In the American Grain | American Modernism and the Uses of History: The Case of William Carlos Williams
In the following essay excerpt, Jay asserts that ‘‘the past emerges in In the American Grain as its product, not its topic,’’ and is thus ‘‘ideologically skewed.’’
IV
By virtue of its insistently recuperative strategy, Williams’s book affirms what Donato, by way of Kojève, and White each in their own ways suspect about the necessarily ironic condition of post-Hegelian history: In The American Grain is decidedly a post-historical history, for Williams deems the present which animates it to have its origins in a past which keeps repeating itself into the present. His twentieth-century America, that is, represents a cultural moment whose immediacy is grounded in the forms of a past tradition which is its central source, so that the...
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