A Temporal Meditation on Gross’s Introduction to An Extensive Republic (Occuring Within This Specified Space)

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.

Advertisements, Novels, and A Priori Ideology: A Response to Davidson, Chapters 3 & 4

In reading chapters three and four of Davidson's book, I became especially interested in the role advertisements played in attracting and influencing readers. How much power did the advertisement have in attracting would be readers and setting a priori ideological undertones for the work it was promoting and in which it was contained?

I find it telling that in the 19th century, non-novels were being advertised as novels. Obviously the novel as a genre had developed a kind of sway, a kind of power that the captivity narrative, the biography had not. And this development seems to have happened rapidly, historically speaking, as the 18th century saw novels being advertised as, for instance, "sentimental histories." I tend to think of the advertisement today as having more power than the product itself, but in early America, it would seem that the novel--as a product and as a genre--empowered the advertising industry. (I wonder what a reader would think upon opening a captivity narrative that had been advertised as a novel. Would the novel label hold? Or would the reader realize she had been duped? How much power does a predefined label have over us?)

But that is not to say that advertisements as a genre were not powerful--they certainly were. And advertisements within a particular work seemed to play a role in shaping not only that work's ideological grounding, but also the ideology behind the works in the advertisements themselves.  An advertisement for Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman within the pages of Charlotte Temple may have suggested to readers some of the novel's more feminist undertones, but Charlotte may also have suggested to readers unfamiliar with Wollstonecraft that her work would be one of a feminist slant similar to Rowson's because of the advertisement's placement. The relationship between advertisement and text, then, became one of mutual benefit, at least from the perspective of the printer/publisher. (In that respect, I wonder if Davidson would have benefited from considering the printer/publisher's role as an educator.) Moreover--if I may throwback to our friend Starr for a moment--advertisements and texts interacted with each other in a very horizontal way, mimicking the way in which the reader interacted with texts and advertisements, too (at least according to Davidson). 

It is in this light that I read Davidson's assertion that "it is necessary to ask not only who could read but what they read; not only what they read but in what context" (122). In that regard, as Davidson later says, the novel indeed "was not culturally autonomous but, rather, was contiguous with other literary forms, was intertwined with the social and political concerns of the day, and was part of the activities of the reader's life" (139). 

            One of these "other literary forms" was, as I have asserted, the advertisement. Davidson uses advertisements as a way to read the perceived target audience of a work: "The advertisements included in early American novels also indicate that they were often targeted specifically for children, women, or a new and relatively untutored readership, not for the intellectual elite" (139). 

            Her footnote on this subject is even more illuminating: "For example, in the 1794 edition of Charlotte, Mathew Carey advertised other books by Rowson as well as Wollstonecraft's The Rights of Women [sic] (for $1), suggesting that he anticipated a primarily female (and feminist?) audience. In an 1811 edition of the same novel, most of the books advertised at the back are juvenile works, as are the preponderance of books in the 1815 edition of Sarah Savage's The Factory Girl. Conversely, in a 1793 edition of Rowson's textbook, Universal Geography, nearly all of the ads are for books by or about women, including some novels" (408). 

Clearly, then, something changed between 1794 and 1811. The context in which readers were reading was different: Charlotte was not a new novel, and developments in education--as well as the advertisements themselves--suggest that Charlotte was a book readers were able to approach at a young age. (One could also go down the path of considering how the advertisements indicated mothers who would see value in their children's education as Charlotte's readers. I do not do that here, but it is certainly a worthy and most [more?] feasible conjecture.) Maybe, then, Charlotte's potential to promote its particular brand of ideology was even more powerful, as it was getting readers at an early age, when their minds were more open to new, potentially subversive ideas than an adult female reader's mind would have been. In fact, what was subversive to an adult woman may not have seemed subversive to a young reader at all, simply because she did not have the epistemological foregrounding on which to base sophisticated binary distinctions such as subversive/non-subversive in the first place. Charlotte as a children's book (dare I call it a Bildungsroman of sorts?), then, is not so much a demotion as a promotion of its star--not to be confused with Starr--potential. 

