“America was not for him (Tocqueville) a people with a book.”
One can think of American writers and writings that should be read and frequently are read; but, to the extent that Americans are readers, the whole world is their bookshelf; there has not been the deep necessity to absorb their own country’s writings that citizens of other nations experience. A phenomenon like Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, a high work of art which is intended to be wholly German, of Germans, for Germans and by Germans, and is an expression of collective consciousness, is inconceivable to Americans.
And it is astonishing how little a Frenchman knows, or has a feeling for, things that are not French. But to Americans, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe belong to everyone or to “civilization”. And perhaps they do, in the long run. But this was not the view of Greeks, Romans, Italians, Englishman, and Germans, or of the Jews with their book that belonged to them, that told their story, and embodied, so to speak, their instinct. Americans believe in equal access.
Bloom, Allan – The Closing of the American Mind (p.53-54)
