THE NATURE AND POSSIBILITIES OF AMERICAN STUDIES

Those of us who gather together for either a national or a regional meeting of the American Studies Association are at times bewildered as well as invigorated by the variety of fields we represent and the diversity of our means and instruments for bringing these fields together. Most of us seek for a formula. Most of the others ask us to define our "discipline," -- that word which is so useful both as a cloak and a club. But the question might well be asked whether unanimity ....

Note at foot of first page.

In a somewhat different form, the talk was also given as the opening address for the third biennial meeting of the Australian-New Zealand American Studies Association, in Sydney, Australia, in August 1968.

Those of us who gather together for either a national or a regional meeting of the American Studies Association are at times bewildered as well as invigorated by the variety of fields we represent and the diversity of our means and instruments for bringing these fields together. Most of us seek for a formula. Most of the others ask us to define our "discipline," -- that word which is so useful both as a cloak and a club. But the question might well be asked whether unanimity of method and conclusion is an essential part of the nature of American Studies. I should myself, I think, answer no. I look on the strength of American Studies as lying both in its openmindedness and its openendedness. Only with this strength can one approach the American experience which in itself is still so openended, so flexible, so pragmatic (even when clumsily pragmatic). So difficult to understand is this American experience that we need an alertness to innovation. We must discover fresh ways of using our knowledge. Is our older way of approach adequate to the needs of our time? In what context are we to place our knowledge? Knowledge consists of knowing not only data but the significance of data. The present world so presses in on us today that we cannot be ignorant either of what goes on or what went on. We understand the past as it relates to the present. We tend to seek out from the past what is relevant to our needs and our situation. This is not to disfranchise our past but to put it in its place. Fortunately its place is both valuable and necessary. The past is entitled to vote, but its vote is not a divine majority. It is only one of the factors that operate upon us. American Studies by nature is not a training ground for intellectual

Note: In a somewhat different form, the talk was also given as the opening address for the third biennial meeting of the Australian-New Zealand American Studies Association, in Sydney, Australia, in August 1968.

2.

docility but for independence and originality. If we accept the past, as we well
should, we do so independently and always with fresh insights and beginnings.

The American urge or drift towards American Studies began as is well known
with a dissatisfaction at the fragmentation of knowledge. There was a sense
that a university had begun to cease being a uni-versity. What was being
intensified by American Studies was an extension of the belief of a nineteenth-
century Englishman like Ruskin, a belief significantly accepted, for Americans,
by a man like Charles Eliot Norton, that art was the reflection of the political,
social and moral order of a nation. Thus each was the mirror of the others.
Each order involved each other order. Carried over into academic fields, and
deprived of the more overt moralistic tone of Ruskin's belief, the sense of
interrelationships and interdependence of components, or mirrors, of a culture
seemed more scientific but none the less coercive. The sense of interrelationships
was, for example, strengthened by the articulation of socio-anthropology, and
by an understanding of the unpredictable inter-involvements of individual and
social psychology and psychiatry. Especially significant has been the increasing
awareness of the principle of ecology which is rapidly breaking down the
earlier formal distinctions between the branches of the physical sciences. Law,
(at least in the United States), is increasingly conceived of as a social
instrument rather than as an abstractable entity. How can one understand the
instrumental quality of law without knowing something of the society it serves?
Business operates within a society and responds to its pressures. The business
executive must be alive to his culture; so must the economist, especially the
historical economist. Academic walls are constantly tumbling in the development
of area studies. So are they in the teaching of language, the basis of
communication. American Studies is one way, at least, of working from culture
to language, or from language to culture. What we search for in the broadest

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symbolic sense, (a sense which unites the various fields), is to learn a
necessary interdisciplinary language. The intention of American Studies is
not to replace the important disciplinary work of the institutionalized departments
but to strengthen ourselves by providing new opportunities for cooperation by
scholars in a variety of disciplines. The nature of American Studies is not
exclusive, but inclusive. American Studies helps a university to regain its
true nature.

Much has been made by various critics of the apparent failure of American
Studies to produce "a distinctive method in interdisciplinary studies." It
is another way of bringing up the nagging question of whether American Studies
has or has not a discipline. I must at once confess that I cannot define a
discipline. As a professional student of history I know of no single
discipline common to the multiplicity of problems with which historians
concern themselves. Nor, as a professional student of literature and a member
of an English department, can I even guess what discipline unites the historian
of language and the aesthetician, the editor of texts and the explicator of
tragedy. There are skills, but skills are not a discipline.

