Andrew Delbanco

American literature: a vanishing subject? Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021

Some ½fty years after the political es- ber of men in the United States who tablishment of the United States, the are engaged in the composition of lit- concept of an American literature bare- erary works,” and he added justi½ably ly existed–an absence acknowledged that most of these are “English in sub- with satisfaction in Sydney Smith’s fa- stance and still more so in form.”1 mous question posed in 1820 in the Edin- Yet in every settled region of the new burgh Review: “Who in the four corners nation voices were raised to make the of the globe reads an American book?” case that a distinctive national literature The implied answer was no one. Anoth- was desirable and, indeed, essential to er twenty years would pass before this the prospects of American civilization. question was seriously reopened, along Literary production and learning were with the more fundamental question conceived as an antidote to, or at least a that lay behind it: whether a provincial moderating influence on, the utilitarian democracy that had inherited its lan- values of a young society where, as Jef- guage and institutions from the moth- ferson put the matter in 1825, “the ½rst erland did or should have a literature object . . . is bread and covering.” By 1837, of its own. Visiting in 1831, Tocqueville the most notable of the many calls for could still remark on “the small num- literary nationalism, Emerson’s Phi Be- ta Kappa oration at Harvard, with its fa- Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Profes- mous charge that “we have listened too sor in the Humanities at Columbia University, long to the courtly muses of Europe,” has been a Fellow of the American Academy was already a stock statement. By 1850, since 2001. He has written extensively on Amer- when Herman Melville weighed in ican history and culture, including books such as against “literary flunkeyism toward “The Puritan Ordeal” (1989), “The Death of England,” the complaint was a hack- Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense neyed one. of Evil” (1995), and “Required Reading: Why During this ½rst phase of national Our American Classics Matter Now” (1997). self-consciousness, there arose a corol- His latest publication is “Melville: His World lary critique of those few New World and Work” (2005). writers, such as Washington Irving,

© 2006 by the American Academy of Arts 1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, & Sciences vol. 2 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 55–56.

22 Dædalus Spring 2006 who had achieved international recog- Then, as now, the chief business of American nition by copying Old World models– literary journalism was the construc- literature: a vanishing writers who, according to belligerent tion and destruction of individual rep- subject? democrats like Walt Whitman, imitated utations, though at stake throughout authors who “had their birth in courts” the nineteenth century were also more and “smelled of princes’ favors.” These general claims about how and what outbursts of nascent cultural pride tend- American writers should be writing. ed to take the form of shouts and slurs The essays of William Dean Howells, (Whitman spoke sneeringly of “the co- for instance, published as columns in pious dribble” of poets he deemed less The Atlantic and Harper’s and later select- genuinely American than himself ) rath- ed for his volume Criticism and Fiction Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 er than reasoned debate. They were anal- (1892), amounted to a brief for what ogous to, and sometimes part of, the Howells called “realism,” as exempli- nasty quarrels between Democrats and ½ed by his own ½ction. Frank Norris Whigs in which the former accused the (The Responsibilities of the Novelist [1903]) latter of being British-loving sycophants, and Hamlin Garland (Crumbling Idols and the latter accused the former of be- [1894]) proclaimed as universal the prin- ing demagogues and cheats. ciples of whatever ‘school’–“veritism” Literary versions of these political dis- for Garland and “naturalism” for Nor- putes played themselves out in the pages ris–they were committed to at the time. of such journals as Putnam’s Monthly Perhaps the only disinterested critic Magazine and The Literary World (New still worth reading from this period is York), The Dial and The North American John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), whose Review (Boston), The United States Mag- work belongs to the genre of the moral azine and Democratic Review (½rst Wash- essay in the tradition of Hazlitt and Ar- ington, then New York), and The South- nold. ern Literary Messenger (Richmond)–mag- But even such minor novelists as the azines that sometimes attained high lit- Norwegian-born H. H. Boyesen (1848– erary quality (in 1855, Thackeray called 1895) contributed occasional criticism Putnam’s “much the best Mag. in the that helped to enlarge the literary hori- world”). Most contributors to these zon. In Boyesen’s slight book of 1893, magazines had nothing to do with aca- Literary and Social Silhouettes, for example, demic life, such as it was in the antebel- lum United States. The literary cadres of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (a collec- to which they belonged developed ½rst tion of essays written between 1937 and 1962), in Boston; slightly later in New York; Perry Miller in The Raven and the Whale (1956), and, more modestly, in Philadelphia, and Benjamin T. Spencer in The Quest for Na- Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston. tionality (1957), have sketched the emergence Only a very few writers or critics, such of the literary profession in these years as part of the larger construction of American nation- as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom alism in the age of territorial expansion. More Harvard appointed to a professorship in recent scholars, such as James D. Wallace in 1834, maintained more than a tangential Early Cooper and his Audience (1985) and Mer- connection to any college. There were as edith McGill in American Literature and the yet no universities.2 Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003), have deepened our understanding of the econom- ic dif½culties that writers without patronage, 2 Several mid-twentieth-century literary histo- and without much protection by copyright rians, notably William Charvat in The Profession law, had to overcome.

