Coda

Abstract

Abstract The Coda turns to contemporary fantasies regarding monumentalizing masculinity (Donald Trump) and the shadow of Benjamin Franklin. In many ways, Franklin was a larger-than-life eccentric, one whose written life became abstracted into a model for other (white) men to mimic to secure their “way to wealth.” The way Franklin’s textual life writing becomes a synecdoche—a part for a whole—of the U.S. nation shows how one individual’s becoming singular formed an abstract norm against which other lives are measured. Indeed, Franklin’s so-called autobiography is more of a hodgepodge result of four specific writing occasions over the course of nearly twenty years and posthumously manufactured into several iterations of a book. That achievement into book form stabilizes what becomes a norm of written self-production in the nineteenth century.