Studies in Classic American Literature and American Studies

Eighty years after its publication, Susan Sontag described D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature as most interesting book ever written about American culture (n. pag). Sontag was speaking at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where she had been awarded the 2003 Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels for her role as intellectual ambassador between the United States and Europe. In her acceptance speech, she nominated Lawrence as her transatlantic precursor; the English author of Studies in Classic American Literature had shown us, she said, that is the means escape the prison of vanity (n. pag). year before, however, American Studies scholar Paul Giles had delivered a quite different verdict, judging that Lawrence's commentaries on America and its literature merely flatten difference (Virtual Americas 4). My article explores the vexed reception history of Studies, beginning with a consideration of its current disenfranchisement in American Studies as a reactionary work. Drawing on the scholarship of the editors in the Cambridge University Press edition of Studies, I then turn to the contemporary context of its publication in the United States in 1923. I argue that Lawrence's book constituted a radical intervention there when the critical scene was in its formative period. As first thesis book about American literature to endure (Buell 33), Studies demands reappraisal as a remarkable and unorthodox contribution to the origins of American Studies in the 1920s. (1) It is ironic that Studies, the work of a non-national, has been in American Studies' bad books since the late 1990s, when took what Robert A. Gross, in his article of that title, calls The Transnational Turn. Moving away from what it now construed as the superannuated construct of a literature, American Studies-rebranded as American Studies--began to relocate itself in a world of fluid borders beyond the boundaries of the nation-state (Gross 378). Americanists took up the task of what John Muthyala, in his book of that title, calls Reworlding America, and embarked on what Giles's recent study terms Global Remapping of American Literature. Unlike Sontag, who reads Studies as early exemplar of transnationalism, New deem it complicit with the act of canon-formation they seek to repeal. Moreover, in insisting that canonical or classic American literature has an alien quality, which belongs to the American continent and to nowhere else (SCAL 13), Lawrence, it is claimed, is colluding with the of American uniqueness and, by extension, legitimizing the ideology of American exceptionalism, the belief that the United States has a special mission and destiny as leader. But there is elision in such recent reconstructions of American literary history and Lawrence's place in that history: a conflation of Studies with its influence on a later phase of American Studies. Lawrence has become something of a whipping boy for the crimes and misdemeanors of the post-war generation of myth and critics such as with F.O. Matthiessen. (2) To these New Americanists, the members of this and symbol school are practitioners of a Cold War criticism that worked reinforce the pervasive political message of the post-war era that America had achieved a legitimate global supremacy (Shumway 329). Donald E. Pease, for instance, argues that the nineteenth-century American Renaissance canon, set by Matthiessen and subsequently promoted by the and symbolists, contains image repertoire of the US community, images that interconnect exceptional subject (American Adam) with a representative scene (Virgin Land) and exemplary motive (errand into the wilderness). These images comprise the national narrative or national imaginary, ahistorical symbolic order which attempts to erase the resistant materialities of race, class and gender (Pease 3-4). …