How I Invented America

Extract

There exists a handy term, “Americanist,” that serves to describe what it is I am, and what it is I do. I teach in, indeed I started, a busy American Studies programme; I specialize in American literature. The term is handy, and yet it doesn't entirely satisfy me, explaining a good deal about the object of my academic attention, but nothing about why the attention grew up, or what part it plays in my life. I have many basic preoccupations, and many roles deriving from them: I am a university teacher, a literary critic, a writer. But if, as I think, they link fruitfully with each other, this is because they are tied by a presiding and demanding preoccupation with literature — with its stylistic nature and its social and cultural origins and existence, with its historical pastness and its insistent presentness. In such matters I spend most of my life and invest most of my imagination. And in such matters there is no doubt that the United States plays a central and a fascinating part. Yet I was interested in literature before I was interested in America, I was interested in America before I became an Americanist, and my Americanist interest is itself part of something else, an obsessive concern with the inter-nationality of writing, with the influences that shape and command it, with the world in which it works, or does not, as the case may be. So I want to go behind my Americanist function – and what better opportunity could I have than in response to the present invitation, which calls for reminiscence, and even a little confession?

In many ways, of course, my American interests are inevitable enough and obvious enough: anyone drawing the map of contemporary intellectual geography would need to put the United States in some radiating and central position, and anyone considering the nature of writing today would need to agree that in its conduct and its stylistic advancement the United States plays a role of enormous power.