American Literature

 

In the Beginning:

The "Canon" -- "a list of literary works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality" (Concise OED).

The canon represents "the best of what has been thought and said."

For a long time, the canon of American Literature was the literature of European white men (Anglo-American).

 

This resulted in:

Classes in American Literature "[locate] in prose and poetry the growing expressions of democratic consciousness and of such values as individualism and self-reliance" (Tichi).

The "from-to" model -- there is a discernable "evolutionary literary coherence, even progress" as we trace writers through the ages (Tichi).

Classes studied:

"American" was synonymous with "United States."

 

Now comes:

Canon Expansion and Destruction

Classes in American literature teach "a body of literature representing a developing nation-state but claiming the whole of two continents as its purview" (Tichi).

Exclusions:

So, we need to ask, what exactly constitutes "American Literature"?

 

A big example:

New England Puritanism.

Perry Miller "located in colonial Puritanism what he termed 'the meaning of America,' a heroic and individualistic mission" (Tichi).

"His Puritans struggled with anxieties and fears and with their human scale as motes in the cosmos, but they were intellectual heroes in the New World wilderness, tough-minded, courageous, bold, robust, and central to Western civilization: 'Puritanism was one of the major expressions of the Western intellect [and] achieved an organized synthesis of concepts which are fundamental to our culture.'"  (Tichi)

Thus, "Miller offered a heroically cerebral American paternity that put passion into the service of the intellect, where it was contained. Puritan 'regeneration would take the form of a reinvigoration of rational discourse'" (Tichi).

 

Rethinking Miller's ideas:

"Puritan passions, however, have been the unabated focus of subsequent scholarship, beginning in the early 1970s with the inversion of Miller's interpretation of the Puritan 'errand into the wilderness,' the phrase from a sermon by John Danforth and one centered on the lamentations of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. Miller considered the sermon to be testimony to the crisis of diminished piety and zeal on the part of the second-generation Puritans. Subsequent critics began to see eschatological affirmation [focusing on death, judgment, and destiny] where Miller read Puritan self-admission of decline." (Tichi)

In other words, according to Puritan scholar Sacvan Bercovitch, "The New World ministers, already committed to a scheme which would not admit of failure, compensated for their thwarted errand by constructing a legendary past and prophetic future for the country."

Thus, the Puritan legacy and the early canon of American Literature created a "Creation Myth" of sorts for the country.

We should then consider other "Creation Myths":

Thus, with traditional thinking about Puritanism, we have a very "masculine paternity" and one that excludes the "other":

There is essential reinforcement of both Puritan centrality and the otherness -- the alien status -- of non-Puritans.

 

Breaking a second myth:

There is also the myth of the Puritans' "exceptionalism" (Philip P. Gura).

Hence, "That New England's exceptionalism emerges in such research shows the extent to which the literature of the South was systematically excluded from schoolbooks on American literature, just as New England was systematically privileged as the literature of this nation." (Tichi)

Thus, we should instead think of the literature of the Puritans, the literature of New England, as a "Regional" literature.

 

Another way to view Puritanism:

Furthermore, "recent scholarship [on the Puritans] now concerns itself not with the messianic passions but with those of anguish, grief, and mourning. . . . The discourses, moreover, of intellectual heroism and of imperial millennialism, other scholars argue, occlude another kind of discourse, that of the anguished Puritan as immigrant" (Tichi).

"The fundamental Puritan experience is loss at every level (social, economic, personal) and that the most profound psychological impulse, accordingly, is grief and mourning. The mandate of the clerical leadership becomes, essentially, a valediction forbidding mourning, a channeling of thought and feeling away from grief into a spiritual utilitarianism. Loss is identified as the central ethos of Puritanism . . ." (Tichi).

 

What some scholars now conclude:

American literature as it is currently taught represents an "oppressive nationalist ideology" (Jay).

Responsible pedagogy, according to Jay, is multiculturalism at its best -- one that seeks to foster dialogue with the Other. This is different than the multiculturalism of the assimilationist "melting-pot" rhetoric that attempts to erase difference.

Jay also argues for dismantling American literature and replacing it with "Writing in the United States." The course must be reconceived as a study of "how various cultural groups and their forms have interacted during the nation's ongoing construction."

"Danger (leading to 'demagogic multiculturalism') lies in imagining that oppression is always someone else's responsibility. Before we get too busy celebrating our position at the forefront of the liberation of the culture, we must recognize that we are often the problem. It is our racism, our sexual prejudices, our class anxieties, our empowered desires that we must confront and resist" (Jay).

"The history and literature of the US have been misrepresented so as to effectively underwrite the power and values of privileged classes and individuals" (Jay).

 

So, for this course:

Possible questions:

1.) Why, then, are we skipping the sections on "Native American Origins and Creation Stories" and "Explorations and Early Encounters"?

2.) Why does the canon for this class seem to be only slightly better than the older, traditional canon?

 

Possible responses:

1.) I believe the canon for this class is much better than the canon I was taught 15-20 years ago.

2.) I do put some stock in the notion that the "better" writing is more apt to "survive" through the ages. However, I do recognize that some of the writing that is still with us has "survived" in part because of political and cultural agendas.

3.) The bigger paper in this course is going to ask you to examine a lesser-known author and text and to evaluate it by setting it side-by-side with authors and texts more well-known to us.

4.) My experience in this course has been that many people who take the course do value an historical look at the United States through its literature, a look that cannot often be gained in a history course.

5.) I also believe that for us to look at an historical progression of the United States, we have to look at texts that show evolution and progression, texts that have been written in response to earlier ideas and texts. And some texts, such as the Native American Creation Stories, while wonderful in themselves, were not read (or heard) by early writers and, thus, were not incorporated into their (later) texts.

6.) ADD NINA BAYM IDEAS.

 

Sources:

Jay, Gregory S. "The End of 'American' Literature" Toward a Multicultural Practice." College English 53.3 (1991): 264-281.

Tichi, Cecelia. "American Literary Studies to the Civil War." Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: MLA, 1992. 209-231.