American literature internationale

ESQ - Journal of the American Renaissance

Volumn 50, Issue 1-3, 2004, Pages 59-93

  Castronovo, Russ ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61949283198     PISSN: 00938297     EISSN: 1935021X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/esq.2004.0008     Document Type: Review

References (67)

1. See F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), vii, ix.
2. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1851-52;
3. Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom in 1851;
4. William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter in 1853;
5. Warner's Wide, Wide World in 1850. This essay benefits from comments at the "American Literary Globalism" symposium held at Yale University.
6. The phrase appears repeatedly in Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy:. An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, ed. Ian Gregor (1869; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971).
7. Jenny Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, 27 February 1852, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Letters to Americans, 1848-1895: ASelection, ed. Alexander Trachtenberg (New York: International Publishers, 1953). 43. Trachtenberg states that Weydemeyer "may be considered the first American Marxist leader" (3).
8. Wai Chee Dimock, "A Theory of Resonance," PMLA 112 (1997): 1060. 71.
9. Terrell Carver, "Imagery/Writing, Imagination/Politics: Reading Marx through the Eighteenth Brumaire," in Marx's "Eighteenth Brumaire": (Post)modern Interpretations, ed. Mark Cowling and James Martin (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 118, 119.
10. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 15 All references are to this edition unless otherwise specified.
11. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, 76.
12. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 10.
13. KarlMarx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, Marxists.org Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/marx-engels/1852/ brumaire/kapitell.htm.
14. Michàle Biscoe's response to an earlier version of this essay delivered as a talk has helped me think further about the notions of temporality developed in this paragraph.
15. "Only in a dis-located time of the present, at the joining of a radically dis-jointed time," writes Derrida, "all of this can be thought." The "this" seems to mean all possibility, an openness to the consideration of ideas that do not belong together, ideas that exist nowhere in the present but instead are possible only in "radical experience of the perhaps" (Specters of Marx, 17, 35).
16. Thomas M. Kemple, Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the "Grundrisse" (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995). 7.
17. Carver, "Imagery/Writing," 123; emphasis in original.
18. Peter J. Bellis, Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2003), 3.
19. Robert William Chambers, The Red Republic: A Romance of the Commune, 5th ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam" s Sons, 1898), 170.
20. Larry J. Reynolds (European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988])
21. and Philip M. Katz (From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998]) have examined the historical connections between American culture and French revolutionary energy associated with the events of 1848 and 1871. By at times using "Internationale," I intend to highlight the anxious associations between socialist conspiracy and French radical political excess. While "International" is no doubt the more correct term, especially since the historic meeting Marx attended in London became known as the First International, the idea of "the Internationale" nonetheless captures the threat of revolution as a specifically foreign terror associated with the Paris Commune of 1871.
22. Karl Marx, "Address of the International Workingmen's Association to Abraham Lincoln," 7 January 1865, in Marx and Engels, Letters to Americans, 66.
23. See PaulAvrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), 160.
24. As Derrida reads the first paragraphs of The Eighteenth Brumaire, "The conjuration is anxiety" - but also expectation - "from the moment it calls upon death to invent the quick and to enliven the new, to summon the presence of what is not yet there" (Specters of Marx, 109).
25. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 68-69.
26. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 40
27. In recalibrating the standard academic calipers for measuring cultural dissent, Certeau remains strongly committed to models of spatiality. In contrast to a strategy, which is about claiming the terrains of knowledge and discourse, he proposes a tactic as a "calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus" (37).
28. The everyday is always on the move, we might say, otherwise it will be absorbed into yesterday. Although Certeau does not make this connection, the "absence of a proper locus" necessarily opens up the spatial aspect of the everyday to temporal considerations. For more on the political aspects of temporality in a different context, see Robyn Wiegman, "On Being in Time with Feminism," Modern Language Quarterly 65 (2004): 161-76. Wiegman's remarks also entangle spatial aspects with temporal considerations, as she describes how a disposition of radical alterity toward the future - that is, feminism can never fully project a future that will be consistent with the political positions of the present or its past - creates a "nomadic thinking that refuses to take any learning as final" (167), making homelessness the condition of temporal possibility.