Nationality and The Novel: The Rise of Charlotte Temple in America (Expanded Edition)

In searching the Internet for images related to Charlotte Temple, I came across an article by Michael Winship entitled "Two Early American Bestsellers: Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin." As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m new to the realm of the early American novel. So I was fascinated to learn that Charlotte Temple was first published in Britain by Minerva Press; it wasn’t published in America until three years later. 

Now Davidson does mention this fact in Chapter Five. But her agenda in Chapter Two is to look at the origins of the book in regards to its materiality and economic status, so discussing Charlotte Temple's publishing history—so closely tied to how it materialized (on multiple levels) in America—seems relevant here, too. 

It has occurred to me that I am perhaps discussing things with which some of my readers are all-too-familiar, and for that, I do sincerely apologize. I likewise apologize if my proceeding discussion of Charlotte Temple is ill-informed, ungrounded, myopic, or quite simply wrong. It may well be; my knowledge (or is it information?) is limited. But, as I said, fascination is in progress here (here being in my mind). As Winship says, “the question of Charlotte Temple’s ‘Americanness’ is a vexed one.” 

My agenda, then, is to figure out what made Charlotte Temple get stamped as an American—as opposed to a British—novel. And is that stamp appropriate?

According to Winship, Charlotte Temple received little attention in England. I surely believe that—the Minerva Press churned out books of “light literature” at a rapid pace, and the subject matter of Charlotte Temple was hardly anything new on that side of the pond. (If you’d like more information about Minerva Press and eighteenth and nineteenth century publishing in England, check out Richard Altick’s English Common Reader, Second Edition.) 

But then Charlotte Temple came to America. Davidson discusses the American book industry as a triadic interrelationship among the writer, the printer/publisher/marketer, and the reader. So let's look at each of these industry components as they relate specifically to Charlotte Temple. 

1.                          The writer. One Susanna Rowson. Rowson was born in England, but spent most of her life in America. Davidson considers Rowson to be only “marginally American” (163). Winship makes note of her curious signature on the title page of the first American edition—“Mrs. Rowson, of the New Theatre, Philadelphia.” Winship asserts that this signature “seems rather to point to the work’s racy nature, written by an actress, than to the author’s American residence.” Should we read so much into the signature? By associating herself with an American theatre, but not with America itself, is Rowson setting the stage (pun intended) for some kind of subversive strategy that exists within the novel itself? That question aside, it seems we can at best give Rowson the label of British-American. Or a marginal American, if you'd prefer. Thus, it does not seem to be Charlotte Temple’s author that makes it an American novel.

2.                          Of course, it is doubtful Rowson had much control over the title page; any subversive strategies surrounding the signature likely would have been devised by the publisher. Davidson nicely details how a book “was a product of both the writer’s and the printer’s art” (79). How did printers view Charlotte Temple? The answer to that question, on at least one level, is quite easy: they viewed it as a British book, a book not subject to American copyright laws. Would Charlotte Temple have become as widely popular had it fallen under the private domain of a single printer? Winship asserts that “There can be little doubt that Charlotte Temple's great success in America depended on the fact that, as a work in the public domain, it was freely available for reprinting by any and all American printers and publishers who cared to offer an edition—and many did throughout the nineteenth century." The aforementioned title page—in addition to assigning an ambiguous label to Rowson—also includes a quotation from Romeo & Juliet. (I’m pretty sure the latter is the title of a British play, but then, I’m hardly familiar with early British works, either.) From a marketing standpoint, there seemed to be a reason for blurring the nationality associated with this book. Could it be that publishers were afraid it would be thought too subversive, too much of a scandal? Whatever the answer may be, the printer/publisher/marketer seems not to provide us with an answer to what made Charlotte Temple an American novel.