Dædalus Spring 2006 23 Andrew he approved such now-forgotten writers derstanding of Civil War literature–ex- Delbanco on the as Edgar Fawcett and H. C. Bunner for pressed frank hostility toward academics humanities portraying “the physiognomy of New as hopelessly straitened and petty. York–the Bowery, Great Jones Street, Probably the most signi½cant body and all the labyrinthine tangle of mal- of American critical writing to date is odorous streets and lanes, inhabited by that of a novelist, Henry James, in the the tribes of Israel, the swarthy Italian, prefaces to the New York edition (1907 the wily Chinaman, and all the other –1909) of his ½ction as well as in his alien hordes from all the corners of the considerable body of literary journal- earth.” Novelist-critics like Boyesen and ism. “The Art of Fiction” (1888)– James Gibbons Huneker (1860–1921), James’s riposte to the English critic Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 an advocate of impressionism in paint- Walter Besant’s prescriptive essay about ing and music, were among many who the Do’s and Don’ts of ½ction-writing– tried, with a mixture of anxiety and ap- still has tonic power for young writers proval, to come to terms with the im- who feel hampered by prevailing norms pact of modernity on American life. and taste. And James’s 1879 study of Their critical writing, like their ½ction, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the ½rst signi½- was more descriptive than prescriptive, cant critical biography of an American more inquiring than inquisitorial–and writer, brings into view in a few pages therefore incipiently modern. the whole moral history of nineteenth- In short, forward-looking proponents century American culture. In that re- of American literary ideals tended to be markable book, we see how theological outside the academy. This has been so ideas were being displaced and how the from the era dominated by the Duyck- artist-observer could take pleasure in inck brothers, whose Cyclopedia of Amer- witnessing their displacement: ican Literature (1855) helped establish a It was a necessary condition for a man canon of major writers, through E. C. of Hawthorne’s stock that if his imagina- Stedman’s Poets of America (1885), W. C. tion should take licence to amuse itself, Brownell’s American Prose Masters (pub- it should at least select this grim precinct lished in 1909 by Scribners, for whom of the Puritan morality for its play ground Brownell served for forty years as liter- . . . . The old Puritan moral sense, the con- ary advisor), and Alfred Kazin’s On Na- sciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful tive Grounds (1942), a revelatory book by nature of our responsibilities and the sav- a young freelance book reviewer who, age character of our Taskmaster–these like his contemporary Irving Howe, things had been lodged in the mind of a did not take a permanent academic job man of Fancy, whose fancy had straight- until late in his career. The author who way begun to take liberties and play tricks emerged in the twentieth century as the with them–to judge them (Heaven for- central ½gure of nineteenth-century give him!) from the poetic and aesthetic American literature, Herman Melville, point of view, the point of view of enter- was championed mainly by critics work- tainment and irony. This absence of con- ing outside the academy, such as Lewis viction makes the difference; but the dif- Mumford, Charles Olson, and, in Brit- ference is great. ain, D. H. Lawrence. And a good num- ber of major twentieth-century critics– The American-born T. S. Eliot once notably Edmund Wilson, whose Patrio- expressed the view that “the only crit- tic Gore (1962) did much to revise our un- ics worth reading were the critics who

24 Dædalus Spring 2006 practiced, and practiced well, the art of braced American writing as a plausible American literature: which they wrote”–a statement that has ½eld of study more slowly. Once its le- a vanishing been almost universally true in America. gitimacy had been established, though, subject? professors of American literature settled At the turn of the twentieth century, into defending the virtues of the (main- however, American writing was begin- ly New England) ancients against what ning to become a ‘½eld’ in the academ- Boyesen had called the “alien hordes.” ic institutions that earlier practitioners In his Literary History of America (1900), had, by and large, avoided. As early as Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, devoted the 1880s, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and virtually all of its ½rst 450 pages to New Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Brown were offering, at least sporadi- England writers, followed by a closing cally, courses on American authors, chapter entitled “The Rest of the Sto- though the subject remained dispen- ry.” In a preface to his new anthology sable enough that nyu, which ran an of American literature (1901), Brander American literature course from 1885 Matthews, Columbia’s specialist in dra- to 1888, allowed it to fall into abeyance matic literature, followed Johann Gott- until 1914.3 The scholar who ½rst in- fried Herder and Hipployte Taine in stalled the subject in one of the new insisting that a national literature must research universities was Moses Coit be understood as the expression of the Tyler, the child of Connecticut Congre- “race-characteristics” of the people who gationalists. While a professor at the produce it. Writing nearly ten years after University of Michigan, he wrote the the death of Walt Whitman, Matthews ½rst serious history of colonial Ameri- con½dently declared that the United can writing, A History of American Liter- States had “not yet produced any poet ature, 1607–1765 (1878), based on close even of the second rank.”4 study of virtually all published primary With the consent of such ½gures as texts. In 1881, Tyler moved to Cornell, Wendell at Harvard and Matthews at where he assumed the ½rst university Columbia, the subject of American lit- chair devoted wholly to American lit- erature became an instrument by which erature and produced his Literary His- the sons of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ could tory of the American Revolution (1897). get better acquainted with their heritage It is worth noting that Tyler began and, presumably, protect it from the in- teaching at a midwestern state univer- terloping hordes who were threatening sity and concluded his career at the to debase it. Here was the literary equiv- quasi-public Cornell, founded in 1865 alent of the ‘Teutonic germ theory’ of with a combination of private benefac- American history: the idea that demo- tions and public subsidies. Older, more cratic ideas and institutions had germi- tradition-bound private institutions nated in the German forests, from which such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, restless tribes carried them to England, all of which originated in the colonial where they sprouted again (against the period as seminaries allied with one or resistance of the Celtic ancestors of the another Protestant denomination, em- modern Irish) and from which Puritan emigrants eventually transplanted them 3 Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a 4 Brander Matthews, “Suggestions for Teach- Profession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl- ers of American Literature,” Educational Review vania Press, 1986), 110. 21 (January–May 1901): 12.

