Wolfe's realist manifesto in 1989. Using Andreas Huyssen's notion of an "alternative postmodernism" to examine arguments by writers such as Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman in comparison to John Barth and John Hawkes, I explore the intervening years between the Gass/Gardner debate and the Wolfe manifesto to uncover the diversity of approaches to experimental practices. Of particular note in this section is my observation regarding the trend of the antagonism moving toward suppressing or diminishing the explicit connection to the construction and representation of national identity. I resume my examination of the debate as it manifests in the new millennium through the publication of three antagonistic essays--by B.R. Myers, Dale Peck, and Jonathan Franzen, chronologically--which attempt to recuperate values associated one hundred years earlier with the genteel tradition. These essays provoke a host of heated rebuttals, led by a spirited proclamation by Ben Marcus defending the virtues of experimentation. While various critics sound their exasperation over what they perceive to be yet another repetitive instance of an age-old argument, I demonstrate how this contemporary version of the debate resembles and deviates from previous versions. Most importantly, the issue of national identity seems to recede into the background in the twenty-first century. While no longer explicitly visible in the same ways it had been in earlier versions of this debate, I contest that it remains an impactful subtext that continues to drive the debate. === A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. === Summer Semester, 2014. === June 16, 2014. === Includes bibliographical references. === R. M. Berry, Professor Directing Dissertation; Joseph Hellweg, University Representative; Andrew Epstein, Committee Member; S. E. Gontarski, Committee Member.