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“What's American About America?”: A Structuralist Approach
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
The quotation marks in my title offer homage to John A. Kouwenhoven for a stimulating essay he published under that name more than twenty years ago. In it he brought under one intuitive umbrella such diverse Americana as the Manhattan skyline, the gridiron town plan, the skyscraper, jazz, the Constitution, Mark Twain's writing, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, assembly-line production, and chewing gum. What united them all, he felt, was their embodiment of process—the ongoing changingness that was the essence of America. Brilliant as the essay may be, it remains inspired journalism because Kouwenhoven had no method to propose except his own cultivated intuition. In this essay I shall speak of several of the same American phenomena but in a context intended to meet the need for a theory and a method to guide the complex business of making sense of American distinctiveness.
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References
NOTES
1. Kouwenhoven, John A., “What's American About America?” Harper's Magazine, No. 213 (07 1956), pp. 25–33.Google Scholar
2. The most accessible short introduction to structuralism in the varied fields where it has proved significant so far is Structuralism: An Introduction, ed. Robey, David (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)Google Scholar. For analysis of the principal structuralist ideas in relation to American Studies, see my “access essay” entitled “Structuralism and the Humanities” in American Quarterly, 30 (11 1978), 261–81.Google Scholar
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6. Daniel J. Boorstin gives a good quick account in The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 20–34.Google Scholar
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