Dædalus Spring 2006 25 Andrew to the New World.5 Seen as a branch of certain dogmas but, simultaneously, on Delbanco on the this kind of race thinking, the academic the facts of human nature. It has failed humanities study of American literature arose, at above all to carry over in some modern least in part, as a defensive maneuver and critical form the truth of a dogma by Anglophile gentlemen who felt their that unfortunately received much sup- country slipping out of their control in- port from these facts–the dogma of to the hands of inferiors. original sin. At ½rst sight Mr. Mencken As a more miscellaneous blend of would appear to have a conviction of students began passing through the uni- evil. . . [but] the appearance . . . is decep- versities, these gentlemen hoped that tive. The Christian is conscious above all Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 the study of American literature could of the “old Adam” in himself: hence his be a means of sweetening and enlighten- humility. The effect of Mr. Mencken’s ing them before they presented them- writing, on the other hand, is to produce selves for positions of power no longer pride rather than humility . . . [as he] con- reserved exclusively for the Brahmins. ceived of himself as a sort of morose and Some professors went further, claiming sardonic divinity surveying from some for themselves the moral authority once superior altitude an immeasurable ex- reserved for the clergy. Consider Irving panse of “boobs.” Babbitt, who specialized at Harvard not Yet even as it served social ends, the in American but in French literature, study of American literature remained and who became a public commentator a secondary or even tertiary (after clas- on issues of the day by waging war in sics and English) part of the program general-circulation magazines against for making boys into gentlemen. To what he considered the American ten- read through the ½rst scholarly history, dency toward vulgarity and self-indul- The Cambridge History of American Liter- gence. Here, in a 1928 essay on H. L. ature (1917)–a book more encyclopedic Mencken, with a nod to Sinclair Lewis, than discriminating–is to be reminded, Babbitt writes his own version of how as Richard Poirier has remarked, that Americans had fallen away from the into the third decade of the twentieth moral realism of their forebears. James century, American literature “was still had told the tale as the story of Haw- up for grabs.”6 As classics departments thorne liberating himself from the sup- continued to shrink and English depart- pressive weight of his ancestors, but ments to grow, even books by the New Babbitt tells it as a moral descent from England worthies were still treated with self-knowledge into self-deception, as condescension. As late as the 1950s, Har- exempli½ed by Mencken: vard graduate students in English could If the Protestant Church is at present propose American literature as a doctor- threatened with bankruptcy, it is not al examination ½eld only as a substitute because it has produced an occasional for medieval literature, which was com- Elmer Gantry. The true reproach it has ing to seem arcane and archaic, even to incurred is that, in its drift toward mod- traditionalists. ernism, it has lost its grip not merely on With the continued decline of philolo- gy and of Latin and Greek as college pre- 5 See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Histori- 6 Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: cal Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random sity Press, 1988), 87–88. House, 1987), 19.

26 Dædalus Spring 2006 requisites in the 1930s and 1940s, the V. L. Parrington, an English professor American literature: study of American literature ½nally at- at the University of Washington, was a vanishing tained a certain academic respectabili- an effort, as tendentious as it was ambi- subject? ty. Yet the Harvard English department, tious, to trace the genealogy of demo- which preserves in its name, “Depart- cratic populism all the way back to dissi- ment of English and American Litera- dent Puritans. Perry Miller’s great revi- ture and Language,” a trace of its origins sionary works on the Puritan mind, con- in philological studies, did not add the ceived in the 1930s partly in response to phrase ‘and American’ until the 1970s. Parrington, ran parallel to the writings My own department at Columbia, the of such neo-Calvinist theologians as “Department of English and Compar- Reinhold Niebuhr, who retrieved from Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 ative Literature,” to this day does not deep in the past an account of human include in its of½cial name the term psychology that might still serve as a ‘American’–and, as far as I know, has competent description of contemporary no plans to add it. reality as the horror of fascism engulfed Europe. Today, though some professors of As American literary studies gained American literature still feel outnum- in prestige, it became apparent that its bered and even beleaguered, the ½eld leading scholars did not trust, and were is populous. Since the founding of the not to be trusted with, the ways and American Literature Section of the means of the English department. Many Modern Language Association in 1921, of the vanguard ½gures were openly and the professional status of American lit- overtly concerned with the world out- erature has been secure, and members side the college gates. Some forged at of the guild now designate themselves least a tacit partnership with such histo- by the term ‘Americanist’–a word that, rians as the senior Arthur M. Schlesing- like ‘orthopedist’ or ‘taxidermist,’ im- er, who, as early as 1922, had insisted in plies an arduously acquired training for New Viewpoints in American History that a useful trade. no serious history could be written with- It is an unfortunate word for various out attention to the experience of wom- reasons, not least because it obscures en and that “contrary to a widespread the fact that for many years after their belief, even the people of the thirteen subject achieved academic acceptance, English colonies were a mixture of eth- Americanists were among the least pro- nic breeds.”7 fessionalized of professors. Especially Yet the originating ½gures of Ameri- at a time when English departments still can literary studies have been described devoted themselves mostly to philologi- in recent years as narrow-minded men cal research and to the recovery of reli- (until the 1970s and 1980s, they were able texts, the ½eld of American litera- almost all men) with retrograde minds ry studies was something of a mis½t. It occluded by the sexual and racial preju- attracted students with current political dices of their time. This is, at best, a cari- and cultural problems much on their cature and, at worst, a slander. F. O. Mat- minds and scholars who seemed unable thiessen’s ½rst published book was a to rid themselves of what detractors re- garded as chronic presentism. For exam- 7 Arthur M. Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in ple, the immensely influential Main Cur- American History (New York: Macmillan, 1922), rents of American Thought (1927–1930), by 3, 126–127.

