ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance Dr. David Lavery Spring 2016 Dr. David Lavery Spring 2016 ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Inventing America ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Edmundo OGorman ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? The Copernican Revolution The Discovery of Columbus America as an Invention America as Europes Dream ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? American Studies ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Perry Miller ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Richard Poirier ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Reflections on America ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? When you get there, there isn't any there there.Gertrude Stein ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? For some reason Americans are terrified of the very idea of passionate love going on past middle age. Are they afraid of being alive? Do they want to be dead, i.e., safe?May Sarton, Journal of Solitude ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? To furnish a barren room is one thing. To continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is quite another. To have failed to solve the problem of producing goods would have been to continue man in his oldest and most grievous misfortune. But to fail to see that we have solved it, and to fail to proceed to the next task, would be fully as tragic.John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Americans continually find themselves in the position of having killed someone to avoid sharing a meal which turns out to be too large to eat alone.Philip Slater, Earthwalk ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? America is striving to win power over the sum total of things, complete and absolute mastery of nature in all its aspects.... To occupy God's place, to repeat his deeds, to recreate and organize a man-made cosmos according to man-made laws of reason, foresight and efficiency: that is America's ultimate objective.... It destroys whatever is primitive, whatever grows in disordered profusion or evolved through patient mutation.Robert Jungk, Tomorrow is Already Here ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Consider to what extent an "antique" is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self just as a pine piling saturated in creosote resists corrosion by the sea and thus possesses a higher coefficient of informing power for the naught of self. If you say that a writing table made by Thomas Sheraton is of value because it is excellently made and beautiful, how would you go about making a writing table now that would be similarly prized as an antique two hundred years from now? The real question of course is whether the twentieth- century self is different from the eighteenth-century self, both in its reliance on "antiques" to inform itself and in its ability to make a writing table which is graceful and useful and for no other reason. Was a well-to-do eighteenth-century Englishman content to buy a Sheraton writing table, or would he have preferred a fifteenth-century "antique"?Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Why is it almost impossible to gaze directly at the Grand Canyon under these circumstances [as a sightseer] and see it for what it isas one picks up a strange object from one's back yard and gazes directly at it? It is almost impossible because the Grand Canyon, the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer's mind. Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is seeing the symbolic complex head on. The thing is no longer the thing as it confronted the Spaniard; it is rather that which has already been formulated by picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders, and the words Grand Canyon. As a result of this preformulation, the source of the sightseer's pleasure undergoes a shift. Where the wonder and delight of the Spaniard arose from his penetration of the thing itself, from a progressive discovery of depths, patterns, colors, shadows, etc., now the sightseer measures his satisfaction by the degree to which the canyon conforms to the preformed complex. If it does so, if it looks just like the postcard, he is pleased; he might even say, "Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!" He feels he has not been cheated.... Is looking like sucking: the more lookers, the less there is to see? --Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? At different times in our history, different cities have been the focal point of a radiating American spirit. In the late eighteenth century, for example, Boston was the center of a political radicalism that ignited a shot heard round the world a shot that could not have been fired any other place but the suburbs of Boston.... In the mid-nineteenth century, New York became the symbol of the idea of a melting-pot America or at least a non-English one as the wretched refuse from all over the world disembarked at Ellis Island and spread over the land their strange languages and even stranger ways. In the early twentieth century, Chicago, the city of big shoulders and heavy winds, came to symbolize the industrial energy and dynamism of America.... Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? The commonly accepted notion that Americans are materialists is pure bunk. A materialist is one who loves material, a person devoted to the enjoyment of the physical and immediate present. By this definition, most Americans are abstractionists. They hate material, and convert it as swiftly as possible into mountains of junk and clouds of poisonous gas. As a people, our ideal is to have a future, and so long as this is true we shall never have a present. --Alan Watts, Does It Matter? ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Someone once wrote a definition of the difference between English and American humor.... He said that the English treat the commonplace as if it were remarkable and the Americans treat the remarkable as if it were commonplace. --James Thurber ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? If America didn't have Blacks it would be Switzerland. Attributed to Roy Blount ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? American life is a powerful solvent. --George Santayana ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? A new, unsteady kind of creature lurches forth on the deserted streets of America these days. It is the Walking Driver. You can tell immediately that these beings are not true pedestrians: they waddle, they are unsteady, they have little back-of-the-head vision, they seem unused to the true weight of their bodies. They are not bipeds, nor are they four-legged creatures; they are semi- bipeds, sitting, folded creatures. A Martian observing the lunch hour in one of our cities said to me that an American without a car is gravely ill, like a snail that lost its shell. In fact, an American body is only a "body" when it is inside an automobile. What we see "walking" is only part of the body Andrei Codrescu, "The New Body ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? The American body, my friend explained, is an aggregation of man and machine. The latest addition to it is the computer. Very soon, a body not seated in front of a blinking screen can be considered as ill as a body outside of a car. My Martian friend, who has been a passionate observer of Homo Americanus since the nineteenth century, foresees a day when all newly born humans will have a plug inserted in the small of their back. There is no doubt that the new symbiosis has occurred. --Andrei Codrescu, "The New Body ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? "America's critical role in the planetization of humanity does seem to be that of the catalytic enzyme that breaks down all the traditional cultures of the world, be they Asiatic, Islamic, or European. With Disneyland in Paris and Tokyo, the United States is well on its way to dissolving all the world cultures, and I do not think any nativistic revolt of Islam will succeed in stopping it any more than Marxist-Leninism did." (79) --William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? For what underlay our clearing of the continent were the ancient fears and divisions that we brought to the New World along with the primitive precursors of the technology that would assist in transforming the continent. Haunted by these fears, driven by our divisions, we slashed and hacked at the wilderness we saw so that within three centuries of Cortes's penetration of the mainland a world millions of years in the making vanished into the voracious, insatiable maw of an alien civilization. Musing on this time scale, one begins to sense the enormity of what we brought to our entrance here. And one begins to sense also that it was here in America that Western man became loosed into a strange, ungovernable freedom so that what we now live amidst is the culminating artifact of the civilization of the West. --Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? The View from