The Lost Cause

doi:10.2307/1104744

Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside

CounterText ◽

10.3366/count.2018.0118 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 98-113

Author(s):

Shaobo Xie

Keyword(s):

Aesthetic Education ◽

The Other ◽

Human Values ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Lost Cause ◽

Western Tradition ◽

The World

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.

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The Galaxy, National Literature, and Reconstruction

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2020.75.1.50 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 75 (1) ◽

pp. 50-81

Author(s):

Brook Thomas

Keyword(s):

Henry James ◽

Mark Twain ◽

National Literature ◽

Lost Cause ◽

American Democracy ◽

Fair Treatment ◽

The Galaxy ◽

Great Poet ◽

John William De Forest ◽

United Nation

Brook Thomas, “The Galaxy, National Literature, and Reconstruction” (pp. 50–81) The North’s victory in the Civil War preserved the Union and led to the abolition of slavery. Reconstruction was a contentious debate about what sort of nation that union of states should become. Published during Reconstruction before being taken over by the Atlantic Monthly, the Galaxy tried, in Rebecca Harding Davis’s words, to be “a national magazine in which the current of thought of every section could find expression.” The Galaxy published literature and criticism as well as political, sociological, and economic essays. Its editors were moderates who aesthetically promoted a national literature and politically promoted reconciliation between Northern and Southern whites along with fair treatment for freedmen. What fair treatment entailed was debated in its pages. Essayists included Horace Greeley, the abolitionist journalist; Edward A. Pollard, author of The Lost Cause (1866); and David Croly, who pejoratively coined the phrase “miscegenation.” Literary contributors included Davis, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Mark Twain, Constance Fenimore Woolson, John William De Forest, Julian Hawthorne, Emma Lazarus, Paul Hayne, Sidney Lanier, and Joaquin Miller. Juxtaposing some of the Galaxy’s literary works with its debates over how the Union should be reimagined points to the neglected role that Reconstruction politics played in the institutionalization of American literary studies. Whitman is especially important. Reading the great poet of American democracy in the context of the Galaxy reveals how his postbellum celebration of a united nation—North, South, East, and West—aligns him with moderate views on Reconstruction that today seem racially reactionary.

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