Dædalus Spring 2006 27 Andrew study of the ½ction of Sarah Orne Jewett young Hawthorne reading in a college Delbanco on the (1929). In The New England Mind (1939– common room and had rushed away humanities 1952), Miller showed, long before the to report his discovery of a new talent. ‘New Historicists,’ how close scrutiny Professionalization, of course, was of what most of his colleagues consid- inevitable. By the 1940s, New Criticism ered subliterary forms could reveal an was the reigning orthodoxy in literary alien culture. Constance Rourke, who studies. Among Americanists, it was never held an academic post but exerted deployed to best effect in Matthiessen’s formidable influence on academic liter- American Renaissance (1941) and in the ary studies, anticipated in her American books and essays of Newton Arvin, Humor (1931) the ‘anthropological turn’ who spent his career at Smith College. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 of forty years later by breaking down the The techniques of New Critical analy- distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cul- sis revealed that at least a few Ameri- ture and reveling in the mix. can works had a density and complex- American literary studies in these ity comparable to the most dif½cult, formative years was emphatically un- and therefore (according to the criteria or even anti-academic. There was a nat- of the New Criticism) most rewarding, ural af½nity between professors interest- modernist poems. Matthiessen made ed in the history of their own literature his case for Melville by setting Ahab’s –a short history, after all–and under- speeches in verse and presenting them graduate writers who hoped to make a as every bit as intricate as the soliloquies place for themselves in the literary his- of Hamlet or Lear. He brought to his wri- tories of the future. Richard Wilbur, ting the kind of formal scrupulosity as- who was a Junior Fellow at Harvard in sociated with F. R. Leavis and William the 1940s, recalls that F. O. Matthiessen Empson in England, and along with fel- was always alert to “any stirrings of the low travelers Robert Penn Warren and creative spirit” in his students (he taught Cleanth Brooks (who eventually con- undergraduates almost exclusively) and verged at Yale), he inaugurated a tradi- made himself available to read manu- tion that continues today in the work scripts by the hopeful young poets and of such adept close readers as Richard playwrights who passed through his Poirier and William Pritchard. courses.8 Lionel Trilling, though he nev- Although Matthiessen and the best er carried a portfolio as an Americanist, of his followers were never doctrinaire wrote extensively about American writ- (½fty years after its publication, Daniel ers past and present–Fitzgerald, Twain, Aaron described American Renaissance as Dreiser, Hemingway, and Frost, among “fully cognizant of the social context” others–and took a special interest in his of its subject), the vogue of explication de gifted and eccentric Columbia College texte threatened to become a formalist student Allen Ginsberg. When Trilling’s dogma.9 Matthiessen himself was never colleague Mark Van Doren wrote his ex- uberant critical biography of Hawthorne 9 Daniel Aaron, review of H. Lark Hall, V. L. in 1948, it was as if he had just heard the Parrington: Through the Avenue of Art in the New Republic, September 5, 1994. By the early 1960s, one of Matthiessen’s successors at Harvard, 8 Richard Wilbur in F. O. Matthiessen (1902– Howard Mumford Jones, faulted Ralph Waldo 1950): A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezy Emerson for writing essays that amounted to and Leo Huberman (New York: Henry “paragraphs on a string” and thereby failed the Schuman, 1950), 145. New Critical test of formal coherence. H. M.

28 Dædalus Spring 2006 narrowly a ‘New Critic.’ He was a man the context in which works of the past American literature: of the Left, who after the war was to had been produced, but on behalf of a vanishing write a naïve report, From the Heart of what would soon come to be known subject? Europe (1948), about how impressed he as ‘relevance’ to the present. Here was was with life and spirit in the solidifying the keynote of the American studies Soviet bloc. And in his preface to Amer- movement, which flourished in the post- ican Renaissance, he declared that what war years as an eclectic alternative to linked his ½ve authors (Emerson, Tho- both English and history at a number reau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whit- of universities, including Pennsylvania, man) was their “common devotion to George Washington, and Case Western the possibilities of democracy”–an odd Reserve, as well as at Yale, Harvard, and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 assertion about Hawthorne, though one Berkeley. that helps explain the absence of Edgar On many campuses, American stud- Allan Poe from Matthiessen’s book. By ies seceded, in fact if not always in name, the 1950s, the turn inward away from from the English department. American politics was in full swing, and testing studies scholars sometimes clustered an author’s literary signi½cance by any within English as a quasi-independent political standard was coming to seem subdepartment or broke away into de- eccentric. partments or programs of their own. They were impatient with the parochial- One dissenter from the aesthetic turn, ism of what they regarded as Anglophile Henry Nash Smith, who was among the literary studies, but also, as Smith went ½rst recipients of the Ph.D. from the on to suggest, with the empiricism of Harvard Committee on the History of traditional historians: “We are no bet- American Civilization–and whose dis- ter off if we turn to the social sciences sertation became a remarkable book, for help in seeing the culture as a whole. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol We merely ½nd society without art in- and Myth (1950), a study of the frontier stead of art without society.”10 At its myth in pulp ½ction, James Fenimore best, American studies was a hugely am- Cooper’s novels, Wild West shows, and bitious enterprise that aimed to lay bare the writings of Jefferson and Twain– the heart of “the culture as a whole” by complained in 1957 that “the effect of exposing myths and metaphors that op- the New Criticism in practice has been erate below the level of consciousness to establish an apparently impassable and by which, according to Smith’s de½- chasm between the facts of our existence nition of culture, “subjective experience in contemporary society and the values is organized.” To these ends, it assumed of art.” Smith, who by then held a pro- a wide mandate, taking into its purview fessorship in the Berkeley English de- not just literary monuments but monu- partment, lodged his objection not on ments of all kinds–there is a direct line behalf of a historicist understanding of from Lewis Mumford’s Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civi- lization (1924) to Alan Trachtenberg’s Jones, introduction to a new edition of W. C. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965). Brownell, American Prose Masters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), vii. This sort of opinion mongering in the guise of 10 Henry Nash Smith, “Can ‘American Stud- objective judgment was not a healthy develop- ies’ Develop a Method?” American Quarterly 9 ment for the ½eld. (Summer 1957): 203.

