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

这个项目询问在19世纪和20世纪初的美国文学和政治文化中，作为一名公共知识分子意味着什么。我们如何公开表达思想，以及我们如何理解思想和行动之间有时被遮蔽的关系？通过对这一时期的六位关键作家--拉尔夫·瓦尔多·爱默生、霍勒斯·布什内尔、亨利·大卫·梭罗、玛格丽特·富勒、亨利·亚当斯和威廉·詹姆斯的考察，该研究认为，扮演知识分子的角色就是生活在一种根本上自相矛盾的地位上。一方面，知识分子被要求以思想知情的方式行事，以证明他们在公共文化中的崇高地位是合理的；另一方面，人们期望知识分子应该保持不受行动的玷污，好像思想一旦颁布就不能保持其道德可信度。《思考美国》在快速发展的公共文化背景下探索这种矛盾的叙事，在这种文化中，智力工作最好的位置应该放在哪里，以及什么样的语言最能体现这一点是一个紧迫的问题。基督教共同话语的衰落，奴隶制对公共领域的暴力分裂，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国家自我定义的影响，都对那个时期智力活动的形式和功能提出了挑战。爱默生是这本书的核心：他关于个人和国家自治的最自信的例子--那些似乎证实了他是美国例外论先知的时刻--提供了一个强大的智力独立模式，我选择的所有作家都无法全盘采纳(甚至爱默生本人)。布鲁斯·罗宾斯和爱德华·赛义德辩称，相反，这种独立性需要被非本国人利用。从世界性的角度来看，它可能会产生任何效果。然而，我的研究并没有摒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人们对美国的看法复杂化。在流动性和多样性日益增强的19世纪文化中，还有可能保留对启蒙运动所珍视的连贯公共领域理想的信念吗？我的研究有助于两个主要的研究背景。首先是知识分子产生的历史，作为一个范畴和性质的道德、认识和政治之争。我考察了近年来激增的相互竞争的从属关系和独立模式(特别是罗素·雅各比、齐格蒙特·鲍曼和爱德华·赛义德的那些模式)，以思考在所讨论的时期智力工作的地点和可能性。第二个主要的研究背景是超越自主的民族认同的范围，他们开始重新思考美国主义的工作，如保罗·贾尔斯和约翰·卡洛斯·科，他们在阅读美国文学时，以世界性的、跨国的术语来学科。我的书建立在这种方法的基础上，探索那个时期的国家认同叙事工作是如何受到比较分析结构的启发的。如果知识分子最适合居住在一个世界性的有利位置，那么S与民族国家有什么样的关系？

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?