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My research in American literature has focused on
the revolutionary period, the decades before and
after the revolution.
And I think that most Americans are aware that this was a
period of change, politically obviously.
But I think that one of the things that makes the study of
literature from this period so fascinating is that so much of
the rest of our modern culture was in flux at this time.
Specifically, if you think about the change in national identity
simply as a change from monarchy to democracy,
that may seem pretty straightfoward.
But when we look at what happened to the free white
citizens of the United States when that change happened,
their identity, their personal identities changed, too,
so that they went, almost in an instant really,
from being colonists to being colonizers.
And that may only be a few letters but in terms of your
sense of who you are, it's really a world of difference.
And when we start to look, then, at these people and the change
they had both in terms of national and personal identity,
we start to realize that all the other aspects of personal
identity were also in flux--what it meant to be a woman or a man,
what it meant to be a member of a particular racial group,
what it meant to be free or unfree.
All of these things were kind of up for definition at the
same time that the nation was defining itself.
From a literary perspective it's really interesting to look at
what cultural historians have done with these kinds of changes
and to think about how that interacts with the changes in
literature, specifically to look at the history of the book,
the history of printing, and ideas about what it means
to be an author and how those relationships between
authorship and personal identity get played out.
Right now we hear a lot about the death of the book,
we hear about the end of newspapers, we hear about the
internet and how it's going to replace every other means of
communication and every other way of excercising
our subjectivity in the world.
And I think we have a lot to learn by looking back at this
foundational moment of American history to see how people tried
to exercise agency then and how their sense of personal identity
and national identity played out in these various kinds of media
that they were involved in.
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