Dædalus Spring 2006 29 Andrew Even in its more strictly literary mani- by poisoning himself with alcohol a few Delbanco on the festations, such as R. W. B. Lewis’s The weeks after the assassination of Presi- humanities American Adam (1955), the American dent Kennedy. studies method was to look through The range and imagination of these and beyond particular literary texts to scholars were far-reaching, but their in- ½nd what Lewis called the “recurring tellectual force was centripetal. They pattern of images–ways of seeing and wanted to penetrate through a great va- sensing experience” by which Ameri- riety of texts to some unitary core of cans apprehend meaning in their lives.11 Americanness. (They construed broadly Leo Marx, in The Machine in the Garden the word ‘text’ long before the ‘cultur- (1964), showed how writers such as Tho- al studies’ movement of the 1980s and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 reau and Twain tried to chart a path be- 1990s discovered the semiotics of fash- tween rapacious capitalism and radical ion, advertising, or sports.) The titles utopianism–a via media that Marx de- of their books commonly included what scribed as a uniquely American version today’s scholars would dismiss as ‘total- of pastoral. Smith’s Virgin Land and izing’ or ‘reifying’ phrases, like ‘Ameri- Lewis’s The American Adam disclosed a can character’ (the subtitle of Constance national dream of recovering a prelap- Rourke’s book on humor was “A Study sarian condition in which the world of the National Character”) or ‘Ameri- could begin anew–a dream painfully can mind,’ as in Alan Heimert’s Religion lost when the dreamer awakes. and the American Mind (1966) or Roderick The patterns that interested Ameri- Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind can studies scholars tended to be ex- (1968). pressions of progressive hope, and it Recently, their movement has come is perhaps a measure of their intense under sharp attack as a collection of personal investment in the promise insouciant dreamers–men who elided of America that a striking number of ethnic, racial, class, and gender differ- leading ½gures in the ½eld fell into dis- ences and confused the fantasies of appointment and even despair. Like elites with the experiences of ordinary Matthiessen, John William Ward, a lead- people. In a recent retrospective essay, ing member of the ‘myth and symbol’ Leo Marx, now in his eighties, vigorous- school (who, during the Vietnam era, ly defends the American studies move- became an outspokenly antiwar presi- ment as having always acknowledged dent of Amherst College and later a pol- discontinuities between America’s itical activist on behalf of public hous- claims to egalitarian democracy and ing), died by suicide. Perry Miller has- the realities of life in a brutally compet- tened his own death at age ½fty-eight itive society, where equality of oppor- tunity, much less equality of condition, has never been fully achieved. There was 11 A cogent critique of the ‘myth and symbol’ always, Marx insists, an emphasis on school is Bruce Kuklick, “Myth and Symbol the ‘un½nishedness’ of American socie- in American Studies,” American Quarterly 24 ty as well as a sense that scholar-teachers (4) (October 1972): 435–450. Kuklick doubts could contribute to the tradition of “dis- that we can apprehend anything so vague as sident social movements, including, for ‘popular consciousness’ by elucidating the structure of artifacts, such as books or paint- example, the transcendentalist, feminist, ings, or even political events, such as speeches and abolitionist movements of the ante- or elections. bellum era; the populist movement of

30 Dædalus Spring 2006 the 1880s and 1890s; the pre–World War ment.”13 By the 1970s, Perry Miller’s American literature: I progressive movement [of which Par- protoexistentialist Puritans, who had a vanishing rington’s Main Currents was a belated struggled to preserve their Calvinist pi- subject? expression], and . . . the left-labor, anti- ety in the face of Arminian rationalism, fascist movements (and Cultural front) were giving way to Sacvan Bercovitch’s of the 1930s . . . . ” By and large, American Puritans in his The Puritan Origins of the studies scholars looked for inspiration American Self (1975) and The American not to the mainstream academy, but to Jeremiad (1978)–millenarian crusaders what Marx calls an “uncategorizable co- who proclaimed themselves a chosen hort” of “deviant professors, indepen- people charged by God to seize the “wil- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 dent scholars, public intellectuals, and derness” from the heathens and erect in wide-ranging journalists and poets”– it a New Jerusalem. among them, Constance Rourke, Thor- A leader of what might be called sec- stein Veblen, Alexis de Tocqueville, D. H. ond-wave American studies, Bercovitch Lawrence, and W. E. B. Du Bois.12 tried to come to terms with the ½rst wave by dissociating himself from the Amid the enormous upheaval of the “tribal totem feast” at which a new gen- 1960s to which Steven Marcus alludes in eration of scholars was feeding on Mil- his overview essay in the present issue of ler’s corpus. In 1986, having moved from Dædalus, American literary studies, like Columbia to Harvard, he dedicated to virtually every other activity in Ameri- Miller and Matthiessen an edited col- ca’s universities, was profoundly trans- lection of essays by a number of youn- formed. A series of traumatic assassina- ger scholars whom Frederick Crews, tions (John Kennedy, Medger Evers, Dr. in an unfriendly essay-review, grouped Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy, under the rubric “New Americanists.”14 Malcolm X) and the spiraling disaster of But reconciliation was elusive. The New the Vietnam War inevitably darkened Americanists accused Matthiessen of the myths and symbols that drew Amer- “silencing dissenting political opin- icanists. The individualist frontiersman ions,”15 by which they seemed to mean of Smith and Lewis became the maraud- that he had been locked into a binary ing Indian-killer of Richard Slotkin in his Regeneration Through Violence: The 13 Henry Nash Smith, “Symbol and Idea in Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600– Virgin Land,” in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, eds., Ideology and Classic American Liter- 1860 (1973)–a book that read the Viet- ature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, nam War back into the nineteenth-cen- 1986), 28. tury Indian wars. Henry Nash Smith is- sued a mea culpa in a late essay (1986) in 14 Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing Ameri- which he wrote that when he had com- can Literary History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). Crews coined the term posed Virgin Land as a young man, he in “Whose American Renaissance?” New York had been under the spell of Frederick Review of Books, October 27, 1988, and carried Jackson Turner and had already “lost his critique further in “The New Americanists,” the capacity for facing up to the tragic New York Review of Books, September 24, 1992. dimensions of the Westward Move- 15 Donald Pease, “Moby-Dick and the Cold War,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, 12 Leo Marx, “Believing in America,” Boston ed., Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease Review 28 (6) (December 2003–January 2004): (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 28–31. 1985), 119.

