Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 149sociopolitical awareness and commitment. However, such critiques
have differed in approach. As Terry Gifford explains, these differ-
ences have often fallen curiously along national lines, with the more
dismissive critiques emanating from Britain, and the more appro-
priative approaches coming from the United States.^50 Indeed, in the
1970s, critics such as John Bull and John Barrell were openly declar-
ing the death of the pastoral literary form.^51 This was largely because,
they argued, the distinctions between town and country, which the
concept demanded, had collapsed and been rendered obsolete, with
the countryside now simply being “an extension of the town.”^52 I n
a more politically motivated critique, Raymond Williams dismisses
the pastoral as a valuable literary genre and concept, particularly for
what he sees as its willing ahistoricism and sociopolitical ignorance.
For Williams, the pastoral concept is invested with ideology in that
it arbitrarily separates town and country while suppressing the com-
plex historical, man-made production of both. The pastoral idyll is
therefore an aesthetic construct made at a very distinct, privileged
vantage point in the social power nexus that blots out the violence
involved in the creation of the country/city divide. It is “a rentier’s
vision [that depicts the] country [... ] not of the working farmer but
of the fortunate resident.”^53
Although major American literary scholars writing at the same
time, such as Leo Marx, shared similar suspicions of the concept,
they also argued that the genre had not completely lost its relevance,
but that it could and must be revived in new, more philosophically
attentive and self-reflexive incarnations. In his oft-cited work The
Machine in the Garden , Marx takes pains to emphasize the impor-
tance of the pastoral in the American national imagination and
declares that the “pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning
of America ever since the age of discovery.”^54 However, he argues
that the pastoral is chiefly articulated in two different ways in the
A merican literary and cultural tradition. The f irst, he labels the gen-
eral, “sentimental” kind: that which is propagated by popular fiction
and involves “infantile” depictions of nature and a nostalgic return
to “the simple life.”^55 Although Marx believes both visions share a
similar inspirational “source,” he argues that the second view of the
pastoral involves a more self-reflexive and sensitive perception on the