Each autobiographer presents himself as a self-made «people\'s celebrity», an unlearned but supremely successful practitioner in social communications, a respectable (!) confidence man whose example could be followed by the citizens of the young republic. The authorial persona functions as a site of exchange, an instrument of social self-advancement for both the person who has written the text and the person reading it. The tactics of tall-tale telling and advertising are used effectively in all three narratives, putting stress upon the convertibility of meanings, images and monetary values as well as the double coding of irony. The «cash value» of a communicative gesture is ever uncertain, communication itself unfolds as an «outguessing» game, a competition of wits and wills.
Part 2 «Author and Reader in the Republic of Letters» considers an American writer\'s uneasy attempts to negotiate between writing as professional activity and as intimate self-expression. Literary communication is mediated necessarily by market partnership — which is lamented but also taken up as a challenge to reshape the forms and means of a writer\'s «conversation» with the readership. Literature in a democracy becomes (according to M. Fuller) a vast «system of mutual interpretation» where relationships are more intimate and more remote than ever before. Like a personal letter, a book reaches from one «polar privacy» to another traveling across public space where it is propelled by commercial interest and incentive. Hence the curious double strategy of catering to the reader as a generalized consumer while also appealing to him as an individual partner in «real conversation». The latter relationship implies a special kind of «bargaining» where the highest value at stake is each subject\'s personal growth, self-change, self-enhancement.
Chapter 2 «Edgar Allan Рое. Between Diddle and Mystery» looks at a typical Рое story as a «transformer». Alternately serious and hilarious, metaphysical and entertaining, «democratic» and «aristocratic», it is designed to be «universally read» but also addressed to the «the highest intellect or genius». Base market appeal and high literary merit use each other as a disguise while a reader is invited to make his personal best of the masquerade — giving in to the artist\'s «magic» but also meeting its challenge with critical/ creative activity.
Chapter 3 «Herman Melville. Between Price and Absolute» explores the theme of exchange, material and symbolic, central to Melville\'s work. Ahab (sublime speculator) and Ishmael (interpreter, go-between) are exponents of the alternative strategies of dealing with the world. «Real conversation» is forever desired among «iso-
latos» yet forever unreachable because most human transactions are necessarily finite and partial. Fiction is defined by Melville as a way of «hoodwinking» the reader, deceiving him into truth that he might be unprepared to appreciate. Bargaining — an essentially democratic social skill, is hardest to realize in an actual democracy, because too demanding for an average individual.
Chapter 3 «Mark Twain. Between Show and Play» explores Twain\'s life-long preoccupation with the compatibility of the two discourses that he felt equally master of: the disinterested creativity of play and professional manipulation of an audience by a showman. Art, to Twain, is half-play, half-trade. His idea of freedom is that of «evasion», the bargaining out of rather than into the binding social contract. Authenticity of human contact to him always remains a problem, along with the frequent inadequacy of the general public as a writer\'s «partner».
The Attachment «Conversation on Conversations» offers 4 studies of American and Russian literary classics — novellas or novels invited to self-reflexive dialogue of which the subject is communication itself, modes of talk, interaction through speech. The «participants» are W. Irving («Rip Van Winkle») and N.V. Gogol («The Carriage»), H.D. Thoreau («Walden») and F.M. Dostoyevski («Notes from the Dead House»), N. Hawthorne («The Blithedale Romance») and N.G. Chernishevski («What is to be Done\'?»), W.D. Howells («The Rise of Silas Lapham») and I.A. Goncharov («Oblomov»). The general argument is that the Russians tend to aestheticise familiar intimacy, empathy and trustful dependency in communication. The American ideal is pragmatic — it values standing with «one foot on trust another on suspicion» (H. Melville), changeability, newness and differences dealt with through the economy of irony.
Bargaining as a mode of communication (certainly, not unique nor confined to the 19-th century or American culture) has its limitations and blind spots as well as advantages and resources. Iis potential, however, is of particular interest and promise in the world of today, increasingly unstable and decentralized, teaming with local definitions that need be negotiated with precision and cre-ativeness.