Dædalus Spring 2006 31 Andrew view of the world that pitted American and gender-based anticanon”–literary Delbanco on the individualism (of which Whitman’s works by racial minorities and women, humanities poetry and the free consciousness of who had been ignored and who revealed Melville’s Ishmael were his prime ex- in their writing that the American dream amples) against repressive totalitarian- had always been an American night- ism (as exempli½ed in Captain Ahab). mare. Bercovitch himself made a potent argu- ment, similar to that of Louis Hartz in By the late 1990s, the heat of the po- The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), lemics was subsiding, and the New that America lacked any political alter- Americanists were starting to sound Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 native to a property-oriented, individu- old. They fought with their predeces- alist liberalism. His implication was that sors, after all, mainly over texts whose Americans were peculiarly impoverished signi½cance both parties assumed. Af- in the realm of political ideas, and were ter the sound and fury of the 1980s– condemned, by their inheritance from the decade in which the 1960s college the millenarian Protestantism of the Pu- generation came into tenured positions ritan founders, to live with the illusion and Ronald Reagan came into the White that the American Way is God’s Way. House–a heightened awareness of sexu- For the generation of New American- al as well as racial and ethnic difference ists who followed Bercovitch, the failure now almost universally informed Amer- of earlier critics such as Matthiessen ican literary criticism. A number of new (who was often dubbed a ‘cold-war in- anthologies, notably the Heath Antholo- tellectual’ even though he did his major gy of American Literature (½rst edition, work before the United States entered 1989), edited by Paul Lauter, and well- World War II) was in having erased researched literary histories, such as “potentially disruptive political opin- Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: ions” from what amounted to a sani- Race in the Making of American Literature tized account of American culture. Mat- (1993), synthesized the work of the pre- thiessen and his ilk had left conflict out ceding two decades and presented a of the story–or so the charge went. As new narrative of American literary his- Crews put it, the New Americanists re- tory. Previously marginal writers (Mar- pudiated their predecessors as “timidly tin Delany, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hur- moralizing” scholars in thrall to a “ge- ston, Nella Larsen) were now key ½gures nially democratic idea of the American in the story; writers who had long been dream and its gradual ful½llment in his- central, such as Cooper and Melville, tory.”16 were revealed as struggling with unre- The patricidal assault took place on solved racial and sexual preoccupations. two fronts: by trying to show how the In 1983, while the Heath Anthology was major (according to Matthiessen & Co.) still in progress, Lauter could write that works of American literature obscured “only a few syllabi meaningfully inte- the oppression of racial minorities as grate the work of Hispanic-American, well as America’s history of imperialist Asian-American, or American Indian expansion, and by recovering from the writers.”17 His choice of verb was tell- putative prejudice of the Matthiessen school what Crews called “an ethnic- 17 Paul Lauter, ed., Reconstructing American Lit- erature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues (Old Westbury, 16 Crews, “New Americanists,” 32–34. N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1983), xiv.

32 Dædalus Spring 2006 ing. Representation is one thing, but had happened. Leslie Fiedler, a proli½c American literature: integration is another. The con½nes of critic who participated in both waves of a vanishing what had once been regarded as Ameri- the American studies movement, issued, subject? can literature had been exploded. There in 1982, what amounted to a farewell to had once been a more or less of½cial lit- the whole business of academic literary erature, in which writers from John Pen- study. “Literary criticism,” he wrote, dleton Kennedy (Swallow Barn [1832]) to “flourishes best in societies theoretically Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind committed to transforming all magic in- [1936]) portrayed black people chiefly as to explained illusion, all nighttime mys- plantation darkies. And most critics had tery into daylight explication: alchemy passed over such representations of the to chemistry, astrology to astronomy.”18 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 serving-class–the sort of people whom This was a restatement of the call for the Edith Wharton blithely referred to in “grass-roots anti-hierarchical criticism” The House of Mirth (1905) as “dull and (Fiedler’s phrase) that Susan Sontag ugly people” who must, “in some mys- had made in the famous title essay of her terious way, have been sacri½ced to pro- book Against Interpretation (1967), where duce” her delicately bred heroine, Lily she proclaimed an end to pleasure-dead- Bart. But now the reviled and exploited ening literary analysis and called for an moved to the center of the story–and “erotics of art.”19 their voices were heard strongly in the Fiedler went further. Always a mar- classroom for the ½rst time. ginal ½gure with respect to the academ- “The changes in our profession,” ic power centers–his teaching posts Lauter wrote, “ . . . are rooted in the were at Montana State University and movements for racial justice and sex the State University of New York at equity. Those who worked in the move- Buffalo–he had his ½nger on the pulse ments came to see that to sustain hope of the larger culture. In the age of televi- for a future, people needed to grasp a sion and video, he saw that literature meaningful past.” In this sense, the re- was being permanently demoted, at least vision of the American literary canon as a category to which only certain aca- was what the Yale cultural critic David demically certi½ed books were allowed Bromwich, playing on Clausewitz’s fa- to belong. (Consider the valedictory title mous de½nition of war, has called “pol- he gave to his 1982 collection, What Was itics by other means.” The good news Literature?) In Love and Death in the Amer- was the enlargement of the canon–an ican Novel (1960), Fiedler had long ago expansion that was, in fact, consistent ventured into sexual and racial themes with the spirit of openness characteris- that previous critics had evaded; for tic of American studies from its begin- him, popular culture was where one nings. The bad news was the implica- heard the heartbeat of America. If one tion that progressive-minded people– were to pay attention to novels, it was people committed to diversity and in- clusiveness–could ½nd nothing ‘mean- ingful’ in what had once been the main- 18 Leslie Fiedler, What was Literature?: Class stream American tradition. Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon and But even the changes that made read- Schuster, 1982), 37. ing lists unrecognizable to students who 19 Ibid., 117. Sontag’s essay was itself a restate- had attended college just twenty years ment of an argument against argument put earlier did not tell the full story of what forth around the same time by Roland Barthes.

