634 American Literature
Texts] to centers of cultural domination”- determine not only how texts are written but, more importantly, what texts are read and how they are read. This dramatic battle for literary power assists the revisionist program by justifying renewed attention to works that have been (unfairly) excluded by hegemonic forces. By proposing that texts do not stand above the world on an aesthetic pedestal but, on the contrary, have a worldly ideological “cause,” it enlists criticism in the cause of social justice and equality (thus aligning it, not incidentally, with traditional American democratic values) and also provides a non-formalist rationale for reading. But because this political formulation of ideology stresses conflict and fragmentation, it necessarily resists the consensus- the connected narrative about American literature- that the New Orthodoxy seeks. It privileges parts over the whole, diversity over unity and does nothing to establish the common ground necessary to the traditional project of American literary studies.
This demand for coherence has, more recently, moved some proponents of the New Orthodoxy toward an alternate version of ideology that abandons conflict for mediation. This ideology is inclusive rather than divisive. It accounts for all of the vast web of values and assumptions that constitute culture. In Sacvan Bercovitch’s terms, it “enact[s] the purposes of a society in its totality.” Compelling as this all-embracing ideology sounds, however, it begs all the questions that inspired revision in American literary studies in the first place. Like the “myth” criticism of the sixties, it is a stand-in for the “National Spirit” of nineteenth-century criticism. It neatly totalizes American culture and tames the complex diversity of texts by tying them to the complex unity of the surrounding culture, rather than to the motives of a dominant social group. But in either case, for the New Orthodoxy, ideology is the “Holy Ghost” that unites cultural “Father” to the textual “Son.” Even as proponents of the New Orthodoxy deny that they want to mean by “America” anything so simplistic or naïve as an idealized national identity,
Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology,” p. 636, The last quotation is from Tompkins, Sensational Designs, p. 30.
Bercovitch, “The Problem of Ideology,” p. 638, see also p. 647.