American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge: Innovative Writing in the Age of Epistemology

In this work, Ronald E.Martin analyzes the impulse of major 19th and 20th-century American writers to undermine not only their inherited paradigms of literary and linguistic thought but to question how paradigms themselves are constructed. Through analyses of these writers, as well as contemporaneous scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and visual artists, American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge creates a panoramic view of American literature over the past 150 years and shows it to be a crucial part of the great philosophical changes characteristic of the period. The works of Melville, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson, followed by Crane, Frost, Pound, Stein, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Aiken, Stevens, and Williams, are examined as part of a cultural current that casts doubt on the possibility of knowledge itself. The destruction of concepts, of literary and linguistic forms, was for these writers a precondition for liberating the imagination to gain more access to the self and the real world. As part of the exploration of this cultural context, literary and philosophical realisms are examined together, allowing a comparison of their somewhat different objectives, as well as their common epistemological predicament. New interpretive insights into the work of these authors are revealed by uncovering the American literary community’s involvement in the age of epistemology. A major contribution to the fields of American literature and American studies, this broad interdisciplinary work should be of interest to all scholars and students of American culture.