3.                          That leaves us, then, with the American readers. How did they respond to this book? Winship writes that, “as a tale of seduction and innocence lost, yet in the end somehow forgiven and redeemed, it [Charlotte Temple] struck a chord with American readers, especially during a period that saw the new nation attempt to establish itself culturally in a Eurocentric world that viewed America as innocent of artistic and moral tradition.” Indeed, Charlotte Temple is commonly hailed as the first American bestseller (Winship’s article provides a nice overview of the origin of this word). American readers related to it, learned from it, were empowered by it—and that seems to be, then, what has made Charlotte Temple come to be known as an American novel. And within the context of the time in which it was originally published, having the support and devotion of American readers certainly seems a solid enough foundation upon which a novel may stand and declare itself American.

So Charlotte Temple’s American stamp is appropriate. Not a subversive conclusion on my part, to be sure. Though to be honest, even if I thought that "American" wasn't an appropriate stamp, I might have been too afraid to say so. Even asking this question in the first place had me quickening my (typing) pace and looking behind my back for McCarthy.  

On Davidson's Introduction, or Why "Expanded Editions" may now be my new favorite kind of Edition

     I found reading Cathy Davidson’s introduction to be an enlightening, engaging experience. So much so, that I almost feel at a loss for words. I know so little about Early American Novels, and yet I was able to relate so much of what they were trying to accomplish to my own areas of interest—intertextuality truly abounds, and history (of the novel) does indeed repeat itself.

     Richard Rorty has written that literature is the new philosophy, but perhaps literature has first and foremost been “the people’s philosophy.” Davidson’s comment that “the novel as a genre was more inclusive in its audience and characters than was the new government” (9) certainly seems to serve as evidence for such a labeling. I’m not particularly surprised here, but to sit and ponder over just how much power potential a novel could have, I’m, as always, amazed. I wonder, today, what has—if anything—the same amount, the same kind of power to influence our country. (I’ll let you know when/if I come up with an answer I think sound, or at least remotely possible.)

     Christopher Newfield’s argument that “moderation” is, as Davidson puts it, “the most consistent and foundational American value” (17) rings true to me, and it is a value that these early American novels seemed to possess. Introduce the intrigues of seduction, sure, but have a nice moralizing bit at the end to tidy things up. Texts were careful not to be too extreme, and it seems that idea passed on into the minds of readers.

     On this note, Davidson’s discussion of “subversion” was of particular interest to me, given my following of Victorian sensation novels of the 1860s—subversion, subversion, subversion, is the word on the literary critics’ street. Yet I’ve always liked and disliked the word, thought it appropriate, yet not really appropriate at all. As she writes, “subversion seems like a narrow way to describe the complex operations of the literary form in the contest over how to define and create that amorphous entity called a ‘nation’” (24).

     Finally, that her work is truly of the interdisciplinary sort speaks to its power. That she sometimes met with disfavor toward such a methodological approach is something I, too, have come across, but to see that she was able to move beyond that and produce what, from the introduction, promises to be a first rate work is inspiring.

     I should also add that my interest is now that much more peaked to read some of these early American novels. I’m not sure when I’ll get to it—my reading list is always long—but get to it I shall. I may well find that further reading of Davidson’s text results in a repositioning of said list altogether.

On Starr, Chapter 4 (and tangents assuredly related)

            I approached Starr with a personal goal this week: to lesson my ire toward the kind of tale he is trying to weave for us—a tale (in my humble opinion) of how political systems gave rise to an exceptional American communications systems. I read Hayden White. I did some deep breathing. I opened the book while sitting down to sup, and I smiled. Starting his chapter with the abysmal reviews early American literature received from abroad and at home, I knew Starr was going to have some fun telling us how American literature rose from the ashes into the realm of respectability and acclaim. And I was okay with that.

I was admittedly upset that Starr ignored the transatlantic interplay of what was happening in American and British journalism and literature. He speaks of the rise of crime literature and the reporting of scandalous murders, such as the Helen Jewett case, as though it happened in a vacuum. What about, to give one example, the Newgate Novels that had become all the rage in Britain? What’s your opinion, Professor Starr? How did the British publishing world influence America, and how did the American publishing world influence Britain?  But I calmed myself down. Matters of the transatlantic sort are not part of Starr’s agenda. A history book cannot be exhaustive in its coverage, I concede. Nor can it be expected to answer all of my questions. Expecting that would make me horribly self-centered.

