Tony Tanner's new book

[Terrance]

I Picked this book up. I like a Tanner. 

http://www.semcoop.com/categories/criticism/article.asp?review=ctanner.txt

Moreover, as Tanner argues, the expansion of America and the nation’s
prizing of the new was a constant exercise in naming things and giving
language to novel experiences. However, this reliance on language was
tempered by a distrust of it. It is the more ambiguous notion of
language as well as the ever-changing nature of America’s mores and
institutions that Tanner examines in his essays on American literature.
Writers from Emerson to Pynchon have been fascinated with transitory
structures, the authentic and inauthentic, and the degree to which
language can be trusted to give a true picture of what it is describing.