As a graduate student who took his doctorate in History, Arts and Letters
I was deeply influenced by my work with Malinowski, from whose Trobriand
Islanders I tried to learn what questions to ask of the American Long Islanders.
Later, defending American Studies against the accusation that it lacked a
discipline, I used to lecture on what I called an interdisciplinary discipline.
Indeed I probably still feel that the closest approximation to the so-called
discipline of an already orthodox field would be to socio-anthropology. This
is what I should call the "distinctive" approach which the University of
Pennsylvania has adopted under the leadership of Professors Garvan and
Murphey. But I myself soon found any close adherence to the socio-

4.

-anthropological framework too confining, and I burned my lecture notes without forgetting their lessons. Socio-anthropology is but one of the many ways of American Studies.

I think of Harvard's different way, where the relationships of literature and history are stressed and in whose doctoral program such creative scholars as Henry Nash Smith, Daniel Aaron and Edmund Morgan have been trained. These men operate with special skills on material which is widely drawn from many fields. They have been original.

I think of the University of Hawaii which in its graduate program, under Seymour Lutzky and Reuel Denney, "stresses the relations between American civilization and the civilizations of Asia, with special emphasis on those problems in American life which present difficult and current problems both in the United States and in Asian countries." This seems broad enough even for a man like Professor Denney who has written prize-winning poetry, a critical study of Conrad Aiken, shared the authorship of *The Lonely Crowd*, and been a Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. This is scope.

I think too of the University of Texas, where its program of American Studies includes the relationships between the United States of North America and the Central and Middle American countries, and where Hartley Grattan's great collection of Australiana gives the potentiality for the study of relationships between two continents with interesting parallels of background. Its Chairman, William Goetzmann, is known as a historian of the American West in terms of nineteenth-century scientific exploration. His second book, which won both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft Prizes in American history was a development of his dissertation in American Studies at Yale. He is a still different interdisciplinary "progeny."

5.

At the University of Buffalo, Lawrence Chisolm has established a new program in American Studies, organized largely in terms of his article published in *American Studies in Transition*, called "Cosmotopian Possibilities: American Studies as Comparative Cultural History." Chisolm's doctoral dissertation was published as *Fenellosa: The Far East and American Culture*, and he has recently completed a three-year research fellowship on Chinese language, history and general culture. Buffalo's program, like the others, will have its own identity, its own way of getting at things.

They all illustrate a concept of American Studies which does not stand or fall on the quarrel over a discipline, or perhaps even a single distinctive method. They represent a potentiality, open to all of you, to discover one thing and then do it. Almost nothing has been done within American Studies which might not have been accomplished within any one of the more traditional fields of instruction or research. Indeed the majority of those who hold doctorates in American Studies do not go into similar programs but into orthodox departments of history and literature which become a little less orthodox because of their presence. That is doing one's thing too. That is one of the possibilities, and the justifications of American Studies.

Possibilities can be generalized from particulars. My particulars come out of my experience at Yale; they will have to be translated into your own situation or situations. Let me cite a few examples of the liberating effect of American Studies on the undergraduate Yale curriculum. American Studies provides a course in "The History of Religion in American Life and Thought." American philosophy, in comparison with classical and European philosophy once seemed trivial to majors in philosophy and their instructors. The American Studies budget provided the funds and the American Studies majors provided

6.

the majority of students. In the end, philosophy majors crowded in. Now it is listed as a philosophy course. Such a change had been made possible by the viability of a non-discipline. In History of Art, the situation was almost the same. American art and architecture seemed trivial beside the study of classical and European art. But courses in American art, sustained by American Studies, have by being good become significant. The professor of American art has now been named Director of the newly established Paul Mellon Center for British Art and British Studies, based on the gift to Yale of Mr. Mellon's priceless collection of paintings and illustrated books. For Mr. Mellon's gift also includes chairs for the study of British culture, and the earlier experimental example of the American Studies Program was meaningful.

Courses in economics, as economics became increasingly econometric, became less and less available to upper-classmen and graduate students who were not taking degrees in economics. Yet both for the average student and for the historian increasingly aware of economic influences, some generally available course in economics was desirable. For this reason American Studies sponsored "The Structure of the American Economy", taught by an economist but focused otherwise than for majors in economics.

American Studies being more flexible, perhaps because it does not insist on being a discipline, can afford to experiment. The area of what is now called "Afro-American Studies" is a case in point. In 1955 Robert Bone did as his dissertation in American Studies what became *The Negro Novel in America*, now recognized as the best study of an increasingly important subject. To some members of the English Department, however, the genre was invalid, -- "We do not write about novels by red-headed authors," they said. There is an abstract justification to such an opinion. But life is not abstract.

