Rob Wilson and the American Sublime

I'm not sure if Rob Wilson's The American Sublime is a good book, but it's definitely a tiresome one. It's written in that hyper-theoretical style that distances itself from making immediate sense. That isn't to say it doesn't make sense, but the reader who struggles mightily through the dense, jargon-laden, poorly-crafted prose is often not quite sure. And by "the reader," I mean me. And a good example comes quickly; here's the first sentence of the introduction:

"If there is strength in America's size and numbers, there is also a threat posed to the subject of that sublimity: "Hey you! I say to the H-bomb. / Miami Vice says to me" is the way Bob Perelman stages this struggle between the democratic ego and the forces of technology and information that now threaten to magnify, dwarf, and abolish it."

Prose this bad should never have been published. I'm driven crazy by the first use of the word "that." What does "that" refer to? Well, America's "size and numbers." And why does the author so boldly assume the reader is going to agree that America's size and numbers are sublime? It would seem the author's priority, as an academic writer, would be to support such an assumption rather than sneak it in. And to develop a complex argument by both refusing to state it and relying on a poetic snippet to (barely) exemplify it is inefficient and off-putting. All of the parts of the book I read utilized this same frustrating style. There's also a befuddling attempt on Wilson's part to employ the word sublime in some form or another in nearly every sentence.

If value must be found in the opening sentence, it is that it gestures toward Wilson's primary argument (if parsed very carefully). According to Wilson, the American sublime involves one's interaction with a vast landscape of nature and technology that gets internalized, creating a subject implicated in American power and ambition. Through the twentieth century, the form of the sublime changes strategies in its relationship with American power, ending with postmodernism, which challenges "the long-standing American sacralization of force" (10).

I'm honestly not certain what I make of this argument, as it often comes across as tautological. For example, one of Wilson's goals is "to provide a definition of the American sublime as a poetic genre that implicates the lyric ego in the production of America as a site of the sublime" (9). So the sublime produces the sublime? Um, okay.