Dædalus Spring 2006 33 Andrew best to focus on such disrespected (by Today, students of American literature Delbanco on the academics) books as Harriet Beecher are still working out these issues: What humanities Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or George kinds of cultural artifacts allow access Lippard’s Gothic potboiler The Quaker to the inner life of the culture? What City–in which sadism and secret crav- role, if any, should aesthetic judgment ings are unmodi½ed by literary re½ne- (and according to what criteria) play in ment. Fiedler was interested in prose the study of written texts? New lines of ½ction not for the modernist virtues internal relations within American liter- of intricacy or allusiveness but for its ature have lately emerged with the rise democratizing power as an early form of a movement known as ‘ecocriticism’ of mass art. The popular novel, he saw, –lines that run, for instance, from Tho- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 was the precursor to Hollywood movies reau through Aldo Leopold to Rachel and tv soap operas; it had, he thought, Carson and up to Barry Lopez.21 The a power of democratic leveling compar- histrionics and name calling of the ‘cul- able to the ‘ready-made garments’ that, ture wars’ are gone if not entirely for- in the early twentieth century, “made gotten–yet literary studies seem likely it impossible to tell an aristocrat from to remain divided for a while between a commoner.”20 those who follow the Frankfurt School While younger Americanists were critics Theodor Adorno and Walter Ben- settling scores with their predecessors jamin in regarding mass culture as a kind over such issues as the proper interpre- of soft propaganda by which the public tation of Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter, degenerates into the mob, and those or whether Margaret Fuller should be who celebrate popular culture as a roil- rescued from Emerson’s shadow, Fied- ing scene of imaginative liberation–as ler recognized that the commercial pro- does University of Pennsylvania Ameri- ductions of popular culture–mass-mar- canist Janice Radway in her influential ket movies and television, but also com- book Reading the Romance: Women, Patri- ic books, advertising, and fashion–were archy, and Popular Literature (1984), and, entering academia as legitimate subjects, more recently, in her Feeling for Books: and that the old academic disputes over The Book-of-the-Month-Club, Literary literary classics were devolving into Taste, and Middle Class Desire (1997). quibbles. It was not surprising that by the 1980s there had arrived onto course Today, the situation seems strikingly syllabi such nineteenth-century best- symmetrical with that with which this sellers as Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide essay began. In the early nineteenth cen- World (1850) and Maria Cummins’s The tury, a case had to be made for the exis- Lamplighter (1854)–now championed tence–not to mention the signi½cance– by feminist critics such as Jane Tomp- kins (in Sensational Designs: The Cultural 21 The impact of environmentalism in Amer- Work of American Fiction [1985]), who ican literary studies is well represented in two made the case for exactly those books books by Lawrence Buell, The Environmental that Nathaniel Hawthorne had dis- Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the missed more than a century earlier as Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, drivel by a “damned mob of scribbling Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), and Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Litera- women.” ture, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Be- yond (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 20 Ibid., 99. Press, 2001).

34 Dædalus Spring 2006 of American literature. In the early years an example from a recent book on a sub- American literature: of the twenty-½rst century, this case has ject that once would have been called a vanishing to be made again. Chinese art: subject? There is reason to feel a certain sense This book is very deliberately called Art of déjà vu. For one thing, the legitima- in China, and not Chinese Art, because it cy of the very idea of the nation-state is is written out of a distrust of the existence under siege in academic circles, where of any unifying principles or essences link- perhaps the most cited book of the last ing such a wide range of made things, three decades is Benedict Anderson’s things of very different types, having very Imagined Communities: Reflections on the different dates, very different materials, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983). and very different makers, audiences, and Shocked by the resurgence of national- contexts of use.23 ism in a century when Marxist intellec- tuals expected it to decline before the In 1999, Janice Radway, in her inaugural advance of international worker solidar- address as president of the American ity, Anderson de½ned nationalism as a Studies Association, suggested that the kind of atavism for which deluded mil- phrase ‘American studies’ be deleted lions have been willing to kill and die. In from the name of the organization in this context, the idea of a national litera- favor of the term ‘United States stud- ture seems, at best, to furnish an oppor- ies’–an act of puri½cation that would tunity to expose the mechanisms (such save its members from implicitly en- as the literary creation of patriotic myth) dorsing the hegemonic ambitions of by which the nation-state maintains it- the United States to dominate (at least) self and, at worst, to be complicit with the north and south ‘American’ conti- the criminality of the nation-state itself. nents. Another way to see what has happened Without embracing the strategies of is to recall Robert Bellah’s famous Dæda- self-acquittal these scholars propose, lus essay written in 1967, in which Bellah one may share their wariness toward accurately predicted that the American the nation-state as an object of vener- nation would split apart into factions of ation. Quasi-genetic ideas of race soli- “liberal alienation” and “fundamental- darity have always polluted feelings of ist ossi½cation” with respect to the “set nationalness (as late as 1934, one ½nds of beliefs, symbols, and rituals” that he Edith Wharton blithely remarking on called “civil religion.”22 Among aca- the “boyish love of pure nonsense only demic humanists, who are overwhelm- to be found in Anglo-Saxons”24), and ingly liberal and alienated from religion no one who has come of age since World in both its civil and fundamentalist War II can dissociate such ideas from the forms, it is hardly possible today to use hideous consequences that have some- the term ‘American’ without irony or times followed from them. embarrassment. Moreover, there is no blinking the We all recognize the gestures of dis- fact that American literary studies must avowal. Scholars in many ½elds are go- now make their way in a postcolonial ing through the same motions; here is 23 Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford 22 Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in Ameri- University Press, 1997), 10. ca,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post- Traditional World (New York: Harper and Row, 24 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New 1970), 183. York: Scribners, 1934), 157.