7.

the topics related to life. For seven years, American Studies has offered a senior seminar on :The Negro in American History." it now offers one on "Black Literature." They help to provide a core of academic experience for Afro-American Studies.

American Studies has also presented a seminar on "The Urban Tradition in American Thought and Literature," described as "a discussion of major American attitudes toward the city and of the major metaphors and literary themes by which such attitudes have been traditionally expressed. Emphasis is placed," so the statement reads, "on major novelists, poets, and social and religious thinkers writing before 1900, but analytical tools will be drawn from recent scholarship in literature, intellectual history and sociology."

Such a drawing together of sources and resources can be done, and the results can be exciting. Urban studies have been fostered by urban realities. Urban Studies, like Afro-American Studies, has become itself a major.

All of these innovations are appropriate to the nature of American Studies. They are possibilities which have become consequences. American Studies in its nature has something to do with America; it has even more to do with the principles of education. American Studies is what you make of it, what you wish to make of it. It has to do with your eyes and what you see and what you do with America. That is to say, American Studies is what we do with ourselves.

Mr. Ambassador, the Vice Chancellor of Sydney University, the Vice Chancellor of Macquerie, Professor Harper, Dr. Meaney, fellow scholars, it is an honor and a privilege for me to be here with you today at this third biennial meeting of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association. And I am deeply grateful to the Australian-American Educational Foundation not only for making my attendance today possible, but also for enabling me to visit a number of the Australian universities and to familiarize myself with their achievements. I am equally grateful to the Committee of Vice Chancellors of the Universities of New Zealand and to the United States Educational Foundation in New Zealand for the fortnight's similar visit I shall make there, after this conference.

But it is chiefly my privilege today officially to bring you the greetings of the United States American Studies Association, its regional groups and its individual members. Professor Boorstin, Vice President of our Association, and Professor Weinstein, one of our active younger members, join with me, as President, in expressing the warmth of fellowship we feel between your group and ours. That you should be holding your third biennial meeting is in itself significant of the sustained interest everywhere in the study of America, and the recognition that in the American experience all of us have a relevant mirror of ourselves and of our involvements in the still basically unknown, contemporary world in which we all live.

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The publication of *Pacific Circle* at this time,
with the papers from your last meeting, is significant too,
not only in the excellence and variety of its contributions
but in the additional evidence it gives of the fraternity of
scholarship. American contributors like Max Savelle, Richard
Wade, Samuel Morse and Richard Current have been your colleagues
in the truest sense. There have been others before them; there
will be many more to come in the future. Happily for Americans,
there are increasing numbers of Australians and New Zealanders
who do us the honor of visiting the States, working in our
libraries, and being colleagues with us there. The Pacific
circle is increasingly a true circle.

Indeed *Pacific Circle* is itself an example of the
nature and possibilities of American Studies, the subject on
which I have been asked to speak. These particular topics
have been most ably discussed in the articles by Professor
Harper and by the Vice Chancellor of Canterbury. Quite
properly by them the field has been divided between American
Studies in the United States, and American Studies in the
United Kingdom, in Australia and New Zealand. As Americans,
Americans are looking at themselves, as everyone everywhere
ought to do. But you are looking across at someone else, as
everyone everywhere ought also to do. To a certain degree,
therefore, the definition of the nature and possibilities of
American Studies will differ between us. In fact one is tempted
to suggest that at some future biennial meeting of ANZASA your

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guests might be a representative from the American Studies Association of Great Britain and a representative from the similar organization in Canada. This would provide an invaluable opportunity for comparison of methods of instruction as well as of scholarly conclusions.

It would not provide unanimity. Australians and New Zealanders would not and could not look at the United States through British or Canadian eyes. You have your own eyes and they are part of your strength, just as the others find their strength in their eyes. But many of their problems are shared by you, even if the solutions differ.

