Robert A. Gross begins his introduction by telling readers that “An Extensive Republic charts the expansion of print culture in a new nation rapidly gaining in population and spreading across space” (1, emphasis added). He later talks about the “tyranny of distance” in regards to how long it took to disseminate information across the vast terrains of America.
But I wonder if the real culprit--though is there a culprit, really?--is in fact time; after all, distance is something that can be conquered, that technological advances can help us to overcome. We cannot, however, overcome time in quite the same sense, though time and space are, as we commonly view them, inextricably linked.
What seems most illuminating about the 50-year time span on which Extensive Republic focuses is how much growth there was in such a short temporal segment on the timeline of that intangible entity we refer to as history. And where this growth came from was (1) the exponential rise of print culture and (2) the multiplicity of public spheres that arose at least in part as a response to the rise of print culture.
Gross expands on Habermas’s idea of the public sphere, asserting that there is also a “public sphere of civil society” (11). But I think there is more expanding to do than that—to assume and think of the public sphere as a collective—or here a binary collective—entity is simply to default back to the notion of there being one and only one way to define American nationalism, one and only one way to define American ideology. Print culture offered itself to multiple, fragmented sectors of the public that were in fact, by themselves, not so fragmented at all. Print culture helped, for instance, women to have voices. They developed their voices, however, because they made space for themselves when they saw the so-called universal public sphere was leaving them out. But even there, we could divide the category of women down by factors of class, race, and geographical location.
Each divisional public sphere, in and of itself, existed in a fugal harmony with other public spheres; different, yes, but with the same overarching goal: to build personal and national identities, to learn about one's self and one's nation. Not being too general and offering materials that were sufficiently localized was a balancing act print culture in America had to deal with, and it dealt with it fairly well. Certainly, space was important, for, as Gross points out, Americans thrived on localism. What concern had farmers in rural North Carolina for the public sphere that existed among New York entrepreneurs? A public sphere of one’s own—that’s what Virginia Woolf would have called for had she lived in this time (and space), I should like to think. And while Gross gets closer to this idea than Habermas did, he’s still missing the mark.
In this regard, I wonder about the “campaign by many writers, editors, and artists to bring forth a distinctive literature and culture expressive of the nation as a whole” that arose in the 1830s (13, emphasis added). Gross uses the word “expressive” instead of “representative," and I'd like to think he was savvy enough to have chosen his diction here quite carefully. A singular literature and/or culture that could stand up as a representation of America’s diverseness surely would have been difficult; if nothing else, such a representation would have taken up too much space. But an “expressive” literature and/or culture suggests a more linguistic way of signifying a nation, which, if we are inclined to agree with Bahktin’s assessment of novels (and I suppose I am so inclined), is in fact a way the varying voices of America could be heard. Assuming we're willing to take the time to listen.
Hi Melissa, I think your post is quite insightful--thanks. I think our old friend Bakhtin would say that every sort of utterance--yours, mine, gross's and all the early American nationalist authors--takes place in a concrete cultural context of dialogue. I think the early nationalist authors were reacting--in dialogue--to feelings of inferiority generated by English journals which derisively proclaimed that there was no such thing as a good American book. And our friend Gross is writing in response to his assigned task of trying to make sense of an age filled with so many curious contradictions. Cohesion and unity are always more imagined than real, and critics like us are always trying to make sense--discover relevant patterns--in complicated, contradictory materials. Gross was trying to be expressive of a whole, which at best is an imagined community. Interesting, since it begs the Hayden White question of history as narrative. In trying to make sense of what is so complicated, do we risk bending too many rough edges to fit into our narrative? A profound but unanswerable question. Good stuff. dw
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