American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch (review)

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• American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch
• Ezra Tawil (bio)

American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic
daniel diez couch
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022
282 pp.

How is it possible that no one before now has written a literary history of the "fragment" in early US literature, or one which focuses on this form as important to a more broadly targeted literary history? The fact that such a question can even form itself in a reader's mind is usually a concrete sign of an author's success. In the present case, that success rests, in my view, on the combination of the argument's novelty and the obviousness of its importance to the field. Granted, the "fragment" is an intrinsically minor literary mode—indeed, it rather baldly advertises itself as such. But as any student of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transatlantic culture can attest, such openly "unfinished literary forms" (3) abound in print, as stand-alone pieces in periodicals, interpolated texts in larger works, entries in miscellanies, and so on. Interestingly, as Couch observes, the relative neglect of the subject in American literary history is not matched in transatlantic scholarship, where, for example, work on both British and German Romanticism have zeroed in on the "fragment" as a preeminent Romantic form. In bringing American Romanticism into a zone of contact with these transatlantic traditions, Couch carves out space for his critical project in a couple of ways. First, he shows that the "fragment" is not in any way an American invention or formal innovation. On the contrary, the fever for [End Page 220] fragments was an observable inclination of the Romantic literary marketplace—what Couch calls a "tradition of eighteenth-century partial writing" (2)—on both sides of the Atlantic. Second, he argues that when this interest in "unfinished forms" did cross the Atlantic, it took on a distinctly cisatlantic spin. It was not just that the public fascination with "artfully contrived fragments" (2) was observable here as part of a general transatlantic fad but also that it merged with particular streams of cultural, political, philosophical, and aesthetic thought to become an essential literary mode whose formal "minorness" belies its importance and power.

What, then, does it mean to call "unfinished forms"—and not, say, poetic epics, long prose fiction, political treatises, or other genres which seem instantly to claim more national importance—the mark of a "political aesthetic" in the early Republic, as the book's title does? Or, as Couch puts it early on: "What kind of artistic creation was a fragment, and how did deliberately unfinished writing play into an America that was itself still unfinished?" (3). If the correlation here asserted, between a literary form and a national project both "unfinished," might at first seem a glib way of making the connection, we should note that this is emphatically not where the book's argument leads; it is merely the question that calls it forth. Couch offers two kinds of answers to this question. The first is thematic. It is not that literary fragments necessarily "overtly scrutinize the array of political problems facing the nation" in the closing decades of the eighteenth century (3). On the contrary, these were "minor" forms that tended to come filled with a social content equally defined as lacking in significance, centrality, or importance to the body politic. Couch gives a set of examples from Matthew Carey's first issue of the American Museum in January 1787, which includes "three curious essays subtitled 'fragments': 'The prostitute.—A Fragment,' 'The Slave.—A Fragment,' and 'Negro trade.—A fragment'" (1–2). In this way, the fragment's claim on the reader's imagination seems implicitly connected to a kind of demotic turn in the social and cultural politics of this particular time and place. Fragments tended to turn "away from the center and toward the periphery to look at the private lives of those whom the middling and elite classes called the 'lower sort'" (2). There was thus a particular politics to this peculiar aesthetic, which became a way of representing particular social types...