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Professor Donald Pease is a primary spokesperson for the New Americanist Movement that revolutionized American Literary and Cultural Studies in the 1990s. He is currently the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities at Dartmouth College, Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program and Founding Director of Futures of American Studies Institute. His major monographs include: Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context(University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), The New American Exceptionalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and Theodor Seuss Geisel (Oxford University Press, 2010). It was my great honor to be able to set up his lecture “Moby-Dick; or Planetarity: Thinking Beyond Transnational American Studies” on March 22, 2025 at Speaker’s Hall of Keio Academy of New York, with the great help of one of his former students Mr. Winthrop “Tad” Baylies.

I first came to know the name of Professor Donald Pease when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation on the Antebellum Romantic writers at Cornell University in the mid-1980s. In the heyday of deconstructionism as represented by Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in the early 1980s,which was a kind of revival of “close reading” practiced and canonized by New Criticism that influenced and permeated American literary studies from the 1930s through the 1940s, I was deeply intrigued by Professor Pease’s article “Moby Dick and the Cold War” included in American Renaissance Reconsidered co-edited by distinguished Walter Benn Michaels and Don Pease himself and published from Johns Hopkins University Press in 1985. This book undoubtedly marked a great paradigm shift in the late 1980s from the linguistic turn of deconstructionism to the historicist turn of New Historicism, post-Colonialism and especially New Americanism championed by Professor Pease himself and his colleagues involved with a critical journal Boundary 2, with John Carlos Rowe, William Spanos and Jonathan Aracas its regular contributors. 

To put it simply, the New Americanist Movement coincided with the genuine dismantling of the Cold War mood around the year of 1990 and attempted to re-interpret American Literary History as dominated by an infinite loop between the Revolutionary War in the late 18th century and the Civil War in the mid-19th century and the Cold War in the latter half of the 20th century. 

Chronologically speaking, the three wars do not seem to be intertwined with each other. Nonetheless, what Professor Pease revealed through his controversy with Professor Frederick Crews of UC Berkeley, who coined the very term “New Americanism” in his 1988 book review, is that the critical moment around 1990, that is, immediately before and after the end of the Cold War (the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of USSR in 1991), cannot help but invite us to redefine the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Likewise, his reconstruction of the Revolutionary War induces us to reconsider the Civil War and the Cold War.  In this way New Americanists replaced the cult of American consensus repressing differences within as represented by his great precursor F. O. Matthiessen with the dissensus imperative that de-canonizes American Literary History by liberating a world of differences within as exemplified by Donald Pease, Emory Elliott, Michael T. Gilmoreand David Reynolds. 

For instance, while orthodox American literary historians have long neglected the significance of atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, putting more stress upon the tragedy of Pearl Harbor, in his 2009 book The New American Exceptionalism Professor Pease gently attacks Jacques Derrida’s underestimation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and re-portrays Hiroshima as occupying the place of what he calls “the national Thing in the primal scene of the cold war fantasy” (50).  In this sense, Professor Pease could well be considered not only as a hardcore New Americanist but also as a prototypal Transnational Americanist deeply aware of what Gayatri Spivak designated “Planetarity” or “Planet Thought.” This is the reason why he took up Melville’s Moby-Dick in his lecture at Keio Academy of New York and asserted that unlike Melville’s contemporary John O’Sullivan who declared the Manifest Destiny of the “Empire of Liberty,” non-American readers have generated transnational readings intended to decenter and reconstruct America as a post-colonial and non-imperial geo-political formation. It is very natural that he could converse with a bunch of participants, some of them his Dartmouth disciples, in the Q&A section and at post-lecture reception.

After his lecture, Professor Pease graciously asked me to give a New Americanist lecture at Dartmouth College on April 17th, 2025, only three weeks ahead. What a privileged invitation out of the blue! Without his New Americanist theory I could not have written my major work New Americanist Poetics (Seidosha Publishers, 1995; expanded edition, 2005; definitive edition, 2019), the winner of the 1996 Fukuzawa YukichiAward. I snapped up the offer. On the very day of April 17th, taking advantage of our spring break, I and Mari drove to Hanover, New Hampshire where Dartmouth College is located. 

After Professor Pease’s generous and detailed introduction, I gave a lecture entitled “Purloined Voices, Paranoid Spaces: Reading Poe’s Ratiocinative Tale in the Age of De Man and Nixon” in a gorgeous lecture hall at Sanborn House from 16:00. This lecture is based upon my new article to be included in Philip Edward Phillips’s edited 2025 collection of essays Poe Spaces: Within and Beyond the Spatial Turn(Palgrave, forthcoming). So, let me show you my abstract below:

Although most of Poe’s major characters have long been diagnosed as neurotic, today’s perspective enables us to redefine their sensibility as paranoid. Thus, I find it high time to reread “The Purloined Letter” as one of the most paranoid stories, with the help of Richard Hofstadter, the author of The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964).

Before developing my interpretation, let us be aware that while the 1920s saw the Melville Revival, the 1970s saw the Poe Revival.  As Barbara Johnson pointed out, the poststructuralist controversy between French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and Algerian French philosopher Jacques Derrida over “The Purloined Letter” (1844), a tribute to Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers(1844), ended up with a renewed interest in the Dupin trilogy; in his 1971 article "The Purveyor of Truth" Derrida performed a deconstructive reading by attacking Lacan’s text "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" composed in 1956. What matters here is that Derrida’s nemesis Paul de Man gave a lecture entitled “The Purloined Ribbon” in 1976, focusing not on Poe’s detective story but on Jean Jacques Rousseau’s autobiography.

In consequence, critics have scarcely discussed Derrida’s “The Purveyor of Truth” along with de Man’s “The Purloined Ribbon.” Nonetheless, de Man and Derrida were equally fascinated with the very act of purloining for a reason: the Watergate Scandal featuring the break-in as the act of stealing and the cover-up as the act of depriving the tape of the true signified. In the post-Trumpian era that naturalized post-truth and alternative fact, rereading “The Purloined Letter” will provide us with a clue to comprehending the essence of paranoid space haunted by a number of conspiracies.

Despite the highly abstract topic, this lecture could receive serious and constructive responses from the floor as regards the unreducibility of the text and the transactions between the act of purloining and literary plagiarism. What excited me most is that when we visited Left Bank Books the next day, the owner of the bookstore and talented poet Rena J. Mosteirin handed down to me a poem inspired by my lecture. With the permission of Rena, I would like to show you the splendid textempowering the New Americanist poetics: 

The Paranoid Politician

Poe’s paranoid space shaped 
the paranoid style of the whole nation.

Paranoid characters are humming in the background.
The persistent paranoia is always already lurking.

Abraham Lincoln himself was a man of conspiracy.
A paranoid allegory. A paranoia epidemic.

President Nixon became paranoid.
Paranoid like all those living in America at that time.

A paranoid spokesman. A domestic threat.
America has entered it’s absurd and paranoid era.

Trump’s paranoia does not surprise Washington insiders,
he is the most paranoiac president the US has ever had.

Paranoid improvisation. Our own paranoid political moment of today.
The moebius strip of paranoia. This is the beginning of everything.

Rena J. Mosteirin*

*This poem draws inspiration and borrows language from Takayuki Tatsumi’s talk “Purloined Voices, Paranoid Spaces: Poe, De Man, Nixon” at Dartmouth College on April 17, 2025, under the auspices of the Masters in Arts and Liberal Studies Program.