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Cism can produce a “coherent and integrated story about our literary past.” Even the work of revision is supported (or, in the case of the coming new American literary histories, made possible) by publishers whose commitment to intellectual exploration must necessarily vie with their commercial interest in supplying what an audience already knows it wants. It should not be surprising, therefore, that, amidst all their prescriptions for the ills of the field, the New Orthodoxy leaves the enabling project of American literary scholarship inviolate.
In doing so, the New Orthodoxy plants itself squarely within the tradition. Despite its protestations, it continues to rely on the word “America” to provide that locus of implicit coherence, that critical focal point about which American literary scholarship revolves and upon which it depends. Contemporary criticism has adopted a new and fashionable rhetoric, but the function of that rhetoric within the institution of American literary scholarship is the same as ever. Just as nineteenth-century Americanists invoked a discourse of national “spirit” or character and Matthiessen relied on the “possibilities of democracy” to establish the coherence of American literature, the New Orthodoxy has proposed the notion of “ideology” to unite the diversity of American particulars. They make it the middle term they need (and which all American literary criticism has sought) between history and literature.
Poised between these old antagonists ideology, like most mediators, has to wear more than one face. First, in order to justify the revisionary project in the first place, it takes a political form, as a system of ideas “in the service of power,” that arises “out of historical circumstances, and then represents [those circumstances] …as natural, universal, and right.” The notion of “re-presentation” is crucial because, by dividing cultural “reality” from its ideologically mediated appearance, it opens a place between culture and texts into which repressive power can be inserted as shaping cause. Powerful ideologies- the “relation [of
Kolodny, “The Integrity of Memory,” p. 297
See John Fekete, The Critical Twilight: Explorations in the Ideology of Anglo-American Theory from Eliot to McLuhan (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), p. xxi, and Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 144ff.