The question might well be asked whether unanimity of method and conclusion is an essential part of the nature of American Studies. I should myself, I think, answer no. I look on the strength of American Studies as lying both in its openmindedness and its openendedness. Only with this strength can one approach the American experience which in itself is still so openended, so flexible, so pragmatic (even when clumsily pragmatic). So difficult to understand is this American experience (which I have suggested to be in some sense a mirror of the condition of us all) that we need an alertness to innovation. We must discover fresh ways of using our knowledge. Is our older way of approach adequate to the needs of our time? In what context are we to place our knowledge? Knowledge consists of knowing not only data but

-4-

the significance of data. The present world so presses in on
us today that we cannot be ignorant either of what goes on or
what went on. We understand the past as it relates to the
present. We tend to seek out from the past what is relevant
to our needs and our situation. I was chided mildly but
understandably by a secondary-school master in Queensland
because American secondary-school students knew little of
British history after the Revolution. My answer was that
after the Revolution, British history ceased to be American
history. This is not to disfranchise our common past but to
put it in its place. Fortunately its place is both valuable
and necessary. The past is entitled to vote, but its vote
is not a divine majority. It is only one of the factors
that operate upon us. American Studies by nature is not a
training ground for intellectual docility but for independence
and originality. If we accept the past, as we well should,
we do so independently and always with fresh insights and
beginnings.

The American urge or drift towards American Studies
began as is well known with a dissatisfaction at the fragmentation
of knowledge. There was a sense that a university had begun to
cease being a uni-versity. What was being intensified by American
Studies was an extension of the belief of a nineteenth-century
Englishman like Ruskin, a belief significantly accepted, for
Americans, by a man like Charles Eliot Norton; that art was
the reflection of the political, social and moral order of

-5-

nation. Thus each was the mirror of the others. Each order
involved each other order. Carried over into academic fields,
and deprived of the more overt moralistic tone of Ruskin's
belief, the sense of interrelationships and interdependence
of components, or mirrors, of a culture seemed more scientific
but none the less coercive. The sense of interrelationships
was, for example, strengthened by the articulation of socio-
anthropology, and by an understanding of the unpredictable
inter-involvements of individual and social psychology and
psychiatry. Especially significant has been the increasing
awareness of the principle of ecology which is rapidly
breaking down the earlier formal distinctions between the
branches of the physical sciences. Law, (at least in the
United States), is increasingly conceived of as a social
instrument rather than as an abstractable entity. How can
one understand the instrumental quality of law without knowing
something of the society it serves? Business operates within
a society and responds to its pressures. The business
executive must be alive to his culture; so must the economist,
especially the historical economist. Academic walls are
constantly tumbling in the development of area studies. So
are they in the teaching language, the basis of communication.
American Studies is one way, at least, of working from culture
to language, or from language to culture. What we search for
in the broadest symbolic sense, (a sense which unites the
various fields), is to learn a necessary interdisciplinary
language. The intention of American Studies is not to replace

-6-

the important disciplinary work of the institutionalized departments, but to strengthen ourselves by providing new opportunities for cooperation by scholars in a variety of disciplines. The nature of American Studies is not exclusive, but inclusive. American Studies helps a university to regain its true nature.

At this point, certainly, it is appropriate to refer to at least some of the conclusions by Professor Harper in his paper on "American Studies in the U.S.A.", given at your last conference and now included in *Pacific Circle*. I quote from it at length not only to refresh your memory but because what he says is so relevant to the discussion of the nature and the possibilities of American Studies not only within the United States but for you. "What then," Professor Harper says, "are the implications for Australian and New Zealand Universities considering the introduction of courses in American Studies? The first point to make is, I think, that so far American Studies in the Harvard-Princeton-Amherst-Pennsylvania sense has not produced a distinctive method in interdisciplinary studies. If one conceives of American, Studies historically as the result of increasing dissatisfaction with the traditional limits or fences imposed by literary scholars and historians, as a revolt against the establishment in both fields which resulted in a shot-gun marriage, one is entitled to ask whether, after the Seven Year Itch, the marriage has produced new progeny. Methodologically, there is little to suggest that this has happened, although both

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American literature and American history have become much more sophisticated. Many of the young intellectuals of the twenties and thirties are now content with the breaking down of the walls to which Robert Frost drew attention. In some universities this is reflected in the relatively small enrolment in American Studies-American Civilization-American Institutions at the undergraduate level. Enrolments are also affected in part by the rigid limitations imposed upon entries to these courses at the honours level."

Much has been made by various criteria of the apparent I am of course struck by Professor Harper's reference to the failure to produce "a distinctive method in interdisciplinary studies." It is another way of bringing up the nagging question of whether American Studies has or has not a discipline. I must at once confess what Professor Harper and others of you know, that, I hope not by prejudice, I cannot define a discipline. As a professional student of history I know of no single discipline common to the multiplicity of problems with which historians concern themselves. Nor, as a professional student of literature and a member of an English department, can I even guess what discipline unites the historian of language and the aesthetician, the editor of texts and the explicator of tragedy. There are skills, but skills are not a discipline.

