Thinking America: Public Intellectuals and the Framing of National Identity, 1837-1909

思考美国：公共知识分子和国家认同的框架，1837-1909

• 批准号: AH/D500850/1
• 负责人: Andrew Taylor
• 金额: $ 2.71万
• 依托单位: University of Edinburgh
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2007 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FD500850%2F1
• 关键词: Thinking; America; Public; Intellectuals; Framing

This project asks what it means to be a public intellectual in nineteenth and early twentieth century American literary and political culture. How do we give public expression to thought, and how are we to understand the sometimes occluded relationship between thought and action? Through an examination of six key writers of the period- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Bushnell, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Henry Adams and William James, the study argues that to perform the role of the intellectual is to inhabit a fundamentally paradoxical position. On the one hand, intellectuals are required to act in a manner informed by thought, so as to justify their elevated status within the public culture; on the other, there is an expectation that intellectuals should remain untarnished by action, as if thought cannot retain its moral credibility once enacted. ''Thinking America' sets out to explore this ambivalent narrative in the context of a rapidly evolving public culture, one in which questions were pressing about where intellectual work should best be located, and what kind of language might best embody it. The decline of a shared Christian discourse, slavery's violent fracturing of the public sphere, the development of both a market economy and a university culture, and the effect of mass immigration and overseas imperialism on national self-definition, all provide challenges to the form and function of intellectual activity in the period.Emerson is central to this book: his most assertive instances of personal and national autonomy - those moments that seem to confirm him as the prophet of American exceptionalism- provide a powerful model of intellectual independence that all of my chosen writers are unable to adopt wholesale (even Emerson himself). Bruce Robbins and Edward Said have argued that such independence needs instead to be harnessed to a non-national. Cosmopolitan vantage point for it to have any effectiveness. However, rather than discarding the nation-state as an organising force for intellectual work, my study asks to what extent the presence of transatlantic and transnational frameworks serves to complicate the ways in which the United States is thought. In a nineteenth century culture of increased mobility and diversity, is it still possible to retain a belief in the cherished Enlightenment ideal of a coherent public sphere?There are two main research contexts to which my study contributes. The first is the history of the intellectual brought into being as a category and character of moral, epistemic and political dispute. I examine the competing models of affiliation and independence that have proliferated in recent years (looking especially at those of Russell Jacoby, Zygmunt Bauman and Edward Said) to think through the locations and possibilities of intellectual work in the period under discussion. The second major research context is derived from re beyond the parameters of autonomous national identity, are beginning to rethink the work of Americanisms such as Paul Giles and John Carlos Kowe, who, in reading American literature the discipline in cosmopolitan, transnational terms. My book builds on this approach to explore how the work of narrating national identity in the period is informed by structures of comparative analysis. If the intellectual is best placed to inhabit a cosmopolitan vantage point, what kind of relationship does s/he have to the nation-state?

这个项目询问在十九世纪和二十世纪初的美国文学和政治文化中，作为一个公共知识分子意味着什么。我们如何公开表达思想，我们如何理解思想和行动之间有时封闭的关系？本文通过对爱默生、布什内尔、亨利大卫梭罗、富勒、亨利、亚当斯和詹姆斯六位重要作家的考察，认为扮演知识分子的角色就是处于一种根本上矛盾的位置。一方面，知识分子被要求以思想为指导的方式行事，以证明他们在公共文化中的崇高地位;另一方面，人们期望知识分子不被行动玷污，好像思想一旦被制定就不能保持其道德信誉。“《思考美国》着手在快速发展的公共文化背景下探索这种矛盾的叙事，其中关于智力工作最好放在哪里以及什么样的语言最能体现它的问题非常紧迫。共享基督教话语的衰落、奴隶制对公共领域的暴力破坏、市场经济和大学文化的发展，以及大规模移民和海外帝国主义对民族自我定义的影响，都对这一时期知识分子活动的形式和功能提出了挑战。爱默生是本书的核心：他对个人和国家自主权最自信的例子--这些时刻似乎证实了他是美国例外论的先知--它提供了一个强大的智力独立模式，我所选择的所有作家都无法全盘采用（甚至爱默生本人）。布鲁斯·罗宾斯和爱德华·赛义德认为，这种独立性需要被非国民利用。世界性的Vantage，使它有任何效力。然而，我的研究并没有抛弃民族国家作为智力工作的组织力量，而是询问跨大西洋和跨国框架的存在在多大程度上使美国的思维方式复杂化。在世纪的文化中，流动性和多样性增加了，我们还可能保持对启蒙运动所珍视的和谐公共领域理想的信念吗？我的研究对两个主要研究背景做出了贡献。首先是知识分子作为道德、认识和政治争论的范畴和特征而产生的历史。我研究了近年来激增的从属关系和独立性的竞争模型（特别是罗素·比尔德、齐格蒙特·鲍曼和爱德华·赛义德的模型），以思考在所讨论的时期智力工作的位置和可能性。第二个主要的研究背景是源于重新超越了自主的民族认同的参数，开始重新思考美国主义者的工作，如保罗·贾尔斯和约翰·卡洛斯·柯，他们在阅读美国文学的学科在世界性的，跨国的条款。我的书建立在这一方法的基础上，探讨了这一时期叙述民族身份的工作是如何通过比较分析的结构来进行的。如果知识分子最适合居住在一个世界性的Vantage位置，那么他/她与民族国家之间是什么样的关系？

项目成果

Thinking America

思考美国

• 发表时间: 2010
• 作者: Taylor Andrew