The Sentimental Politics of Language: Ralph Waldo Emerson's and José María Sánchez's Texan Stories
In 1828, Mexican President Guadalupe Victoria assigned General Manuel de Mier y Terán to survey the Texan boundary between Mexico and the United States and to assess the situation of Anglo-American settlers in the territory. Traveling with Terán was Lieutenant José María Sánchez, whose diary of the expedition has long been recognized as an important source document for histories of the period and region. This article asserts the literary value of Sánchez’s diary for a hemispheric study of American Romanticism. In his description of landscape as spiritual experience and his emphasis on language as creative political force, Sánchez enacts the core tenets of an Emersonian Transcendental subject, an artistic sensibility at variance with the Byronic Romantic hero of Mexican and Latin American literature of the period. This article investigates the Mexican political tensions such a Romantic position evokes while exploring the inter-American potential of a hemispheric Romanticism.
Irving’s Columbus and Hemispheric American History
My essay traces the influence of the Spanish American revolutions (1808–26) on Washington Irving’s early nineteenth-century writings and, in particular, on his popular 1828 biography of Christopher Columbus. Irving’s conception of America as a multinational hemisphere comprised of nation-states with entangled nationalist rhetorics and narratives—including Columbus’s “discovery”—underwrites the biography’s unprecedented critiques of nationalist historiography. Examining the politics motivating this work offers new insights for discussions of the textual morphologies of nineteenth-century nationalist thought.
Unity Identity Text Self
Abstract Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.