American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film [Hardcover]

American Obscurantismargues for a salutary indirection in US culture. Critiquing the impulse to see history in seminal works like Griffith'sBirth of a Nationand the residual positivism of New Historicist methodology, the book challenges this shared visual epistemology . It traces meaningful exceptions to this pattern across canonical figures from US literature and film.American Obscurantismargues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through late twentieth and early twenty-first century film, the most compelling manifestations of America's troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic's founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane or directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. The book traces this arc from one of visual history's notoriously troubled texts: D.W. Griffith'sThe Birth of a Nation(1915).American Obscurantismengages the basis of these explorations in Poe and Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in characters' racial understanding, an obtuseness or na?vet? that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with - and implicitly critical of - the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. Citing critiques such as those of Tim Dean and others of efforts to politicize literary and cultural studies, this book restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white-,bourgeois, heteronormative polity,American Obscurantismposits an insistent, vitlã6