I did chuckle when Starr wrote about “the advent of journalism as form of entertainment in which fidelity to facts was subordinate to the interest in a compelling story” (134). What about the advent of historiography, Starr? The way you are reading the facts is influenced by the story—which you clearly find compelling—you’re trying to tell. Did Starr realize he was providing commentary on his own text within his text? If so, a humorous nod to the fact would have been grand.

            The rise of the popular press and sensation journalism, says Starr, helped to give rise to the American renaissance—writers “transformed the sensibility of their time into enduring literature” (137). I see how there is a baseline American influence for these American writers, but what about all of the British literature they were reading? (In 1820, British reprints still accounted for 70 percent of all books being published and sold in America.) What was the interplay there? Why don’t you mention that, Starr? (I know: I answered this question already. Clearly I don't find my own answer to be sufficient.) Why you don’t mention women authors is another beef I had, but Larisa’s blog writes a wonderful letter to Starr on that subject, so I shall not expand on it here.

            I think it’s great that books and thus information were able to travel so far—that there was even “village enlightenment.” And the rise in printing cheap papers and novels that were popular—sometimes tasteful, sometimes not—if nothing else helped to ensure the rise of literacy rates. What we ended up with was what Starr calls the “diffusion of useful knowledge.” Does he actually mean knowledge here, or information? Again, what are we getting from newspapers? What are we getting from books? I accept Starr’s book as a “diffusion of useful knowledge,” but now I’m not really sure what I mean when I say that.

            I found Starr’s overview of copyright struggles very enlightening, particularly when pertaining to an individual author’s rights. Poet Joel Barlow’s remark that “There is certainly no kind of property, in the nature of things, so much his own, as the works which a person originates from his own creative imagination” (120) certainly moved me, as an individual who produces works of the mind. Fighting to own the creations of one’s mind is certainly a fight worth fighting for, though these days we have given ownership of much of what we produce online to certain companies (Facebook, twitter, etc.). Of course, we let that happen. I let that happen. It’s a price to pay, I suppose, for being linked into communication superhighways. The Internet can also control our right to free speech, in a sense—if you post something a webmaster, blog writer, etc. finds offensive, it can simply be removed. You are free to say what you want, but there is no guarantee others will be free to read it. There is a level of policing going on that I fear may expand in frightening ways.

The fact that (as I mentioned above), in 1820, British reprints still accounted for 70 percent of all books being published and sold in America makes the periodical research we are doing--thanks to the Internet--invaluable. In these newspapers, in these journals, we find stories—fictictious and factual—that give us insight into what it was like to be an American during these years. Without these insights, we’re left with the bare bone facts, which historians such as Starr deliver to us in carefully constructed packages. Of course, newspapers are edited, and there is no way to really know if what we are reading is "authentic" (whatever that means), but accepting some things as basic premises is the only way to push forward, and I choose to accept what we are finding when scouring the databases as nuggets of true insight into American life.

            And the papers confirm some of what Starr tells us—reading became a source of diversion, and reading became a far more extensive than intensive activity. There was so much being produced, so much to read, and the urge for consumption of so much new material was so high that people would fly through a newspaper today to be ready for tomorrow's, fly through a book segment to be ready for the next installment—in this sense, there is little wonder as to how we (and other developed nations, too) became so information hungry. Knowledge was not being mass marketed as hip and trendy—why sit down and spend hour upon hour examining the works of Aristotle when you could read what's hot off the presses? And the prices in America! I was amazed at how cheaply things were printed here in comparison to pricing in England at the time. You could afford to be voracious.

Fast-forwarding this conversation, I question what impact the Internet has had on our reading. Without the Internet, we wouldn’t be able to access the American Periodicals database. It has done wonderful things for nonlinear reading—stories presented as hypertext often help to illuminate their meaning. But it is also that much easier to scroll and skim, to disengage. On airplanes now, everyone has an e-reader or an iPad. (I own a Kindle—I use it for pleasure reading.) Just how different is it to read on a screen as opposed to a paper page? Are we losing power and control over our reading experience?

