The Constructedness of TraditionsLecturers: Annika McPherson/ Christina Meyer/ Olaf Simons Date: 2009-01-07

Aims of this lecture

1. Recapitulating our lectures and the new concept for the BM2

2. Reflecting our histories as constructed formations

3. Look ahead at the written test next week

Changing topics, different histories

Our lecture was remodelled on a chronological tour through history

We wanted to make sure you realised which

topics we actually touched offer individual histories for the

different fields we touched question established views of the

developments We were interested in widening

the geographical scope to the Anglophone sphere

The topics we selected

The series comprised lectures on the concept of diasporas the steps of the historical

expansion of the Anglophone sphere

the major political systems religion economy technology and knowledge media representations of justice

We excluded the central cultural productions?

The series did not comprise lectures on music, literature, the visual arts Film + television

We read such materials under the different thematic perspectives

From standard periodisations and essentially nationalistic

stereotypes

to a search for developments that invited the creation of

collective mythologies

The dark ages of ignorance: witchcraft, religion and superstition instead of science, scholasticism instead of philosophy

Elizabethan period: the Renaissance in England (ideals of the Greek and Roman antiquity), birth of the nation

Civil war: disastrous self-destruction Restoration: rebuilding Britain under a monarchy of

libertine king Enlightenment: New rationality and refined sentiments Romanticism: Backswing towards idealism and irrationalism Victorian Age: a prudish Empire of manifest double

standards Modernity breaking with traditions, rationalising everything 20th century and Globalisation: World wars

Standard periodisations

The different periods only meet their characteristics within a story of progress in which we focus on certain perspectives to glorify our own culture – they create a history of progress, leading into scientific age of free and democratic (and essentially bourgeois)

societies

Standard periodisations... remain problematic

As harbingers of freedom progress and democracy Great Britain oldest modern democracy Great Britain first bourgeois capitalistic society USA nation of religious freedom Anglophone countries led world into industrial

revolution and modern sciences Anglophone countries today leading producers of

world culture (reaching from Hollywood to Bollywood, from CNN to Internet)

Glorification of Anglophone nations

From standard periodisations and essentially nationalistic

stereotypes

towards a search for developments that went hand in

hand with the creation of collective mythologies

“To boldly go where no man has gone before...”

Star Trek motto referring to North American exploration of the west

...is it the result of the historical move west

...a mythology designed to justify the territorial expansion as inbred character feature?

...remember Timothy McPherson referring to the Canadian version of this mythology to explain why North Americans might have different habits of spending money

Recurring Moments 1: Norman Invasion

All English soil granted by King conflict between Crown

and lower aristocracy Magna Carta to stabilise

situation (civil rights tradition)

Dynastic ties with France Long history of Anglo-

French wars (English Nationalism)

A language of mixed origins and simplified grammar

Continent: France: strong nation state Germany: weak Emperor,

federalism of territorial states

Recurring Moments 2: Church of England

The special decision to declare King head of Church Led to conflicts with Catholic

France (promoting a catholic line of succession)

led to dissent within Protestantism with strong criticism of state interference in matters of personal belief (civil rights movement)

influenced the development of the USA (separation of church and state)

Reflected in mythologies of US American Exceptionalism

Continent: France: State protects

Catholicism, persecution of Huguenots, separation of church and State achieved with secularisation

Germany: individual territories form alliances with churches – conflict between these territories

Recurring Moments 3: Capitalism and International Culture

London: naval power rivalling Spain and Portugal the Netherlands Special capitalist

colonisation organised by monopolistic stock companies with influence on Crown

London: capital of free growth (no borders) The first capitalist

metropolis attracting international culture

Continent: France: Culture dominated

by Crown and French Academy

Germany: territories competing with each other

Recurring Moments 4: Anglo-Saxon Expansion

Spreading a special brand of capitalism as organisational structure – as basis of colonisation and industrialisation

Spreading legal system and special ideals of justice

Spreading an early modern public sphere with free media coverage

Spreading notions of civil rights and individual freedom developed in special historical conflicts both in Britain and the US

