[In Call Me Ishmael Olson] makes clear his relation to a responsiveness and decision in such writing to be found only in such comparable works as D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, W. C. Williams' In The American Grain, and Edward Dahlberg's Can These Bones Live. In this respect, criticism is not only a system of notation and categorization—it is an active and definitive engagement with what a text proposes. It is not merely a descriptive process. Call Me Ishmael begins:

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman's): exploration….

                                             (p. 2)

Olson's approach was thus … removed from the terms of any other...