The Extra 631
Aesthetic formalism was adopted, in part, as one such strategy, designed to correct deficiencies in existing critical practice. One of the reasons the previous generation of American scholars introduced formalist concerns into the discussion of American writing was their recognition that the cultural bias pervading American literary studies in the twenties and thirties would make literature representative by making it redundant, one more item in the catalog of cultural artifacts. By urging Americanists to turn back to culture, the New Orthodoxy has not initiated a new line of inquiry in American literary history as it imagines. It has simply become the most recent voice in a familiar conversation. Despite all the changes behind the current wave of revision, Americanists are still caught, as they have always been, between the nationalist demands of their particular field and the aesthetic assumptions of the profession at large.
If scholarship is going to increase its attention to the historical forces, social and institutional, that have shaped American literary studies, it seems at best safely “academic” and at worst a sort of scholarly scape-goating to focus on such comparatively rarified, intellectual issues as the impact of aesthetic formalism. Efforts to do so evade the fact that American literary studies has not, for the most part, taken its modern shape in the service of anything so broad and abstract as a cultural “ideology”. It has been driven since the thirties not by the nationalism of aestheticism the New Orthodoxy attacks in its mythic history, but by the need to define itself as a distinct professional field. The reiterated claims of the New Orthodoxy to novelty and political justice repress not only the fear (widespread among scholars) that literary history is passe, but also a continuing allegiance to unacknowledged professional imperatives as deep and (for the past forty years or so) more formative for American literary studies than the political and aesthetic ones current criticism has repudiated. During that period, American literary studies has achieved acknowledged status within literary studies in general and become a self-justifying professional practice, shaped to serve the interests of a (by now) well-established and successful academic sub-group. The consistent feature of American literary scholarship ever since Moses Coit Tyler had to become a professor of American history in order to study American literature