636 American Literature
In its complex totality.” With its gesture toward a canon of “classic writers,” this formulation reveals the deeply conservative potential lurking within the New Orthodoxy’s use of ideology to totalize American culture. It is not enough that ideology connects literature to culture. It also justifies the elevated status of “our classic writers,” who have come under attack from several quarters, by giving them something special to do. The “best” literature, the “classic” works capture that culture with a unique “richness” and completeness. Thus, they represent the traditionally American democratic union of the individual and the nation. Like Ben Franklin or Walt Whitman, they are exceptional precisely because they are so typical. Appealing as they are, these arguments ride rough-shod over all the doubts about established canons, nationalist bias, and aesthetic standards that are fundamental to the current revisionist debate in literary studies. They appeal to venerable allegiances, but remaining, as they do, within the confines of the old debate, such terms once again resurrect the old problems, even as they reproduce the reassuring and familiar old stabilities.
By repudiating a “unique American literature” and “formalist” standards, the New Orthodoxy imagines it has cleansed American literary studies in much the same way the people of Boston fancied they had expelled sin by banishing Hester to the edge of the wilderness. But like Hawthorne’s Bostonians, the New Orthodoxy is only banishing the error that it has learned to define as “other” while enacting error in another, more contemporary, form. The New Orthodoxy offers exactly what we have always had, though like every new generation of American literary scholars, it dresses it up in fashionable critical terms that conceal the worn out, but comfortably familiar, figure beneath.
As long as Americanists preserve these professional motives and subscribe to the sort of myth of American literary studies the New Orthodoxy presents, they will misconstrue American writing and the scholarship that has been dedicated since the 1870s to the peculiar task of distinguishing that writing from other writing in English. A reading of the full history of American literary scholarship suggests that the ”fall” into fragmentation the
Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology,” p. 647.