Paragraph of the Week

From Frank Kelleter's "1776: A Dialectics of Radical Enlightenment," published in A New Literary History of America:

To found a country and constitute a "people" on the basis of natural rights--rather than to commit an existing country or an existing people to such principles--is an improbable thing to do. It marks that country for utopian overreach or constructive despair. It produces forms of self-obsession that often lead one to forget that there is a world outside one's own country. It produces perennial disputes about the meaning of one's communal existence in the world. To the extent that the United States was founded by force of documents, texts, and clashing forms of rhetoric, the United States is bound to be a nation of competing readers and competing readings. And to the extent that even the most self-evident propositions are invariably confronted with local meanings and interests, the United States has always been a nation divided in trying to become one nation. There can be, then, no such thing as a nonpartisan American literature--political, historiographical, or otherwise.

Paragraph of the Week

From Anne M. Wagner's essay "Maya Lin's Wall" (The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington) in A New Literary History of America:

In the end what was most provocative about Maya Lin's memorial--and most disturbing to its opponents--is its willingness to dispense entirely with any evocation of the bodies of the fallen. Which is to say her conception underscores--even replicates--a central, irrefutable fact. Death is loss. When translated into sculpture, bodily absence may register as poignant or threatening, necessary or unbearable; viewers, Hart [, Frederick, a memorial designer who submitted a rival design] among them, have always responded and continue to respond in all these ways. But one thing is certain: with the body and its surrogates so thoroughgoingly banished by the work's abstraction, various animated rituals have been revived or devised to take its place. When viewers visit the Wall, they often supplement its blank surfaces by leaving some relic or talisman--a letter, flowers, photographs, a piece of clothing their loved one once wore--against its slick black planes. And they may well depart with a pencil rubbing of his name. (All the names on the wall, save those of eight female nurses, are male.) This pattern of giving and taking stretches back centuries and has been found at the holiest of sites. When it happens at the Wall, however, there can be no doubt that it responds to--is catalyzed by--Lin's radical simplicity of form.

As I've mentioned before, I think war memorials are endlessly fascinating. You can experience the wall, virtually, at Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund's website.

Paragraph of the Week

Sorry for the one day delay. Long weekends are strangely disorienting. Without further ado, here's a paragraph for you, from Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors' introduction to A New Literary History of America:

"Made in America"--America, made. In many ways, the story that comes together in the pieces of this book is that of people taking up the two elemental American fables--the fable of discovery and the fable of founding--and making their own versions: their own versions of the fables, which is to say their own version of America itself. Who knows if it is John F. Kennedy delivering his Inaugural Address or Jay Gatsby throwing one more party who is more truly invoking John Wintrhop's "A Model of Christian Charity" from three centuries before? Is it Frederick Douglass or Hank Williams who has the most to tell us, not to mention Jefferson's ghost, about the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence? Doesn't Emily Dickinson, within her own Amherst walls, invent as complete a nation--loose in the wilderness in flight from all forms of restraint, be they those of God or man--as Ahab on the quarterdeck or Lincoln at the East Face of the Capitol?