The Extra 635
They go on treating their ideologically saturated “America” in the same old way, assuming, as Americanists have always assumed, that whatever innovations appeared during the turmoil of the mid-nineteenth century (or the revolution, or the Puritan migration) they were somehow “American.” In the light of their professional rather than their political implications, both of the apparently opposed versions of ideology proposed by the New Orthodoxy reveal a continuing commitment to the project of disciplinary self-definition that is American literary scholarship.
This ideological link to culture appeals, of course, by appearing to ground texts in the real, the concrete, in society. But the New Orthodoxy cannot so easily throw off the toils of interpretation. Ideology is not an objective force operating within a particular national culture, as the New Orthodoxy suggests to justify and American cultural literature. On the contrary, ideology is something interpreters discern in human practices (including texts) after the fact. To see this is to see the that New Orthodoxy would tie literature to culture through ideology by the force of tautology. Its literary and its ideological interpretations unfailingly support each other, because both are produced by the same interpreter. Such self-fulfilling prophecy has a long pedigree in American literary studies. From the first, Americanists have selected their texts and formulated their interpretations to fit prevailing assumptions about “America.” By shifting the focus of literary studies from art to culture, the New Orthodoxy reflects the anxieties of a discipline struggling to seem more relevant, but in fact its program simply reenacts the very problems it wants to solve. The practical consequences of that process are the same whether “America” is imagined in the nationalistic terms we now find distasteful or in the more stylish contemporary discourse of ideology and rhetoric.
Moreover, in this most recent incarnation, “culture” seems to appear in surprisingly conservative contexts. “Our classic writers,” Bercovitch asserts, “were accomplices of the culture
Tompkins, Sensational Designs, pp. xiv-xvi; also see Bercovitch, “The Problems of Ideology,” pp. 642-43. The familiar terms of these discussions illustrate the continuing involvement of the New Orthodoxy in the mission that has characterized American literary studies from the first, the effort to reveal what is truly American in American writing.