American Studies: Grasping at a Moving Target

The new Encyclopedia of American Studies is, as they say in the business, a big ol’ piece of material culture. It’s also a surprisingly good read. I’ve had its four volumes scattered in various nooks around my house for a few weeks now, and I’ve had fun dipping into them during odd moments,

opening a volume at random and engrossing myself in an article about Reader’s Digest, or the Shakers, or something else I knew next to nothing about. The articles -- which are signed and richly illustrated -- even have a welcome sense of style and personal voice, which is unusual for a reference work.

But encyclopedias have to do more than amuse. They’ve got an official purpose, to sit in libraries and serve as a resource for readers. At $400 per set, this one is certainly aimed at institutional bookshelves rather than the bedsides of people like me. Moreover, this particular encyclopedia has set itself some exalted goals. A massive undertaking sponsored by the American Studies Association, it is the first of its kind, and it seeks nothing less than to define a protean field.

Reviewing encyclopedias can easily turn into a game of “where’s the missing entry?” No matter how carefully editors try to cover a field, there are bound to be omissions. The vast scope of the Encyclopedia of American Studies makes it a veritable barn door for potshots from hobbyhorse riders. Even so, I can’t resist a few salvos, because they lead to important questions about what manner of beast this new encyclopedia is -- and isn’t.

I can understand why there’s an entry on Coke but not Pepsi, but why is there one on the Hoover Dam but none on the larger ideological concept of reclamation that it exemplifies? Why Plymouth Rock but not Pocahontas? And where are Hawthorne and Faulkner? Enough. The Encyclopedia of American Studies shouldn’t be judged on that basis. It paints in broad strokes. The question is whether such an editorial strategy is a good idea -- and what it finally says about American studies as a field.

The promotional material for the encyclopedia trumpets the fact that there are more than 660 entries in more than 2,000 pages. But by way of comparison, the soon-to-be-released Encyclopedia of Literature and Science has about the same number of entries in less than half as many pages; and the Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (subtitled A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television) has over 1,400 entries in just over 400 pages.

Not surprisingly, the entries in the Encyclopedia of American Studies are longer than in most encyclopedias. They’re full-blown essays, not redactions, and some entries are composed of a handful of separate essays. “Film,” for example, contains an overview followed by five related essays on film and history, audience, technology, reality, and, finally, “Film and the Construction of Identity.” I wonder who is going to ask himself, “Where can I look up information about film and the construction of identity?”

What do you look up in an encyclopedia of American studies, anyway?

If I wanted to learn about Frederick Douglass, my first impulse might be to head to the Dictionary of American Biography, or the new Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. If I had questions about Manifest Destiny, I might turn to the Oxford Companion to American History. The Encyclopedia of American Studies has entries on all those subjects, but I can’t think of a question that would make me turn to it as a primary reference work.

Which prompts another question: What is American studies? That is the eternal chestnut of the field, and it has prompted some serious navel-gazing over the years. But that’s the question that this encyclopedia is trying to answer.

American studies emerged in higher education amid the reformist spirit of the New Deal era. Historically based models dominated at first, resulting in unified national narratives that have come to be classified under categories like “myth and symbol.” Events of the 1960s galvanized the field, producing an emphasis on contemporary political concerns like urban problems, racial issues, and environmentalism. In the 1980s, the direction of American studies shifted again, affected this time by pluralism -- when the cultures of “hyphenated Americans” (a neologism credited to President Theodore Roosevelt, who deplored what he saw as compromised national identity) were found to be a vital source of insight into American culture. Like sedimentary rock, the new encyclopedia records all of those historical layers, with the most recent occupying the most space: By my count, 18 entries are devoted to hyphenated Americans.

These essays are dominated by the search for what one calls “distinctive contributions to American life,” often looking for specialness within larger ethnic categories. (“Two distinct character-istics set Korean-Americans apart from other Asian groups”; Irish-Americans are “unique among all American ethnic groups” by virtue of their experience as emigrants.) Such particularism distinguishes today’s American studies from earlier incarnations of the field, although it’s marked here by a certain defensiveness of tone.

