The paper presents a sample historical-literary survey of a specific popular idea of the gist of
‘Americanness’ in the guise of condensed observations in broad cultural circulation. This is to
provoke the question about the degree to which this kind of discourse may reflect the so-called
habits of the heart (de Tocqueville [1835-1840] 1966: 264), as against how at a certain point it
may explode – to borrow from Paul de Man (1979: 10) – into “vertiginous possibilities of referential
aberration”.