Suchergebnisse

American cultural life depends on a discontinuity between conservative feeling & liberal thinking. The source of the conservative impulse, as shown by our literature, is that nostalgia for the simpler, happier way of life which we have from the beginning felt to be receding into oblivion. We value with our conservative instincts that which history has already rendered irrelevant to the formation of our ideas. The works of Whitman, Melville, Edith Wharton, H. Adams, H. James, Wallace Stevens, the regionalists, & others are discussed in terms of this contradiction. The fundamental purpose of conservatism must always be to remove or reconcile contradictions & polarities, for such oppositions are the perennial source of unrest & change. Programmatic conservatism in America looks to literature for a reconciliation of impulse & idea; since literature could hardly exist without an interpenetration of the one by the other. In much of the most characteristic American writing, impulse & idea are forced apart into a radical opposition. In preserving a vivid distinction between conservative impulse & radical idea American writers - Melville, Hawthorne, & Faulkner no less than Emerson & Whitman - disqualify themselves as conservatives. In the essentials of their art they both mirror & reassert a secular, skeptical, democratic world. J. A. Fishman.