Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)
Studies - Jason M. Dew: Cold War Reflections in Travels with Charley: Steinbeck's New Americanist Evaluation of Intra-Imperialist America
floundering for self-definition. Steinbeck's re-acquaintance with his country was quick to yield this fact. Curiously for a man who thought little of literary critics, Steinbeck's journey takes on a critical dimension not unlike that upheld by the New Americanists, "a group of critics who have attempted to elucidate the conditioning of American criticism by the dictates of the Cold War political climate and to suggest potential rereadings of the American literary tradition that might help to surmount that conditioning" (Booker 15). Text and country, in this light, assume a similar quality as if Steinbeck as a critic were evaluating America as a text. In fact, reconciling the crisis in legitimation and the resulting negative freedom, which is a term used by the New Americanists to describe individualism void of civic or social responsibility that came as a result of America's frenetic quest to contrast itself against the backdrop of alleged Russian "groupness," proves to be a common aim for Steinbeck and the New Americanists. The location of the zenith of the crisis in legitimation during the Cold War by the New Americanists in the early 1960s and Steinbeck's own attempt to negotiate that same crisis during the same time emerges as an irony that only serves to resurrect a reputation that had itself supposedly reached its zenith with the publication of The Grapes of Wrath (1939). To be sure, Donald E. Pease, a leading figure among the New Americanists, notes that the crisis in legitimation —the very same crisis that Steinbeck encounters repeatedly throughout his Odyssey across the states —was more of an issue to "post-World War II American culture than to pre-Civil War America" (IX). 1 Others in the New Americanist camp, including Jonathan Arac, Amy Kaplan, 1 See F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941). Matthiessen located the crisis in legitimation just before the Civil War when both the North and the South was informing their opposing vantage points with the Revolutionary Mythos —a distinctly American idea that can be traced to the Puritans who rejected the Anglican church (the tyrant) in order to pursue their own spiritual path (the individual initiative). Matthiessen, in essence, named the purveyors of the American Renaissance —Melville, Poe, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson —for their attempt in writing to re-locate a visionary compact or general will that would remind all Americans of a common genealogy, thereby extinguishing the crisis in legitimation that had balkanized the United States. 26
