Reviewed by:

• American Fragments: The Political Aesthetic of Unfinished Forms in the Early Republic by Daniel Diez Couch
• Ezra Tawil (bio)

How is it possible that no one before now has written a literary history of the "fragment" in early US literature, or one which focuses on this form as important to a more broadly targeted literary history? The fact that such a question can even form itself in a reader's mind is usually a concrete sign of an author's success. In the present case, that success rests, in my view, on the combination of the argument's novelty and the obviousness of its importance to the field. Granted, the "fragment" is an intrinsically minor literary mode—indeed, it rather baldly advertises itself as such. But as any student of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transatlantic culture can attest, such openly "unfinished literary forms" (3) abound in print, as stand-alone pieces in periodicals, interpolated texts in larger works, entries in miscellanies, and so on. Interestingly, as Couch observes, the relative neglect of the subject in American literary history is not matched in transatlantic scholarship, where, for example, work on both British and German Romanticism have zeroed in on the "fragment" as a preeminent Romantic form. In bringing American Romanticism into a zone of contact with these transatlantic traditions, Couch carves out space for his critical project in a couple of ways. First, he shows that the "fragment" is not in any way an American invention or formal innovation. On the contrary, the fever for [End Page 220] fragments was an observable inclination of the Romantic literary marketplace—what Couch calls a "tradition of eighteenth-century partial writing" (2)—on both sides of the Atlantic. Second, he argues that when this interest in "unfinished forms" did cross the Atlantic, it took on a distinctly cisatlantic spin. It was not just that the public fascination with "artfully contrived fragments" (2) was observable here as part of a general transatlantic fad but also that it merged with particular streams of cultural, political, philosophical, and aesthetic thought to become an essential literary mode whose formal "minorness" belies its importance and power.

What, then, does it mean to call "unfinished forms"—and not, say, poetic epics, long prose fiction, political treatises, or other genres which seem instantly to claim more national importance—the mark of a "political aesthetic" in the early Republic, as the book's title does? Or, as Couch puts it early on: "What kind of artistic creation was a fragment, and how did deliberately unfinished writing play into an America that was itself still unfinished?" (3). If the correlation here asserted, between a literary form and a national project both "unfinished," might at first seem a glib way of making the connection, we should note that this is emphatically not where the book's argument leads; it is merely the question that calls it forth. Couch offers two kinds of answers to this question. The first is thematic. It is not that literary fragments necessarily "overtly scrutinize the array of political problems facing the nation" in the closing decades of the eighteenth century (3). On the contrary, these were "minor" forms that tended to come filled with a social content equally defined as lacking in significance, centrality, or importance to the body politic. Couch gives a set of examples from Matthew Carey's first issue of the American Museum in January 1787, which includes "three curious essays subtitled 'fragments': 'The prostitute.—A Fragment,' 'The Slave.—A Fragment,' and 'Negro trade.—A fragment'" (1–2). In this way, the fragment's claim on the reader's imagination seems implicitly connected to a kind of demotic turn in the social and cultural politics of this particular time and place. Fragments tended to turn "away from the center and toward the periphery to look at the private lives of those whom the middling and elite classes called the 'lower sort'" (2). There was thus a particular politics to this peculiar aesthetic, which became a way of representing particular social types...

审阅者：

• 《美国碎片：共和国早期未完成形式的政治美学》丹尼尔·迪兹·库奇 (Daniel Diez Couch)
• 埃兹拉·塔维尔（简介）

怎么可能以前没有人写过美国早期文学“片段”的文学史，或者没有人写过对这种形式的文学史的关注，而这种形式对更广泛的目标文学史同样重要？事实上，这样的问题甚至能够在读者的脑海中形成，这通常是作者成功的具体标志。在我看来，就目前的情况而言，成功取决于论证的新颖性和其对该领域重要性的显而易见性的结合。诚然，“片段”本质上是一种次要的文学模式——事实上，它相当赤裸裸地以此宣传自己。但正如任何研究十八世纪和十九世纪早期跨大西洋文化的学生都可以证明的那样，这种公开的“未完成的文学形式”（3）在印刷品中比比皆是，如期刊中的独立作品、大型作品中的插入文本、杂项中的条目以及很快。有趣的是，正如库奇所观察到的，美国文学史上对这一主题的相对忽视与跨大西洋学术界并不相符，例如，英国和德国浪漫主义的研究都将“片段”作为一种卓越的浪漫主义形式。在将美国浪漫主义带入与这些跨大西洋传统的接触区时，库奇通过多种方式为他的重要项目开辟了空间。首先，他表明“碎片”无论如何都不是美国的发明或形式上的创新。相反，对[完第220页]片段的狂热是大西洋两岸浪漫主义文学市场的一种明显倾向——库奇称之为“十八世纪部分写作的传统”(2)。其次，他认为，当这种对“未完成的形式”的兴趣真正跨越大西洋时，它呈现出明显的西大西洋旋转。公众对“巧妙设计的片段”（2）的迷恋不仅是跨大西洋时尚的一部分，而且它与特定的文化、政治、哲学和美学思想流融合在一起，成为一种重要的文学思想。其形式上的“次要性”掩盖了其重要性和力量。

那么，所谓“未完成的形式”意味着什么——而不是诗歌史诗、长篇散文小说、政治论文或其他似乎立即声称更具国家重要性的体裁——是“政治美学”的标志。民国初期，正如书名那样吗？或者，正如库奇早期所说：“什么样的艺术创作是碎片，故意未完成的写作如何影响到一个本身尚未完成的美国？” （3）。如果这里所断言的一种文学形式和一个“未完成”的国家项目之间的相关性，乍一看似乎是一种圆滑的联系方式，那么我们应该注意，这显然不是本书的论点所指向的地方；相反，这并不是本书的论点。这只是引发它的问题。对于这个问题，Couch 提供了两种答案。第一个是主题性的。这并不是说文学片段必然“公开审视十八世纪最后几十年国家面临的一系列政治问题”(3)。相反，这些都是“次要”形式，往往充满了同样被定义为对政治体缺乏意义、中心性或重要性的社会内容。库奇举了一组来自马修·凯里1787 年 1 月在美国博物馆出版的第一期的例子，其中包括“三篇标题为“片段”的奇怪文章：“妓女——片段”、“奴隶——片段”和“黑人贸易。——片段”（1-2）。通过这种方式，该片段对读者想象力的要求似乎隐含地与这一特定时间和地点的社会和文化政治中的一种大众化转向有关。碎片往往“从中心转向外围，以观察那些被中产阶级和精英阶层称为‘下层阶级’的人的私生活”（2）。因此，这种独特的审美有一种特殊的政治，它成为代表特定社会类型的一种方式......