Gloss on Locating the Literary in New Media

One reason, perhaps, to discontinue “speaking of a specifically American literary tradition uniquely suited to the critique of technology and modernity” might be to withdraw the license this provides, *even as a critical diagnosis,* for further inward-gazing appropriations of the sort this essay elsewhere so articulately resists. Is it really unthinkable that the entire intellectual tradition of U.S. exceptionalism, in all of its right, liberal, and leftish versions, will someday be decisively shadowed by imperial decline?