638 American Literature
Be clear that orthodoxies, with their firm formulations and reassuring rhetoric, can only stifle inquiry. We should not rush to establish new stabilities before we have exorcised the pervasive and still potent ghosts of the old. Among other things, banishing those ghosts means giving up the comfortable assumptions that, embodied in the word “America,” have both shaped the questions Americanists ask and supplied the answers.
If American literary studies is to escape the dead end created by its repeated substitution of art for culture and culture for art, Americanists need to learn how to make the connections they have always sought between literature and society without sacrificing on to the other. An idealized literature has not afforded literary scholars safe harbor, nor has a hypostatized “culture” provided a solid ground to which they could moor their conclusions. Imagining a useful articulation of literature and culture means reconceiving both terms, and that job will be difficult enough without the extra baggage of an a priori professional obligation to the word “America.” The long-term project of reconceiving literary history is changing the work of scholars in many fields. To take part in that change, Americanists will have to repeal the articles of scholarly faith that built the institution of American literary history.