When the Symptom Becomes a Resource

Appropriately for an anniversary publication, the majority of the scholars writing here look back on 20 years of American Literary History and discern a story of progress. Progress, moreover, takes in these pages a familiarly American form: that of expansion. The canon has been expanded, irrevocably; Michael Bérubé marvels aptly at how recently Americanists still toiled in a “[Frederick] Douglassless field.” More recently, even the borders of the nation are increasingly left behind. As “American” is called into question, so is “literary”: a presumably more far-seeing interdisciplinary gaze replaces what Tol Foster calls the “myopic” concerns of “scholars in more delimited fields.” Hence, a significant handful of the books discussed here are not by literary critics at all. Perhaps more tellingly, those that are typically read literary texts for a “significance” not confined to the “purely aesthetic” (Pfister): whether by literary critic Angela Sorby or historian Clark Halker, poems are examined for their “social uses,” a project that ideally entails not fixating on “particular writer[s]” or works (Foster) but amassing an “impressive database” to garner what another historian calls “‘a more accurate as well as a more democratic portrayal of American culture than we have previously possessed’” (Renker). Whitman-like, “American poetry” thus expands to meet a “democratic” ideal that is also an empirical one. Its authorship should be understood as collective: in Caroline Levander’s words, “language and literature are the tools nations and peoples use to represent their worlds.”

Reading these essays together, one cannot help being struck by the degree to which the pages of ALH have decisively shaped the recent decades of not only this field, but also literary studies more broadly, which has similarly moved toward reading literature in cultural–historical terms. Yet this does not mean the primary tone here is one of self-satisfaction. In keeping with the idea of progress, several writers feel that a transformed American studies has yet to live up to its own expansive promise—has yet to become truly postnational (Irr), transatlantic (Claybaugh), or interdisciplinary (Foster). More strikingly, however, nearly all the essays, even those that are most supportive of the gains that have been made, imply some doubts about what may have been sacrificed along the way, thus calling the discourse of progress itself more into question.

The most obvious—though, importantly, not at all the only—of these doubting voices are those wondering, in Brook Thomas’s words, “What’s literature have to do with it?” Thomas’s own essay, the only one to focus on a book (Wolfgang Iser’s) with no connection to “America” at all, attacks this question head on—as does, in a more musing but nonetheless pointed vein, Douglas Anderson’s piece on the only single-author study in the lot, Dan McCall’s The Silence of Bartleby (1989). The issue arises, however, in multiple smaller moments as well: among others, José Saldívar’s observation of his “transdisciplinary” graduate students’ disdain for his “literary (figural)” reading of Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres’s The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (2002); Leslie Bow’s admission (in a conspicuously stylish essay) that despite—or because of?—the lack of “humor and grace” in most literary criticism, we “still crave beauty in the written word”; and Stephen Burt’s point that Angela Sorby’s reading of John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” (1866) as “a poem about racial whiteness” can tell us little about the formal (rather than thematic) choices Whittier made.

In many ways, of course, this reemergence of the purportedly “dated” subject of “literature’s unique formal value” (Levander) is hardly surprising. We are in the midst of a wave of “new formalism,” a “redisciplinarization” in literary studies, Colleen Lye reminds us, one that makes it newly possible to appreciate the attention a study like Jinqi Ling’s pays to “the textual effects of aesthetic pleasure” in the Asian American novel. Will the result, even for a journal like ALH, be a return to the practice of close reading that, Caren Irr notes, was lamented to be disappearing in a recent...