Dædalus Spring 2006 35 Andrew world in which we are perforcedly con- Literature presented a host of hitherto Delbanco scious that nations are fragile works of unknown texts in more than a dozen Na- on the humanities arti½ce; we have lately witnessed bloody tive American, European, and Asian lan- struggles over just what sort of nation guages, with English translations on fac- is (or was) Kuwait, Israel, the former ing pages. There is, as well, a movement Yugoslavia, a future Palestine, Iraq, and afoot–inaugurated some twenty years Ukraine, to name just a few–and Amer- ago by Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari La- icans, as citizens of the sole superpower, guardia, the editors of Reinventing the must continually consider what sort of Americas: Comparative Studies of Litera- obligation these and other nations ex- ture of the United States and Spanish Amer- ert upon us to preserve what used to be ica (1986), and lately forwarded in such Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 called their ‘right of self-determination.’ books as Anne Goldman’s Continental It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Divides: Revisioning American Literature the legitimacy of American literary (2000)–to reject the nation’s borders studies, narrowly–that is, nationally as impermeable lines dividing ‘Ameri- –construed, is under skeptical scruti- can’ literature from the literature of ad- ny. Ever since the Vietnam War, many jacent and overlapping cultures. American intellectuals have been more In January 2003, a special issue of or less ashamed of America, and the re- pmla, devoted in a skeptical mood to cent Iraq War, with its unilateralist and “America: The Idea, the Literature,” messianic rhetoric, has only made mat- included an essay asserting that “Amer- ters worse. In 1963, the Voice of Ameri- ican literature should be seen as no ca organized a series of radio lectures longer bound to the inner workings on American literature in which the of any particular country or imagined scholarly authorities of the day, includ- organic community but instead as in- ing some who held strong Left views, terwoven systematically with traversals participated: Henry Nash Smith, Wal- between national territory and inter- lace Stegner, Daniel Aaron, Carlos Baker, continental space.”25 And there are ef- Irving Howe, Kay House, David Levin, forts under way to ‘redraw the map of Richard Poirier, John Berryman, among American literature’ by pushing back others. It is simply impossible to imag- its boundaries in time as well as space. ine such a collaboration between the The Yale Americanist Wai Chee Dimock government and the academy today. has proposed a new set of coordinates Nor is it surprising that what is some- by which she would redraw Emerson’s times called America-centrism has be- literary af½liations and see him in rela- come an embarrassment to today’s tion not so much, say, to Bronson Alcott, Americanists. To use a prevalent term, as to the Vishnu Parana or the Koran. the ½eld is being ‘decentered’ through “Deep time” is Dimock’s name for this study and translation of texts written temporal reorganization, and, she adds, in America in languages other than “deep time is denationalized space.”26 English (one doubts how far this move- ment can go, since our educational sys- 25 Paul Giles, “Transnationalism and Classic tem is almost entirely monolingual) by American Literature,” pmla 118 (1) (January such scholars as Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez, 2003): 63. Lawrence Rosenwald, Werner Sollors, 26 Wai Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American and Marc Shell. In 2000, Sollors’s and Literature and World History,” American Liter- Shell’s Multilingual Anthology of American ary History 13 (4) (2001): 760.

36 Dædalus Spring 2006 So far, these attempts to develop post- fectly consonant with the view from the American literature: national ideas of American literature are cultural Left, for whom the hyphen in a vanishing too diffuse to bear much weight. And, as ‘Anglo-American’ marks a trivial divi- subject? is often the case, transformations in the sion between two barely distinguishable academic humanities tend to be second- nations driven by the same imperialist ary to more basic transformations in aims. The idea of an American literature the world. Once a province of Europe, has come to seem provincial again. America has become the power center Yet if one looks beyond the insular of a planet convulsed by a variety of re- academy to a new generation of young sistance movements–armed and other- American writers, one encounters a sa- wise–against it. Yet accompanying the lient–and historically recurrent–dif- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/135/2/22/1829105/daed.2006.135.2.22.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 sense of America as a center of consoli- ference in tone and attitude that contin- dated power is a sense that any coherent ues to divide academic critics from ac- notion of American identity is coming tual practitioners. To read, say, Gish apart. Can we call American a business Jen’s novel Typical American (1991) or corporation whose employees work in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995) factories in Sri Lanka and whose assets is to be struck by how a few changes in are deposited in Caribbean banks? Is the scenic incidentals, or a few substi- an illegal immigrant who crosses from tutions of Yiddish for Chinese or Kore- Mexico into Texas in order to ½nd me- an phrases, would render these works, nial work an American? With such with their historically recurrent tale of questions in the air, why should the idea Old World parents versus New World of an American literature escape interro- children, almost indistinguishable in gation? plot and structure from the Jewish im- As for what kind of answers might migrant novels of Abraham Cahan (Yekl, emerge, the old ones will clearly no 1896) or Anzia Yezierska (The Bread Giv- longer do. At the beginning of our sto- ers, 1925). Writers present have always ry, the proponents of an American litera- felt the parental presence of writers past. ture proclaimed its distinctiveness chief- They register their debts with large acts ly with respect to the burdensome prece- of homage, as when Ralph Ellison hon- dent of the literature of England–but ors the man after whom he was named, to dwell on that distinction today would Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Invisible Man seem to participate in what Freud called (1951), or with small allusive gestures, as the “narcissism of minor differences.” when Philip Roth opens The Great Amer- Matthew Arnold’s point is again oddly ican Novel (1973) with a Melvillean sen- pertinent: “I see advertised The Primer tence: “Call me Smitty.” of American Literature,” he wrote in The work of rede½ning, and thereby 1874. “I imagine the face of Philip or sustaining, American literature has al- Alexander at hearing of a Primer of Ma- ways been mainly carried on by writers cedonian Literature! . . . We are all con- who aspire to become part of it, not by tributors to one great literature–English professors who dismiss its validity or literature.” These sentences, quoted by doubt its existence. In that respect, not Marcus Cunliffe at the opening of his much has changed. The Literature of the United States (1954), would have once pleased only cultural- ly conservative Anglophiles; but today, Arnold’s words (if not his tone) are per-

Dædalus Spring 2006 37