PAB Entry #6: “American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis in Epistemology: The Example of Charles Brockden Brown”

Hagenbuchle, Roland. “American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis in Epistemology: The Example of Charles Brockden Brown.” Early American Literature 23.2 (1988): 121- 151. EBSCOhost Religion and Philosophy Collection. Web. 4 October 2016.

Hagenbuchle begins his article by noting how American literary criticism has focused on the native qualities evident in the works of NINETEENTH-CENTURY writers.  These native qualities of American literature tend to emphasize a writer’s need to understand the world symbolically while finding significance in the phenomenal world (Hagenbuchle 121).  Since most critics concur that interpretation is a paramount quality in studying American literature, an author’s desire to comprehend the world in symbolic terms can be traced all the way back to the Puritans’ “preoccupation with the meaning of self and world” and their desire to “interpret personal and historical events as signs that point to God’s providential plan for the new continent and its people” (121).  This perception of Puritan literature is commonplace in critical studies; in fact, in The Evolution of College English, the author writes, “The religious literature of the time provided a template for interpreting the smallest details of daily life as signs of Providence.  Puritan literature had ‘a palimpsest quality’ that documents the rich interpretive frameworks of the literary mentality of the time” (Miller 29). Proponents of the PALIMPSEST epistemology, where the literature/ideas are reused or altered while still maintaining traces of their previous form, continue to see the connectivity between works of Puritanism and Romanticism in America. As Thomas P. Miller asserts, “Over the last three centuries, the most valued forms of literacy have evolved from religious literature through an oratorical concern for style and delivery to a modern sense of literature as nonfactual works of the imagination” (15).

Click on the picture of Charles Brockden Brown's novel to find a summary of the book and further information.
Click on the picture of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel to find a summary of the book and further information.

While Hagenbuchle recognizes this epistemology, he extends the symbolic study to include the “elements of AMBIVALENCE and self-reflexivity that attend the tenuous relationship between self, world, and word” (121).  Essentially, what Hagenbuchle adds to the study is the uncertainty present in the world; however, this uncertainty continues to be symbolic because the future of America, along with the writers who populate the country, present ambivalence.  Before using CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN as his main American author of reference, Hagenbuchle discusses the differences between nineteenth-century British and American writings, focusing primarily on the plausibility associated with British narratives and the pessimistic and unconventional styles of American writers (122).  According to Hagenbuchle, what is most unusual about Brown’s literature is that there is no valid cause and effect relationship at all.  This tactic is devoid of continuity, and like Hume, who attacked causality and substance while arguing that facts are singular events and correlation between cause and effective is only subjective, Brown endeavors to show in his literature that cause and effect relationships aren’t even plausible (Hagenbuchle 124).  Chronicling Brown’s erratic characters, the lack of connection in Wieland, the lack of motives present in the novel, and an unreliable narrator, Hagenbuchle shows how Brown ignores causality, identity, and stable meaning; therefore, “Self, world, and word, all lose their defining contours” (142).  Although Hagenbuchle chiefly presents Brown’s work at the foundation of his argument, he also references other American authors of the century who exhibit some of the same characteristics of ambivalence in their literature: Dickenson, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, and James.  As the author notes, “Jamesian use of ambivalence appears as the culmination of a century-long American tradition.  Indeed, the inferential method must be regarded as one of the hallmarks of nineteenth-century American literature” (140).

Additional Sources:

Miller, Thomas P. The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the             Postmoderns.  Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. Print.

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