Vertiginous pull of negative rhetoric: The American “No! In Thunder”

Abstract

The paper presents a sample historical-literary survey of a specific popular idea of the gist of ‘Americanness’ in the guise of condensed observations in broad cultural circulation. This is to provoke the question about the degree to which this kind of discourse may reflect the so-called habits of the heart (de Tocqueville [1835-1840] 1966: 264), as against how at a certain point it may explode – to borrow from Paul de Man (1979: 10) – into “vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration”.