-8-

lacked a discipline, I used to lecture on what I called an
interdisciplinary discipline. Indeed I probably still feel that
the closest approximation to the so-called discipline of an
already orthodox field would be to socio-anthropology. This is
what I should call the "distinctive" approach which the
University of Pennsylvania has adopted under the leadership of
Professors Garvan and Murphey. But I myself soon found any close
adherence to the socio-anthropological framework too confining,
and I burned my lecture notes without forgetting their lessons.
Socio-anthropology is but one of the many ways of American Studies.

I think too of the University of Texas, the

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Ambassador's home state, where its program of American Studies includes the relationships between the United States of North America and the Central and Middle American countries, and where Hartley Grattan's great collection of Australiana gives the potentiality for the study of relationships between two continents. Its Chairman, William Goetzmann, is known to many of you as a historian of the American West in terms of nineteenth-century scientific exploration. His second book, which won both the Pulitzer and the Bancroft Prizes in American history was a development of his dissertation in American Studies at Yale. He is a still different "progeny."

At the University of Buffalo, Lawrence Chisolm has this September to establish a new program in American Studies, organized largely in terms of his article published in *American Studies in Transition*, called "Cosmotopian Possibilities: American Studies as Comparative Cultural History." Chisolm's doctoral dissertation at Yale was published as *Fenellosa: The Far East and American Culture*, and he has recently completed a three-year research fellowship on Chinese language, history and general culture. Buffalo's program, like the others, will have its own identity, its own way of getting at things.

They all illustrate a concept of American Studies which does not stand or fall on the quarrel over a discipline, or perhaps even a single distinctive method. Almost nothing has been done within American Studies which might not have been accomplished within any one of the more traditional fields of instruction or research. Indeed the majority of those who

-10-

Professor Harper speaks of "the relatively small enrolment in American Studies-American Civilization-American Institutions at the undergraduate level [in some institutions]." This is often true. But it is not true on just those terms at Smith College, (for women) where Professor Weinstein (another Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale) teaches; it is not true at Amherst College (certainly one of the very best of American undergraduate colleges for men); and it is not true at Yale where American Studies is usually the third or fourth largest undergraduate major. Yet even at Yale the registration in the undergraduate honors degree program is rigorously held down, in the confidence that the size of enrolment has little relevance to whether or not a field should be offered. If this were true, Classics at Yale would long since have disappeared.

-11-

provided the funds and the American Studies majors provided the majority of students. In the end, philosophy majors crowded in. Now it is listed as a philosophy course. Such a change had been made possible by the viability of a non-discipline. In History of Art, the situation was almost the same. American art and architecture seemed trivial beside the study of classical and European art. But the courses in American art, sustained by American Studies, have by being good become significant. The professor of American art has ~~just~~ now been named Director of the newly established Paul Mellon Center for British Art and British Studies, based on the gift to Yale of Mr. Mellon's priceless collection of ~~Mr. Mellon's~~ paintings and illustrated books. For his gift also includes chairs for the study of British culture, and the earlier experimental example of the American Studies Program was meaningful.

Courses in economics, as Economics became increasingly econometric, became less and less available to upper-classmen and graduate students who were not taking degrees in economics. Yet both for the average student and for the historian increasingly aware of economic influences, some generally available course in economics was desirable. For this reason American Studies sponsored "The Structure of the American Economy", taught by an economist but focused otherwise than for majors in economics. It has been a marked success.

-12-

experiment. The area of what is now called "Afro-American Studies" is a case in point. In 1955 Robert Bone did as his dissertation in American Studies what became *The Negro Novel in America*, now recognized as the best study of an increasingly important subject. To some members of the English Department, however, the genre was invalid, -- "We do not write about novels by red-headed authors," they said. There is an abstract justification to such an opinion. But life is not abstract nor are the topics related to life. For seven years, American Studies has offered a senior seminar on "The Negro in American History." It is beginning one on "Black Literature." They help to provide a core of academic experience for Afro-American Studies.

American Studies has also presented a seminar on "The Urban Tradition in American Thought and Literature," described as "a discussion of major American attitudes toward the city and of the major metaphors and literary themes by which such attitudes have been traditionally expressed. Emphasis is placed," so the statement reads, "on major novelists, poets, and social and religious thinkers writing before 1900, but analytical tools will be drawn from recent scholarship in literature, intellectual history and sociology." Such a drawing together of sources and resources can be done, and the result can be exciting. Urban studies have been fostered by urban realities. Urban Studies like Afro-American Studies, has become it's a major.

All of these innovations are appropriate to the nature of American Studies. They are possibilities which have become Progenitors. American Studies in its nature has something to Consequences.