I should like to conclude by mentioning an article Linda Hughes sent our Victorian Periodicals course from the most recent  New York Times Book Review, as I think it is relevant to our conversation as well. Lev Grossman’s “From Scroll to Screen” asserts that the digitization of books has forced us back into a nonlinear form of reading, a form the advent of the codex in the first century A.D. freed us from so that we could interact with texts in more engaging ways. By reading on the Kindle, the Nook, Grossman says, we are giving up the power to control our own reading experience. He ends by saying, “until I hear God personally say to me, ‘Boot up and read,’ I won’t be giving it [reading on paper] up.” I laughed. And I related. And I wondered what Starr version 2.0 will have to say about the creation of media in the 21^st century 100 years from now, too.

It's All About The (Exceptional) Politics: A Response to Starr, Chapters 2 & 3

Starr’s chapters certainly provide an excellent detailing of early American history as it relates to the media; he positions pre-Revolution America in a developmentally liminal space—no longer British, but also not quite American, either.  But Starr’s American exceptionalist, poli-centric slant weakens the power of the text. As a reader, I always knew what was coming.  Early in chapter two, after citing some American accomplishments in media, he notes that, during the same period, British North America (henceforth Canada), had made little communications progress. Why was America successful when Canada was not? The answer might shock you (sarcasm intended): because of “the political transformation of American society in the previous half-century” (49).

This argument setup takes place in regards to printing, too. Starr again notes America’s uniqueness, telling us, “The independent printer-publisher engaged in the newspaper business was an American phenomenon” (59). To stay true to the facts, he does backup, saying that at first, papers largely focused on foreign, British news, “ritually affirming the colonists’ participation in the imperial system” (61). It was, however, Britain’s published critiques of government control over what should be basic liberties that fueled Americans toward revolution. The press was not just a place for vertical communication—horizontal communication took place through printed debates, debates people could then go and discuss with fellow readers. The media could be a provider of more than just rote information. But the liminality ends here, says Starr, for the British arguments for liberty were used by Americans in a wholly new way—to ignite a revolution. Americans were not satisfied to have demands for their liberties stay on the page—politics motivated them to take action against the British government. American exceptionalism at its finest.  

            Starr’s hard-hitting, predictable approach to bringing everything he talks about back to politics and American exceptionalism has made me reflect on what strategical tactics I use to help make my point in papers. Am I just as nauseating? Is that how one should be, or has to be, even? What does it take to be an effective writer? I realize there are a myriad of ways to answer the latter. I also realize that other readers may not find Starr’s approach nauseating at all—maybe my problem is that I do not fully buy his core argument.

            I was particularly interested in Starr’s discussion of the evolution of free speech. As Starr notes, the first document to be issued in print in the English colonies was the freeman’s oath. He writes that the oath expressed a “political philosophy that was radical for its time” (51). But the Puritan elite certainly did not read the oath as radical in any way. The interpretative controversy regarding the oath immediately brings to mind Stanley Cavell’s question: must we mean what we say? And are we any more bound to mean what we say when words are in print? In this case, the oath said what it meant, but what it meant was determined by what the higher powers wanted it to mean at any given time. Leaders did not let the radical nature of the oath come to life, and when it did, punishment ensued. “Bodily correction” is an intriguing euphemism, and I was equally intrigued by the decision to punish offenses of the cerebral sort through bodily torture. Banishment from the colony, as sometimes happened, makes more sense—if you’re not there, no one can hear what you have to say. (Unless you write down your opinions and send them to your now far-away friends through the postal service. But wait! One would have to be educated. And have assured protection of one’s private letters…) Likewise, when the Virginia General Court bore through Richard Barnes’s tongue with an awl, it made (horribly gruesome) sense. Yet neither of these punishments are silencing the true culprit—the mind. It seems that American leaders subscribed to a physicalist view of the body—the mind is not a separate entity. The crimes, then, are of a bodily (specifically brain) sort, so they should be punished as such. Considering that the notion of Descartian dualism was circulating around at this time, and considering the pervasiveness of religion (where the mind/soul surely does exist) in America, too, I find the evolution of corporeal punishment for intellectual crimes fascinating. Perhaps dualism simply does not lend itself well to the realm of discipline and punishment. (I could easily bring in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish here, but Foucault? He was so last week.)

