JD Isip Franklin, Emerson, Whitman, and the American Bible 2012 (original) (raw)
American Exceptionalism A Double Edged Sword
The Washington Post, 2014
Born out of revolution, the United States is a country organized around an ideology which includes a set of dogmas about the nature of a good society. Americanism, as different people have pointed out, is an "ism" or ideology in the same way that communism or fascism or liberalism are isms. As G. K. Chesterton put it: "America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.. . ." As noted in the Introduction, the nation's ideology can be described in five words: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissezfaire. The revolutionary ideology which became the American Creed is liberalism in its eighteenth-and nineteenth-century meanings, as distinct from conservative Toryism, statist communitarianism, mercantilism, and noblesse oblige dominant in monarchical, state-church-formed cultures. Other countries' senses of themselves are derived from a common history. Winston Churchill once gave vivid evidence to the difference between a national identity rooted in history and one defined by ideology in objecting to a proposal in 1940 to outlaw the anti-war Communist Party. In a speech in the House of Commons, Churchill said that as far as he knew, the Communist Party was composed of Englishmen and he did not fear an Englishman. In Europe, nationality is related to community, and thus one cannot become un-English or un-Swedish. Being an American, however, is an ideological commitment. It is not a matter of birth. Those who reject American values are un-American. The American Revolution sharply weakened the noblesse oblige, hierarchically rooted, organic community values which had been linked to Tory sentiments, and enormously strengthened the individualistic, egalitarian, and anti-statist ones which had been present in the settler and religious background of the colonies. These values were evident in the twentieth-century fact that, as H. G. Wells pointed out close to ninety years ago, the United States not only has lacked a viable socialist party, but also has never developed a British or European-type Conservative or Tory party. Rather, America has been dominated by pure bourgeois, middle-class individualistic values. As Wells put it: "Essentially America is a middle-class [which has] become a community and so its essential problems are the problems of a modern individualistic society, stark and clear." He enunciated a theory of America as a liberal society, in the classic anti-statist meaning of the term: It is not difficult to show for example, that the two great political parties in America represent only one English party, the middle-class Liberal party.. .. There are no Tories. .. and no Labor Party.. .. [T]he new world [was left] to the Whigs and Nonconformists and to those less constructive, less logical, more popular and liberating thinkers who became Radicals in England, and Jeffersonians and then Democrats in America.
The Romantic Era of the mid-19th century introduced America to its first distinct form of national literature that brought worldwide recognition to its prominent authors and their works. Yet for hundreds of years prior the continent produced various literary styles that emanated from native tribes and European explorers to revolutionary heroes and leaders, culminating in a vast treasure trove of history that stood as a precursor to what lay ahead. The natives of North America, absent of their own written vocabularies, passed down their histories, tales, myths and legends to their younger generations by word of mouth. Later, European settlers, after sailing across the vast Atlantic Ocean and reaching the shores of the North American continent, would write their own accounts of their findings and eventually decipher and translate the native’s stories into the myriad languages of the western and non-western world. Late 18th century American literature would be full of patriotic fervor from the writings of Thomas Paine, who would help rally General George Washington’s troops and bring new energy and hope to the American cause of independence and freedom. By the early 19th century, and after a second conflict with England, the nascent American nation was ready to sink its teeth into a newly-found national literature that would introduce the Romantic Era while its prominent authors would write about heroic hard-fought battles for democracy, the vast frontiers, and imaginative spine-tingling tales. It would be nature, though, in all of its resplendent boundless natural beauty, wonder and immensity, from sea to shining sea, that would provide the inspiration and impetus for two literary giants of this era, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to let their imaginations flourish with wild creative abandon and to capture, on paper for the first time, the personal sentiments that made man recognize its eternal bond with the natural world and at long last give American’s their own literary genre that spoke to their affinity for the land and a nation they were proud to call home.
A Tale of Two Anti-Americanisms
European journal of American studies, 2007
There is, of course no single American tradition or single American set of values. There are, and always have been, many Americas. We each of us remember and appeal to the Americas we prefer. Immanuel Wallerstein What does the term mean? That you're anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to free speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias? Does it mean that you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans? Arundhati Roy Although most Americans may be largely ignorant of what was, and still is, being done in their names, all are likely to pay a steep priceindividually and collectively-for their nation's continued efforts to dominate the global scene.
American Transcendentalism doc 1
Despire the claims of some American linguists, the American language doesn't exist. So, from a theoretical point of view, American literature shouldn't exist too. But the dilemma, whether a separate literature can exist without a separate language and to what extent the state borders can determine to which literary tradition a writer belongs, is present all around the world. For example, Samuel Beckett was born an Irishman, sometimes wrote in English and sometimes in French, and later translated his works into English. So, we have to admit that the idea of national literature is a rather nebulous notion and that the American literature does exist as a set of influences, themes and literary solutions different from those in Europe. At the end of the 1920s even the European cultural elite started to view American writing as separate from English literature and in 1930 the Nobel Prize for literature went to an American writer for the first time. Paradoxically, American writers who lived in Europe during the same period played a great role in the recognition of American literary particularity. Through their creative works, writers like Henry James, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, changed European literary perceptions of American literature for ever. One of the first expressions of this new European view of American literature appeared in interview by Andre Gide. He claims that American literature is different, even bizarre when compared to the European. The question appears -what are the differences and what are main characteristics of American literature?
Democracy, Language, and Nineteenth-Century American Individualism
Through their imaginative writing styles, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman incessantly endeavored to resolve the lingering question, what is an American? As individuals from around the world journeyed to the promising shores of America’s East Coast, seeking social and religious freedom, America’s cultural variety swelled and rehabilitated existing conceptions of a truly “American” man. Although he or his ancestors may have once taken pride in a European heritage, this new American left behind the traditions and customs of the past and awakened to new ideas, new principles, and could entertain new thoughts, form his own opinions, and experience the world through his own nature. As this new way of thinking spread throughout the nation, writers reflected upon conceptions of freedom, individualism, democracy, boundless frontiers, and golden opportunities—experimenting with how America’s multi-cultural nation should define and understand itself in collective terms.
Contested identities: Nationalism, regionalism, and patriotism in early American textbooks
History of Education Quarterly, 2009
Immediately after the American Revolution, the founders set about the task of ensuring the continued existence of the fledgling republic. Facing a host of problemsFeconomic, social, and governmentalF some founders promoted a concept of schooling that would inculcate patriotism and forge a uniquely American identity. Noah Webster wanted to create an American language, and Benjamin Rush wanted schools to ''convert men into republican machines.'' 1 Webster, Rush, Thomas Jefferson, and others all wanted to use some version of common schooling to instill in children a sense of nationalism. Textbooks used in these common schools would be a likely way to further promote a sense of American identity. What that identity should be, though, and what the ''good citizen'' of the new republic should look like, was sharply contested, and textbooks of this period reflect many of the fissures in the work of nation building. This paper reexamines texts published during the period of the initial formation of the nation, from 1783 to 1815, or from the end of the American Revolution through the War of 1812. If textbook authors had sought to help create a sense of unified American nationhood, we would find messages of commonality over difference, Americanism over Europeanism, and the promotion of a clearly defined sense of patriotism. Instead, this examination of thirty-one textbooks (sixteen geographies and history texts, and fifteen readers and grammar books), most written by New Englanders but also sold widely in the South,