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Overview
What links the hopes of Communist fellow travelers in the 1930s to the work of Emerson a century earlier? Why do we give so much attention to celebrities? And why have we virtually erased the distinction between public and private affairs? Quentin Anderson shows that American individualism goes deeper than we admit. Only in America did writers and thinkers make the claim that a life worth living must subordinate family ties and social obligations to the visionary powers of the self. Drawing on the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, John Dewey, and Henry James - all of whom reacted strongly to the infiltration of money in the national imagination - Anderson finds that in denying the ties and obligations of an existing society each ended up by creating what he calls a "visionary capitalism." Such wholesale appropriations of the American scene, whether in art or systematic thought, discount history and individual action within society. He finds this tendency to grasp the world as an individual imaginative possession in both T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and persistent in the claim to an impersonal authority in contemporary literary criticism. Anderson concludes: "We shall not crack the money firmament or attain to the freedom we want until we see that such liberty comes from the quality of our relations with other people and in no other way."Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
This densely erudite volume examines writers who have grappled with American culture by preaching individual transformation rather than social change. Anderson ( The American Henry James ) begins with Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman, showing how their views conflicted with those of the more socially oriented Hawthorne and suggesting that Melville offered a middle ground. John Dewey, he writes, attempted to unite Emersonian individuals as ``the bearers of civilization,'' while Henry James's view of selfhood, which American intellectuals embraced in the 1950s, merely allowed the individual to escape from communal life, and ``has not cracked the money firmament under which we walk.'' Anderson's supposition that in America, in contrast to Europe, money is ``the containing framework of our culture'' deserves more exposition. He does not attempt explicitly to link his theme to political life until late in the book, when he suggests that those who turned to psychoanalysis, embraced Communism or dropped out of society like the Beats were as deeply influenced by ideas of radical individualism as their 19th-century forebears had been. (Nov.)Library Journal
In this ambitious essay, noted cultural critic Anderson ( The Imperial Self, Knopf, 1971. o.p.) explores the intimate connection between two peculiarly American traits: individualism and capitalism. The author argues that the desire to create and possess the self in America arose in the late 19th century as a response to the loss of self experienced in a society dominated by the values of industrial capitalism. Anderson traces this thesis through the writings of Emerson and Whitman, Melville and Henry James, Diana Trilling and Allen Ginsberg, to demonstrate that this quest for self-identity is ambiguous because it requires isolation of the self from a community of others and is expressed largely in the language of the marketplace. Anderson's essay, which recalls the best cultural criticism of the Fifties, deserves to be read along with Lionel Trilling's Beyond Culture (HBJ, 1965; 1978, reprint) and The Opposing Self (HBJ, 1955; 1978, reprint) as well as the writings of Richard Poirier ( The Renewal of Literature , LJ 3/1/87). Highly recommended.-- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., OhioBook Details
Published
June 6, 1992
Publisher
New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, c1992.
Pages
264
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780151559411