            Of course, for awhile, freedom of speech in regards to print culture was just as policed as public orations. William Berkeley writes that printing “divulged” incorrect opinions to the masses, thereby putting the media in a position it still holds, in a sense, today: a secret breaker. Even the postal system struggled with secret keeping—were people’s letters going to be opened? Was a letter to be just as public as a newspaper, if the government so chose? Starr particularly notes the Fourth Amendment’s inclusion of “papers”—papers should be secure, people should not have to send encoded letters.  

            The background information Starr provides on education came to life in the articles I found when searching the databases this week, particularly in regards to male versus female learning. One article—admittedly to the shock, the writer supposes, of his readers—recommends spinning as a useful undertaking for women. Another article gives credit to the progress that has been made in regards to female education, but also calls for the forward-moving action America used to propel the Revolution to continue to be applied to female education—women should be given more opportunities, a chance to rise higher in intellectual circles. Settling for the status quo leads only to stagnation, and America is a place of progress. The press really was a place people could freely and now fairly safely go to read or even write their own opinions in regards to education (and anything else).

Starr talks of schools as providers of “useful knowledge.” After his previous dismissal of Habermas, I was not surprised he attacked Marxist theories of the rise of education. I was also not surprised that he ended chapter three with another plug for American exceptionalism and the central role of politics in shaping the advances of communication and literacy. I was surprised—or maybe just sad—that, as part of an overview of education in the South, Starr did not mention UNC-Chapel Hill, the oldest public university in the nation and the only institution of its kind to give out degrees during the 18^th century. Carolina shows the investment people were willing to make not just in “useful knowledge”—how to read, write, do basic math—but in advanced knowledge, the kind of knowledge that can help to empower powerful, continued advancements in the nation. Without advanced knowledge, how would America continue to stand out? After all, it’s not easy being exceptional, Starr.

Starr, Chapter One: A Response

When I read in Starr’s acknowledgements that his book can be viewed as a study of "the sources of power in the modern world" (xi), I immediately thought of Foucault. And as I read on into the introduction, I continued to think of Foucault. Starr asserts that today’s media is intrinsically linked to power and that power and politics are intrinsically linked, thereby intrinsically linking the media to politics. Certainly the media today has an almost government-like status, and certainly the question of freedom—how much do we really have?—in connection to our relationship with the media is an important one. Foucault says there cannot be power without freedom, so, if I’m to trust in him (I’m not saying I do), I feel temporarily appeased in knowing that freedom still exists, for the power and influence of politics remains as strong as ever.

My Foucauldian digressions from the text made me think about the kind of media history Starr is in fact presenting—his presentation seems to be filtered through a postmodern lens. I do not necessarily think such a filter to be problematic, though I do think it worthwhile to be cognizant of influencing factors behind Starr’s presentation of material.    

Starr’s writing style is such that it anticipates reactions that readers—at least this reader—will have to his text. He comments that the power of the American model of communications throughout the world raises “uneasy questions about the media’s structure, role, and relation to popular self-government” (3). And sure enough, I felt uneasy when I later read, “Social institutions, including forms of government, are the result not only of forces that create them in the first place, but of forces that affect their survival” (7). The media has prevailed in a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest race, and many of the forms in which it has prevailed reflect how similar our society is to early American society. Indeed, as Starr himself says at the conclusion of his introduction, “Freedom is at stake now in choices about communications as it was at the founding of the republic” (17). My database research focused on criticism in relation to our search terms—novels and criticism, “novel reading” and criticism, and “pernicious books” and criticism—and certainly a popular criticism that arises in the early 1800s is how much smut Americans read when they should be reading “good” literature. Yet when I got to 1830, I found a publication arguing that, since it is obvious that people are going to read their so-called smut, critics should cease and desist trying to convince them to do otherwise. The American people were the force that allowed such fiction to become institutionalized, to survive. The media today is saturated by popular culture—even CNN runs celebrity gossip news on its ticker at the bottom of the screen. Our predilection for so-called smut continues to survive, and it continues to survive because—by flocking to it in droves—we continue to allow it to. What, then, does “fittest” even mean in regards to the media? The best, the most popular, the most persuasive?

