Friends of the American Museum

Abstract: This article contends that we are not very different from the original visitors to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. What we think makes us different—our belief in our superior interpretive facility—is what makes us similar. We are most like the visitors to the American Museum, in other words, when we believe that we are exempt from Barnum’s tricks. By drawing on Miguel Tamen’s writings on the limits of interpretation, this article elaborates on our resemblance to the American Museum’s visitors, which is potentially unwelcome because of the unflattering perception we have of them as, apocryphally, suckers. Although the resemblance may challenge some of our core beliefs about the value of academic scholarship, we need not abandon literary criticism, only modulate our ambitions about what it can accomplish.