American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch, and: Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement by Jerome McGann (review)

Reviewed by: American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch, and: Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement by Jerome McGann Jordan Alexander Stein Daniel Diez Couch, American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic ( Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Pp. 281; 8 b/w illus. $69.95 cloth. Jerome McGann, Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes: The Unsettled Records of American Settlement ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2022). Pp. 272; 11 b/w illus. $95.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. The two monographs under review proceed at the intersection of material textual studies (sometimes elsewhere called book history or the sociology of texts) and formalist readings of genre. Both identify the implications of their focus well beyond genre. Both ask scholars in the field to read unfamiliar or non-canonical materials in relation to canonical materials that, each argues, can and ought to be [End Page 111] re-read in their light. Despite these parallel methods, each study makes a significant intervention that is not identical––neither readily complementary nor obviously incompatible––with the other's. Nothing, of course, necessarily compels anyone to consider these texts together. But it seems that the absence of any such imperative brings into focus a consequential limitation in two otherwise impressive monographs. After considering each on its own, then, let's consider their relation. Jerome McGann's Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes begins with the premise that for scholars of colonial North American literature, "nothing is more widely recognized than its 'practical' character" (3). That is to say, this study extends a line of thinking that presupposes the public and occasional value of colonial texts––sermons, speeches, narratives––rather than any more aesthetic value, especially in the modernist, "art-for-art's sake" sense. With this assumption in place, McGann's study draws attention to ways a history of multiple violated treaties with Native tribes haunts this colonial North American literature. This literature, the study argues, is tuned to a frequency where "the struggle to maintain social order under complex and dangerous conditions, and to persist in the struggle against all odds and in the continual experience of unsuccess and disappointment, nonfeasance and outright malfeasance" is everywhere in the background, a noise that can't be filtered out (13). Can't be, but also shouldn't be: the heart of Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes rallies around the idea that telling "impossible" truths and protecting human memories are the tasks of scholarly vocation (217). The historical dimension of this thesis astonishes with its force, and its imbricated development across eleven chapters and two interchapters points to some of the lengths Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes takes to demonstrate an argument about what in early North American texts and canons is present and absent all at once. Bookending the study are chapters that explore the history of kaswentha, identified here as the central ritual behind treaty-making, a ceremony of Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) origin, whose procedures predate seventeenth-century European settlement (10). Middle chapters reread well-studied colonial texts––including by John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson––to tease out of them the haunted presence of often specific treaty violations, with intriguing and original results. Particularly noteworthy is the short interchapter on Franklin's Treaty Folios––pamphlet texts that print proceedings from treaty discussions between Natives and settlers, though not without distortions. Part of that noteworthiness is the examination of less commonly studied texts than, for example, Franklin's Autobiography, the subject of the subsequent chapter. Rereading mostly canonical works of colonial North American literature in light of a history that surely bears on them and yet has not definitively been connected to them, Culture and Language at Crossed Purposes offers scholars an experiment in trying to understand what "we do not know that we do not know" (5). This study is wholly and thoroughly admirable in its intention, even if it is occasionally strained in its execution. One part of this strain is the organizational complexity of the narrative, its impressively nested and moving parts. Yet another was...