29. J. A. Dacus, Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States: A Reliable History and Graphic Description of the Causes and Thrilling Events of the Labor Strikes and Riots of 1877 (Chicago: L. T. Palmer, 1877; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 82-83.
30. Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), 560, 573.
31. Karl Marx, "Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association," in Inaugural Address and Provisional Rules of the International Working Men's Association, alongwith the "General Rules, "which was published as a pamphlet in London in 1864 and is now available at Marxists.org Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ 1864/10/ 27.htm.
32. Allan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1878; New York: Arno Press, 1969), 396-97.
33. Dacus, Annalsofthe Great Strikes, 89-90; emphasis in original.
34. For more on the enduring identification of the pétroleuse with class and cultural trauma in the United States at the turn of the century, see David A. Zimmerman, "The Panic and the Pétroleuse: Frederic Isham's Black Friday," a chapter in Panic: Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006).
35. On the Great Strike of 1877 as the American Commune, see Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, 166-72.
36. Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959).
37. Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, 86-87.
38. Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass, Terror and Taboo: TheFollies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 31.
39. Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, 80-81, 229.
40. HowardLay, "BeauGeste! (On the Readability of Terrorism)," YaleFrench Studies 101 (2001): 80.
41. Jeffory A. Clymer, America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003), 60, 62.
42. Zulaika and Douglass, Terror and Taboo, 31.
43. Dacus, Annals of the Great Strikes, 17. Dacus also labels adherents of the American Commune "socialistic disorganizes" (90).
44. Archibald Forbes, "What I Saw of the Paris Commune. II.," Century Magazine 45 (November 1892): 52.
45. "What an American Girl Saw of the Commune," Century Magazine 45 (November 1892): 63.
46. George McCrary, quoted in Bruce, Year of Violence, 90.
47. As Daniel H. Borus reports: "Four years after the Great Strikes raised the possibility of violent upheaval, 130,000 workers were involved in 477 work stoppages. In 1886 there were 1,572 strikes or walkouts involving 610,000. . . . Only once in the remainder of the century did the number of strikes fall below 1,000 (Writing Realism: Howells, fames, and Norris in the Mass Market [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989], 153).
48. Or, as Paul A. Gilje puts the case in more graphic terms, "To list all labor riots would be almost impossible; it would entail cataloguing every cracked head found along countless miles of picket lines" (Rioting in America [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996], 117).
49. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 961. Whitman's references in Democratic Vistas to his service as a wartime nurse in the makeshift hospital at the Washington Patent Office serve as visceral reminder that the polity has still not healed its wounds.
50. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 933.
51. Betsy Erkkilä, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 82.
52. Whitman, DemocraticVistas, 963, 960.
53. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 73.
54. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 121, 73.
55. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 72.
56. "President Bush's Proclamation for National Arts and Humanities Month 2001," 25 October 2001, http://www.collegeart.org/caa/ advocacy/artsmonth.htmli quotations in the following paragraph are also drawn from this website. I would like to thank Cathy Davidson for bringing Bush's remarks to my attention.
57. Gustave LeBon, The Crowd (1895; New Brunswick: Transaction, 1995). 27. 61, 77.
58. Marx to Frederic Sorge, 19 October 1877 in Marx and Engels, Letters to Americans, 117. Information about the Pennsylvania strike as an American emanation of the Commune comes from Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, 166.
59. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work among Them (1872; New York: Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1880), 29, 27.
60. Katz discusses plans to repatriate French Communards to the American Southwest (From Appomattox to Montmartre, 131).
61. Jacob A. Riis, Howthe Other Half Lives: Studies amongthe Tenemente of New York (1890; New York: Dover, 1971), 138.
62. LeBon, The Crowd, 89.
63. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1968), 37.
64. Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993), 251.
65. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 74.
66. Jacob A. Riis, The Making of an American: A New Edition with an Epilogue by His Grandson, J. Riis Owre (19014; [New York]: Macmillan, 1970), 119.
67. In contrast to my argument here, Mary Esteve writes that the crowd stands outside the domain of the political: "Figuring sublime absorption or involvement, which, by virtue of its extreme demands on consciousness, is fundamentally incompatible with political liberalism, the crowd functions to mark out an experiential category from the political" (The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003], 15). This conclusion, however, relies on a notion of politics limited to liberalism. In fact, one thing that crowds composed of tramps, hoodlums, the unemployed, and working people protested was the very liberalism that had abandoned them to the market, invalidated their grievances as irrational, and ignored their experience as prepolitical. The drawing of the line between the political and non- or prepolitical is, of course, a supremely political act.