cover image Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction

Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction

Philip Fisher. Harvard University Press, $48.5 (304pp) ISBN 978-0-674-83859-8

The final sentence of Philip Fishers rich investigation into the American commitment to novelty and innovation has the ring of a campaign promise: This book was written to affirm my conviction that in America in the year 2000 it is still the new world. Fisher, a professor of English at Harvard, has previously published on American literary realism, abstract art and the culture of museums. Here he offers an unexpectedly patriotic analysis of what he describes as Americas lack of culture. If culture, in the anthropological sense, refers to traditional, enduring ways of life handed down from parents to children over multiple generations, Fisher argues, then 19th- and 20th-century America has had nothing of the kind. Instead of culture, we have a culture of creative destruction, perpetual immigration, novelty, innovation, mobility and childrens wise refusal to heed the advice of parents. By immigration Fisher means something much larger than the literal introduction of the nonnative-born to the U.S. Americans have always been immigrants, he asserts, adapting to a permanently unsettled rhythm of creation and destruction. While much of the book, which is written in an epigrammatic style with a minimum of footnotes, is based on Fishers close readings of Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Thomas Eakins and other American authors and artists, his surprising and wide-ranging reflections on the principle of creative destruction in commerce and technology deserve a readership well beyond specialists in American literature and art. (May)