We Have Never Been Anti-Exceptionalists

The project of repudiating the exceptionalism associated with the Cold War-era founders of American studies came at the same academic moment as the canon debates-they both started in the mid-1980s. They are twinned countercultural movements, and at their origin they were explicitly interrelated. We've debunked American exceptionalism, but we're still practically glued to the old-fashioned canon-at least where the nineteenth century is concerned. This essay takes up the incompletion at the heart of what began as a conjoined movement against the exceptionalisms of national and literary canons, arguing that our attachment to canonical authors indexes the larger insolvency of our anti-exceptionalist project. It argues for a different critical methodology, one grounded in self-criticism, incompletion, and imperfection.