American cultural studies
pp. 287-300
in: Martin Middeke, Timo Müller, Christina Wald, Hubert Zapf (eds), English and American studies, Stuttgart, Metzler, 2012Abstract
The recent cultural turn in the humanities provides a belated support for the direction the newly established field of American Studies took after its formation in the 1930s. American Studies emerged as a synthesis of intellectual history and literary studies, and from the very beginning, culture was a key concept of the new field—so much so, in fact, that one of its pioneers, Henry Nash Smith, could define American Studies as "the study of American culture" in a programmatic essay entitled "Can American Studies Develop a Method?" Against a then dominant approach in literary studies, the formalism of the New Criticism, scholars in American Studies insisted that literary texts can only be adequately understood and appreciated if they are seen as part of their culture (whereas the New Criticism focused exclusively on the literary text itself; cf. section II.1.3). Intellectual historians had traditionally inquired what traditions and ideas were crucial in forming society. Now they argued that societies gain their identity and cohesion not primarily through ideas but through myths and symbols, that is, cultural forms.