“New” “American Studies”: Exceptionalism redux?

The notion of “American Studies” no more goes of itself than any decreed necessity for their “renovation.” The distortions the locution endured over time threaten to head us for the situation derided by Kant in which one man tries to milk a he-goat while another holds up a sieve to gather the expected product. Some semantic clean-up is in order, in the light of dominant European views. I aim less at giving a sense of American studies (capital A, lower case s) in Europe than at suggesting why ...