Person:

Buell, Lawrence

Never has there been a better moment for foreign scholars outside the English-speaking world to engage in American literature studies. American literature studies is increasingly studied worldwide and the contributions of foreign-born and foreign-based Americanists are becoming increasingly influential. This lecture will attempt to explain this turn of events, with special emphasis on analysis of selected newer transnational and comparative approaches to American literature studies. Background factors contributing to the emergence of these new approaches will be surveyed briefly. These include the changing demography of American academia, the challenges to the traditional canon from within American literary studies of the 1970s and after, and the rise of new historicism, postcolonialism, and critical race studies. The lecture will concentrate especially, however, on defining the types of approach employed by the newer transnational Americanist scholarship. These will be illustrated by describing a number of recent books and articles that suggest the promise of these approaches. Five broad, overlapping initiatives will be defined: (1) author-focused studies that broaden the critical horizon of understanding beyond the scope of the national; (2) projects focusing on linguistic translation or cross-cultural communication; (3) studies of circulation of texts and cross-cultural influences within international zones (the Atlantic world, the transpacific world, the Americas); (4) projects that address cultural mobility on a global scale; and (5) ecocritical studies of transnational environmental interdependencies or affinities. Most, as we shall see, are quite heterogeneous. Within most we find considerable methodological diversity and debate.

Since prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late-nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans' changing relationship to the natural world. Only since the early 1990s, however, has the long-standing interest of literature studies in these matters generated the initiative most commonly known as “ecocriticism,” an eclectic and loosely coordinated movement whose contributions thus far have been most visible within its home discipline of literature but whose interests and alliances extend across various art forms and media. In such areas as the study of narrative and image, ecocriticism converges with its sister disciplines in the humanities: environmental anthropology, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. In the first two sections, we begin with a brief overview of the nature, significance, and evolution of literature-environment studies. We then summarize in more detail six specific centers of interest: (a) the imagination of place and place-attachment, (b) the enlistment and critique of models of scientific inquiry in the study of literature and the arts, (c) the examination of the significance of gender difference and environmental representation, (d) the cross-pollination of ecocritical and postcolonial scholarship as ecocriticism has extended its horizons beyond its original focus on Anglo-American imagination, (e) ecocriticism's evolving interest in indigenous art and thought, and (f) ecocri-ticism's no less keen and complex attentiveness to artistic representation and the ethics of relations between humans and animals.

Just as patriot orators invoked the spirit of Puritanism in their remonstrances against British tyranny, just as the nineteenth-century cult of Pilgrimism taught all America to look back upon the Pilgrim fathers as everyone's fathers, so modern American intellectual history has proclaimed the Puritan origins of the American way. The result has been a scholarly upsurge, during the past half-century, of “Puritan legacy” studies, of which Perry Miller was the prime mover and Sacvan Bercovitch is the leading contemporary theorist. So far as the interpretation of literary history is concerned, these studies have given a new authority and depth to the old New England-centered map of American literary tradition first drawn up by the Yankee-oriented genteel intellectual establishment of the late nineteenth century that presided over the literary institutions whose prestige had been built upon the reputation of the perpetrators of the antebellum New England Renaissance. The old-fashioned interpretation of American literary history and the new-fashioned interpretation of American civil religion as a nationalized version of Puritan ideology have combined to create a strong presumption, at least for specialists in New England Romantic literature, that theirs was the key formative moment in American literary history as a whole.

Examines the forms of public reverence for American author Henry David Thoreau. Testimony of author John Muir; Focus on the theme of pilgrimage; Emphasis on the concept of Transcendental Concord.