Abroad ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.... in most of the operations of mind, each American appeals only to the individual effort of his own understanding Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? America is therefore one of the countries where the precepts of Descartes are least studied, and are best applied. Nor is this surprising. The Americans do not read the work of Descartes, because their social conditions deter them from speculative studies; but they follow his maxims, because this same social condition naturally disposes their minds to adopt them. In the midst of the continual movement which agitates a democratic community, the tie which unites one generation to another is relaxed or broken; every man there readily loses all trace of the ideas of his forefathers, or takes no care about them.... Americans are constantly brought back to their own reason as the obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence in his fellow man which is destroyed, but the disposition for trusting the authority of any man whatsoever. Every one shuts himself up in his own breast, and affects from that point to judge the world. --Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? The distinctive vice of the new world is already beginning to infect old Europe with its ferocity and is spreading a lack of spirituality like a blanket. Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always might "miss out on something." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? There is no country on earth where the "power-word," the magic-formula, the slogan or advertisement is more effective than in America. We Europeans laugh about this, but we forget that faith in the magical power of the word can move more than mountains. Christ himself was a word, the Word. We have become estranged from this psychology, but in the American it is still alive. It has yet to be seen what America will do with it. Thus the American presents a strange picture: A European with Negro behavior and an Indian soul. He shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil. Certain Australian primitives assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor- spirits who reincarnate themselves in the newborn. There is a great psychological truth in this.... C. G. Jung, "Mind and Earth" ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? The foreign land assimilates its conqueror. But unlike the Latin conquerors of Central and South America, the North Americans preserved their European standards with the most rigid Puritanism, though they could not prevent the souls of their Indian foes from becoming theirs. Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of its indigenous inhabitants. Thus, in the American, there is a discrepancy between conscious and unconscious that is not found in the European, a tension between an extremely high conscious level of culture and an unconscious primitivity. This tension forms a psychic potential which endows the American with an indomitable spirit of enterprise and an enviable enthusiasm which we in Europe do not know. The very fact that we still have our ancestral spirits, and that for us everything is steeped in history, keeps us in contact with our unconscious, but we are so caught in this contact and held so fast in the historical vice that the greatest catastrophes are needed to wrench us loose and to change our political behavior from what it was five hundred years ago. ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Our contact with the unconscious chains us to the earth and makes it hard for us to move, and this is certainly no advantage when it comes to progressiveness and all the other desirable motions of the mind. Nevertheless I would not speak ill of our relation to good Mother Earth. Plurimi per transibunt; but he who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being. C. G. Jung, "Mind and Earth" ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Europe visibly aspires to be governed by an American commission. Its entire policy is directed to that end. Not knowing how to rid ourselves of our history, we will be relieved of it by a fortunate people who have almost none. They are a happy people and they will force their happiness on us. Paul Valery ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? A character in Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags said that the difference between prewar and postwar life was that, prewar, if one thing went wrong the day was ruined; postwar, if one thing went right the day would be made. America is a prewar country, psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong. --Anthony Burgess, "Is America Falling Apart? ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? The Japanese may make all the televisions but the Americans make all the images. ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? America and the Ersatz ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.... A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers.... Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things. --Rainer Maria Rilke ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Jean Baudrillard ( ). French sociologist, communication theorist, and media critic. ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared. But so obsessive is it that you go on hearing it behind the voice of Reagan or the Marines disaster in Beirut. Even behind the adverts. It is the monster from Alien prowling around in all the corridors of the spaceship. it is the sarcastic exhilaration of a puritan culture. In other countries the business of laughing is left to the viewers. here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation. (49) ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? The glass facades merely reflect the environment, sending back its own image. This makes them much more formidable than any wall of stone. It's just like people who wear dark glasses. Their eyes are hidden and other see only their own reflection. Everywhere the transparency of interfaces in internal refraction. Everything pretentiously termed 'communication' and 'interaction'walkman, dark glasses, automatic household appliances, hi-tech cars, even the perpetual dialogue with the computerends up with each monad retreating into the shade of its own formula, into its self-regulating little corner and its artificial immunity." (59-60) ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. it is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared). (50) ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? In America the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in man's artificial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles... has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd.... "The skylines lit up at night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night. There is some truth in all this. But what is striking is the fascination with artifice, with energy and space. (50-51) ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? From a historical standpoint, America is weightless. (52) ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? Europeans experience anything relating to statistics as tragic. They immediately read in them their individual failure and take refuge in pained denunciation of the merely quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as representing the dimensions of their good fortune, their joyous membership of the majority. Theirs is the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction. ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? In the future, power will belong to those peoples with no origins and no authenticity.... Look at Japan, which to a certain extent has pulled off this trick better than the US itself, managing in what seems to us an unintelligible paradox, to transform the power of territoriality and feudalism into that of deterritoriality and weightlessness. Japan is already a satellite of the planet Earth. but America was already in its day a satellite of the planet Europe. Whether we like it or not, the future has shifted towards artificial satellites. ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it. --Mark Twain ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect-- we even demand--that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on our car radio as we drive to work and expect "news" to have occurred since the morning paper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We expect our two week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway place. We expect new heroes every month, a new literary masterpiece every week, a rare sensation every night.... ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America? We expect everything and anything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical.... We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly... to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people been more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could possibly offer. (3-4; my emphasis) ENGL 4310: The American Renaissance America?