[For this year’s post-Valentine’s non-favorites series, I wanted to follow up last week’s on scholarly books I’ve loved with a handful of scholarly ideas I don’t. Leading up to a perennial favorite crowd-sourced post, a collective airing of grievances of all types!]
On a highly reductive version of AmericanStudies, and how its exemplar moved beyond it.
In the opening paragraph of this very early blog post on the fascinating 1880s trend of “woman doctor novels,” I boiled down my gripes about Walter Benn Michaels’s version of AmericanStudies scholarship into one succinct sentence. Check out that post if you would (not least because that literary genre really is a unique and striking one, with plenty of continued relevance in the 21st century), and then come on back for more.
Welcome back! I stand by that earlier post’s point about those first two books of WBM’s, 1988’s The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism and 1995’s Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. I’d sum up my significant issues with how he models AmericanStudying through this example: at a certain point in Our America, WBM is developing a reading of a William Carlos Williams poem as nativist, and to help make his case he quotes from a Calvin Coolidge speech. I’m not sure I need to say more than that, but in case I do: those are two different texts, from two different authors/figures (I would argue very different ones at that, but that the two men are not one and the same is in any case inarguable); and, more broadly but even more importantly, a poem is not and never will be a political speech. See the last paragraph of yesterday’s post for more on why such a reductive perspective blatantly missed the “wrinkles and folds” of literary texts.
The second of those two books came out 30+ years ago, though, and I owe it to WBM to note that not only has his career continued for those subsequent three decades, but it has also gone in new and interesting directions over that time. I still don’t entirely agree with the main arguments of his more recent books, at least as captured in titles like The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006) and No Politics but Class Politics (2023, co-authored with Adolph L. Reed Jr.); I recognize that in my own work I can at times emphasize race and ethnicity over class in my analyses of American identity and history and culture, but to my mind the answer is always to see these factors as additive, rather than competing (as seems to be WBM’s argument). So I suppose I’d still have some beefs with Walter Benn Michaels, but I of course appreciate a literary scholar who has branched out into public scholarly topics and work; perhaps WBM is ultimately less my AmericanStudies nemesis (which is how I saw his work when I was in grad school) and more an interesting lens through which I can frame and analyze my own ongoing scholarly journey.
Last non-favorite idea tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Scholarly ideas you’re not a fan of? Other things that gripe your cookies? Share for the weekend post!
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