Continent: France: French Revolution/

secularisation: strong nation state

Germany: National Union of 1870s promoting a strong nation state

Part II: The Constructedness of Traditions

Anglophone Intellectuals defending civil liberties and free enterprise in the 1680s look at the Netherlands (cf. John Locke)

The look at Britain and the USA and the cultures they produced begins in the 18th century (cf. Montesquieu, Gottsched, Lessing, Taine)

19th Century

British and US domestic politics needed public images

1850-1930: International competition between colonial powers created competing “national” brands of colonialism

19th and 20th-Century Constructs

Construction of prehistoric Celto-Germanic origins

Construction of special English medieval past (close to early Italian Renaissance, marked by wars and rebellions)

Construction of English Elizabethan renaissance

Construction of British Enlightenment

New Criticism and New Exploration of Textuality

19th century literary criticism tried to define national and cultural characteristics

20th century countermovement: New Criticism: understand the pure work of art

New Criticism John Crowe Ransom

the heart of the poem lies in the richness and variety of its texture

William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley: “The intentional fallacy” against discussion of an

author’s intention the words on the page are all

that matters T.S. Eliot, Northrop Frye,

René Wellek

Countermovement: From New Criticism to

The 20th century widening of the text base: read all cultural materials as texts to be interpreted Roland Barthes Mythologies:

The design of the new Citroen as cultural statement

Birmingham centre: Comics analysed, media criticism

Development• from defence of supposedly

better high culture over• criticism of mass culture• to appreciation of a new canon

(now including what used to be “low” pop culture)

1980s Deconstruction of Historical Notions

Deconstruction: You analyse cultural

constructs (e.g. traditions) as designed and created

You read histories as attempts to create historical foundations

You identify interests within the construction of histories

Constructs of race, class, and gender became the main targets of analysis

Deconstruction I: The Scottish Kilt

Hugh Trevor-Roper. "The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland." in: The Invention of Tradition ed. Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1st. ed. 1983, repr. 2003. 15-42

http://www.uni-oldenburg.de/anglistik/lit-wiss/intro-to-literature/d/1983_trevor-roper_the_invention_of_tradition.pdf

American Studies Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” Canons and traditions

Progress of America, 1875, by Domenico Tojetti

Progress of America, 1872, by John Gast

Deconstruction II: America, and the Founding Myths

AS: From Intellectual Movement to Institutional Context

Vernon Parrington: founder of the American Studies movement 1927: Main Currents in American Thought:

“I have undertaken to give some account of the genesis and development in American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come to be reckoned traditionally American – how they came into being here, how they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining the form and scope of our characteristic ideals and institutions.”

Perry Miller the founder of the academic field famous for the study Errand into the Wilderness (1956)Francis Otto Matthiessen American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson

and Whitman (1941)

First Ph.D. in the “History of American Civilization” was awarded in 1940 to Henry Nash Smith (Harvard)

Founding of American Quarterly: 1949 The American Studies Association: 1951, which began to hold

national (as opposed to regional) conferences (starting in 1967)

By 1947: “more than 60 institutions were offering undergraduate majors in the field” of American Studies, and the discipline was organized intellectually by a “substantive consensus on the nature of American experience, and methodological consensus on ways to study that experience.” (Wise, 1979: 306)

What were key issues discussed/addressed?

Academic Institutionalization

that there is an ‘American mind’; that what distinguishes this mind is its ‘location in the

New World’; that while the mind can be found in ‘anyone American,’

its greatest expression is in the ‘country’s leading thinkers –Franklin, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne […]’ (compare: Matthiessen’s The American Renaissance)

that the mind’s enduring form is expressed in a set of recurrent themes;

that while the study of the popular is important, ‘America is revealed most profoundly in its high culture’.” (Pease/Wiegman 6)

Constructing a Tradition

Emmanuel Leutze, painted in 1851.

What sense of the “New” World is created here and how?

See also: Neil Campbell and Alasdair Kean, American Cultural Studies: An Introduction to American Culture. 2nd ed. (London & New York: Routledge, 2008) 45.

