Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 77-12(E), Section: A.

Adviser: Michael Warner.

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

This item is not available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.

This dissertation re-opens the literary-theoretical debate about the expressivity of American literature, arguing that this debate needs to be recontextualized within a broader cultural history of self-expression as a practice. Whereas literary theory has tended to insist that the identification of literature with subjective expression is a mystification, I show that self-expression, as a concrete form of interactional practice, continues to shape criticism, and American culture in general, in ways that have yet to be fully analyzed. Inverting the familiar theoretical account of expression, which understands that term as reflecting subjects' desire to make their inner selves transparent to the outside world, I argue instead that self-expression is an ethical technique through which subjects assent to their own mediated-ness in order to cope with the moral, political, and symbolic predicaments of a modern textual world.

Chapter One reinterprets the American Renaissance as an episode in the reorganization of the American public sphere around the practice of self-expression. Emerson and Thoreau made expression a central theme of their writings not because they were expressivists, but in order to draw attention to the relative imperfection of human talk when compared to the redemptive power of what Thoreau called "Nature's language full of poetry." Between the Transcendentalists and Whitman there took place a fundamental disagreement over the social and political significance of self-expression. By abandoning the idea that Nature transcended human history and re-describing mass-mediated society as entirely natural, Whitman taught his readers to see circulating discourse as an enabling condition of a good life.

Chapters Two and Three explore shifting understandings of the relationship of authorship to free expression through a study of James Fenimore Cooper's libel suits against Horace Greeley. Although Cooper and Greeley have both been identified as among the first professional writers in America, they had fundamentally different understandings of free speech. Greeley saw self-expression as a calling, in the fulfillment of which he turned himself into the supplier of a public sphere that he conceived on the model of the "marketplace of ideas." Cooper dismissed this new ethic of self-expression as an alibi for greed and demagoguery. Free speech, for Cooper, implied a responsibility on the part of citizens to speak only when doing so was politically and morally expedient. This belief led Cooper to rethink the ethical status of his own public performances as a fiction-writer. In his novels about Native Americans, Cooper fantasized about ways of speaking freely that did not hold themselves accountable to the interactional nouns of an increasingly expressivist public culture.

The next two chapters demonstrate the centrality of self-expression to modern understandings of identity, distinguishing between two configurations of identity avowed in Native American public culture. Chapter Four argues that prior to the second half of the nineteenth century Native authors writing for mass audiences tended to affirm their Indian identity as a trait given to them by God or Nature. For Christian Indians like Samson Occom, William Apess, and George Copway, Indianness was an objective fact about oneself to which one bore witness in deference to a higher authority (God or, later, science) who supervised history. Chapter Five traces the gradual process through which native writers came to characterize Indian identity as the sort of attribute that could only be avowed from a first-personal point of view. Turn-of-the-century intellectuals like Zitkala-.Sǎ and Carlos Montezuma insisted that only an Indian could authoritatively express (and thereby performatively determine) what it was to be an Indian; Indianness was not something to which one could bear witness as an objective "given." The Society of American Indians (SAI), the first mass-mediated movement for pan-Indian solidarity, was founded in the service of this expressive understanding of Indian identity.

Chapter Six recounts the late-nineteenth-century emergence of a transnational social movement that I call "expressive enlightenment." Reading the ethnological writings of Daniel Brinton and Franz Boas alongside the newspaper publications of the Yavapai-Apache editor Carlos Montezuma, I show how self-expression emerged a new cultural "universal" at a time when mass-mediated forms of belonging displaced forms of solidarity based on kinship, tribe, and race. Both Boas and Montezuma, despite the disparateness of the contexts in which they wrote, saw expressing oneself as a way of taking charge of one's own destiny, thereby announcing to the world that one had constituted oneself as a modern subject. This understanding of self-expression as an ethical practice would help motivate new ethnic uplift movements like the SAI and NAACP, as well as new scholarly disciplines like cultural anthropology and Americanist literary criticism.