Defining “fittest” is far easier in states that censor communication. Take, as example, Cuba. There the government certainly holds power over its media. (To call it “the media” would be to give its media a sense of autonomous power.) In a Cuban newspaper, sure, there are “opinion” sections, but there is never going to be an opinion that does not align with that of the government’s. Want to send an email to someone expressing a supposedly private opinion with which the government would not agree? Go ahead, send it, but your email recipient(s) will find the offensive words blacked out and/or missing from your text. You, like the media, have no higher-level power. But then, to refer back to Foucault, there is no power without freedom. So what is it that Cuba has, then? What do we call it? Is communism, within Foucault’s context, a form of intellectual slavery?

Some of Starr’s most interesting dialogue actually goes on in his endnotes. I have a love/hate relationship with the endnote—I think they can provide a wealth of tangential yet still relevant information to your reader, but they can so easily disrupt the flow of reading. Even if you choose not to refer to an endnote right away, for the sake of first finishing a paragraph or chapter, you see that number, and you think, “To consult the endnote or not to consult?” Certainly reading the book in digital form would solve this problem for me—I could click on or scroll over the note, and there it would be! But just as many writers continued to pass around manuscripts despite the advent of the printing press, I continue to read my scholarly books in their non-digitalized form. And I probably should have put this tangent on endnotes into a footnote.

As I was saying, Starr’s entire debate with Habermas happens behind the scenes, so to speak, although it’s really more of a not-well-defended dismissal of Habermas than a debate. Although I’ve not read Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, I do know it is considered a book that helped to launch media studies into the realm of serious academic discourse. For a book of that much import, Starr dismisses it far too readily for my liking. He faults Habermas for largely ignoring politics, ignoring the government, the very things on which Starr is focusing first and foremost. Habermas finds government control of the press in the early 1700s to be minimal—he sees the press as having more power as an independent unit. In situations such as these, I always question, is there really a right or wrong? Does not the modern day media itself show us how the portrayal of any event can be severely impacted by the spin one puts on it? Are not Habermas and Starr simply using different spins? Of course Starr will champion his own postmodern reading, and, who knows, maybe it is “right.” Or at least more agreeable with modern day palettes.

By footnoting what I take to be an important move for Starr (to decidedly position his text over that of Habermas’s so early in the game), I wonder if Starr is pandering to what he calls “the American culture of information” (17). Maybe most readers aren’t going to be interested in such abstract debates between one academic text and another—they just want the information. Is that, then, what Starr is giving us—just information? Am I gaining knowledge from reading this text? I would like to think so, but then, I’m not afraid of getting lost in the potential utopias of the endnotes. (I’m also not afraid of Virginia Woolf.)

But I’m not reading alone, am I? My brain lit up when I read, “Once a newspaper circulates, for example, no one ever truly reads it alone” (24). Well, books circulate, too. So does knowing that others are reading this book, that others in fact will be blogging about this book, that I will read the blogs written by others about this book, that we will all meet to discuss this book, mean I’m reading in (good) company? And does that impact how I’m reading? Why I’m reading? What I’m reading—“what” in the sense of how I’m taking in and interpreting Starr’s words. And does reading in such company mean there is a horizontal form of information communication going on in what, at a literal level, appears to be a simple vertical transaction (though in my head Starr and I are debating, of course)? Such concepts are fascinating, and I’m thrilled Starr has me thinking about them.

Equally fascinating is Starr’s comment that the rise of the media in late 17^th century Europe gave society more insight into the government, just as the government was getting a clearer vision of its people. Europe, then, saw the creation of modified Panopticon prisons on both sides. But who was at the center of both prisons, who had the power to filter what the other side saw? In this case, it couldn’t be just anyone; it was the collective media, which had clearly garnered, as Habermas asserts, a more than modest amount of legitimate, independent power, more power than Starr grants it. Point Habermas?