“The ‘Dream’ of America”

“[T]he larger part of what has been distinctive and valuable in America's contribution to the history of the human spirit has been due to this nation's peculiar experience in extending its type of frontier into new regions. […]

• [...] we must study the transforming influence of the American wilderness, remote from Europe, and by its resources and its free opportunities affording the conditions under which a new people, with new social and political types and ideals, could arise to play its own part in the world, and to influence Europe.“

“The Frontier in American History”

“Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development […]

The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact, that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people – to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.

The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism.“

Chapter 1

the consolidation of consensus into the myth-symbol school from the late 1940s onwards (until approx. the mid-1960s) academicization of the movement‘s project Creating a tradition of methodological assumptions, objects of

inquiry, and modes of analysis Key foundational texts:

Errand into the Wilderness (Perry Miller), American Renaissance (F.O.Matthiessen), Virgin Land (Henry Nash Smith), The American Adam (R.W.B. Lewis), The Machine in the Garden (Leo Marx)

Symbol – Myth – Image

“By the middle of the 1960s […] the intellectual history synthesis which had served American Studies so well for so long was shattered; and academies across the country were threatened by forces which charged them with being bastions of reaction, not a haven for free, inquiring minds. Similarly, many saw American Studies not as a vanguard movement on the frontiers of scholarship – the movement’s prior image of itself – but as an overly timid and elitist white Protestant male enterprise which tended to reinforce the dominant culture rather than critically analyzing it.” (Wise, 1979 312-13)

From Myth-Symbol-School to What?

a call for a reconsideration and new approaches beyond national borders and interpretations in terms of the nation-state

shift: “to new methodological grounds, decentering the author, the canon, and ideals of homogeneity in favor of explorations of the social as a structure dependent on context, the popular, and the everyday.”

New kind of curricular structure for the field – American Cultural Studies (e.g. Jay Mechling)

reflexive turn that American Studies had taken in the 1970s proliferation of

African American Studies, Latino/a studies or Chicano Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American Studies, gay and lesbian studies, women’s studies […]

The 1960s and Beyond – Crossing Borders/Borderlands

Nelson Limerick, Patricia. “Frontier.” A Companion to American Thought. Eds. Richard Withman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 255-59.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1985), and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992).

The American Renaissance Reconsidered edited by Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease

Revisions/Re-Readings – Myths, Traditions, Canons

Landing of Columbus

By John Vanderlyn, commissioned 1836/1837; placed as painting in the Capitol Rotunda 1847

Columbus

By Sebastiano del Piombo (1529–1530)

Washington Irving

Daguerreotype taken by John Plumbe

Deconstruction III: Columbus Myth

Examples: Revisions of the Columbus myth recognition that “after all Columbus wasn’t the harbinger of

progress and civilization but of genocide, slavery and the reckless exploitation of the environment.” See : Neil Campbell & Alasdair Kean, American Cultural Studies: An

Introduction to American Culture. 2nd ed. (London & New York: Routledge, 2008)

Michael Kammen, “Commemoration and Contestation in American Culture: Historical Perspectives” (2003)

Ward Churchill, “Deconstructing the Columbus Myth: Was the ‘Great Discoverer’ Italian or Spanish, Nazi or Jew?” (1997)

Questions1. Explain the term Charter Company and name one and describe its role in the

expansion of the British Empire.2. Why is the Glorious Revolution named Glorious Revolution? Name differences to

the previous revolution and consequences.3. Critically discuss advantages and disadvantages of a legal system including jury

trials.4. Explain why it is especially difficult for smaller parties to enter the political system

in the U.K. and the USA.5. The reformation took a special development in England – define it and consider

effects of this development.6. Name four technological features, and discuss historical phases of the Industrial

revolution.7. The early modern press is often characterized as lacking freedom – problematize

this statement.8. What is meant by the term mediatisation? Give two examples from the

Anglophone sphere and discuss them briefly.9. Identify developments in the field of cultural studies during the last two centuries.10. Even after the end of formal colonialism the Anglophone sphere is still growing.

Mention political, social, technological events and developments behind this growth.