Of course, American studies has always been in flux. In her 1998 presidential address to the American Studies Association, Janice Radway even suggested changing the name of the field to reflect the “intricate interdependencies” that inform the whole idea of American culture. (She suggested “Inter-American studies,” among other possibilities.)

Everyone can agree that American studies has amorphous and porous boundaries. One political scientist described it to me as “everything that isn’t explicitly non-American,” a big chunk of intellectual real estate indeed. And it’s getting even larger lately: Some scholars are extending the reach of American studies to embrace the cultures of the continent and hemisphere. This expansiveness has been a source of vitality in the field, but it’s bound to be a problem if you’re compiling an encyclopedia. Faced with such an array of possibilities, it may make sense to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity and say of American studies: “I know it when I see it.” The field draws on everything from everywhere, from the Louisiana Purchase to Levittown, from the NRA to the NOW, from race riots to Roe v. Wade. The American-studies program at the University of Minnesota, one of the oldest, simply states that “American Studies is the interdisciplinary study of American cultures.” That’s the main source of the definitional difficulties: a proud interdisciplinarity.

Interdisciplinarity brings some practical difficulties. Robert Tilton, the director of the American-studies program at the University of Connecticut, told me that the program is interdisciplinary in nature but -- “here’s the rub,” he said -- multidisciplinary in practice, as students take many discipline-based courses, combining them in their own experience over time. The Encyclopedia of American Studies conveys a similar feeling -- although it should be said that there’s a serious effort at bridge-building throughout.

One can see the editors wrestling with the problem of equal time. Their efforts to attend to the demands of constituent disciplines might make the reader forget that this is supposed to be a reference book. When I asked Cristina Giorcelli, a professor of American literature at the University of Rome, what she would like to see in an encyclopedia of American studies, she unhesitatingly answered: “Facts, dates, and summaries.” The encyclopedia has its share of those, but they must be extracted from long essays on larger subjects.

There’s also a good deal of what might be called “interpretation.” In keeping with Orwell’s reminder that all writing is political, that strikes me as an honest showing of one’s colors. Jørn Brøndal’s entry on immigration, for example, concludes that “America has made great strides” since 1965 to bridge the gap between national ideals and practice.

Given such prominent politics, it’s accurate to say that this new encyclopedia isn’t about facts and figures at all. Its primary raison d’tre is to make a statement about American studies itself. While there’s no entry on Hemingway, there are essays on the American-studies pioneers Lewis Mumford, Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, and Leo Marx. In fact, this is the rare encyclopedia that has an entry devoted to itself: The essay on “American Studies” is a hefty one in two parts. In an “Overview,” Michael H. Cowan, a past president of the American Studies Association, describes the field as “the self-conscious commentary on American life.” So what do you look up in an encyclopedia of American studies? One answer is: American studies.

Compiling an encyclopedia of American studies is like trying to catch a waterfall in a bottle. Even if you could invent an endlessly expandable bottle, the task is doomed because it’s the movement, along with the water, that defines a waterfall. So too with American studies. The field is defined not by information alone, but by the ongoing interaction among the disciplines, and the interesting and distinctive mixtures that are continually emerging. A decade ago, hardly anyone noticed food. Today, food studies is a flourishing field within American studies. The same is true of minstrelsy (which has an entry) and disability studies (which does not). The only certainty in American studies is that new branches are continually growing, new combinations being catalyzed.

Any document that purports to define this remarkable field has to take into account its remarkable changeability. If there ever were a project that cried out for new media, it was this one. The elasticity and generative vitality of American studies would have been better served by a Web site with hypertext links to draw entries together and a built-in capacity to expand and evolve -- like the field itself. The Encyclopedia of American Studies claims to outline a dynamic field, but instead creates a static memorial to a moment in time. It’s an admirable attempt at an implausible task -- in an inappropriate medium.

Leonard Cassuto is an associate professor of English at Fordham University.

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