American Obscurantism

American Obscurantism argues 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, writerssuch 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's TheBirth of a Nation (1915). American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Poe and Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in characters' racial understanding, an obtuseness or naïveté 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 Deanand 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 Obscurantism posits an insistent, vitalracial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty. Following the insistence on a lamenting historical look back in the cases of Faulkner, Kubrick, and the Coens, the book ends by linking Crane's famous optimism in The Bridge, one rooted in an ecstatic celebrating of the body and anoptimism attending "America" as both concept and nation-state, to the contemporary digital turn and the hope for a more inclusive visual culture as well as racial vision.

In four chapters, bookended by a critical introduction and conclusion, Lurie usefully complicates other critical approaches such as New Historicism and trauma studies. In the conclusion he shifts to considering how direct seeing of the events of 9/11 did not, predictably, lead observers to understand those events. Instead, he posits in the conclusion that recent works by "visual artists and citizen-documentarians" offer "a more encompassing and efficacious mode" than previously found. This book will be required reading for scholars working at the intersections of American literature/film, historical trauma, and visual representation., American Obscurantism not only exemplifies a range of possible futures for American Studies, it also has much to say about the future of America as such. This is ambitious, theoretically rich, sophisticated cultural criticism of a very high order. It deserves a wide and attentive audience.

Peter Lurie is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Vision's Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination (2004) and of articles on Faulkner, Hart Crane, critical race theory, and the cinema of Richard Linklater. He is the editor, with Ann J. Abadie, of Faulkner and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2010 (2014). In 2015 he was a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studiesat the University of Warsaw. Also in 2015 he was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Paris, Diderot. Prior to his position at Richmond he taught Anglo-American Cinema and modern literature as a Fellow at Keble College, Oxford and at Harvard in the History and Literatureprogram.