American Literature Coming Apart

Last summer, I received the following email message from Gordon Hutner, editor of American Literary History:

Dear David:

I’m writing to invite you to contribute to a special issue of ALH that I’m assembling for next year. The project, as part of our anniversary volume, is to review titles from the last twenty years, especially books that our contributors think have been forgotten or misvalued. Ideally, you’ll choose a scholarly or critical book that you think has been neglected or one that deserves a more constructive skepticism than it first received. The overall idea is to review the last 20 years and use the occasion of these new “reviews” to provide a kind of retrospect on the last two decades of American literary historiography and criticism. I say that I encourage you to choose a critical or scholarly book, though of course, you are free to select a title that’s more notable for its theoretical engagement. You may also choose such a title because you wish it had more impact than it turned out to have.

It seemed like an intriguing project, but no book leapt to mind, and I wrote back to say that I would be pleased to contribute if I could think of an appropriate object to discuss. As you might have gathered, I never did come up with a book, and hence, I am writing this commentary on the special issue.

I think my inability to find a neglected work of scholarship may be symptomatic of the current state of American literature studies. In order to know what people should have been reading, one needs to be able to know what they have been reading. I will suggest that, increasingly, they have not been reading anything much in common. However, my difficulty may be related to my own recent research and teaching, which may or may not be typical. The book I have just finished is on rock stars as cultural icons, and the one in progress deals with filmmaker John Sayles. My last published book, Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis (2003), has two chapters on American fiction, but my research did not lead me to any books that I thought unjustly neglected. Rather, it seemed to me when writing one of the two chapters, about Alison Lurie and John Updike, that they had been unjustly neglected. My next project is to some extent a response to that. It will focus on realism in a variety of forms in twentieth-century American culture. Though my research is preliminary, I have yet to find a single academic monograph that I feel moved to rescue from oblivion. Since I teach, in order of frequency, film, literary theory, and American literature, it may be that I am simply out of touch with what is happening in the latter field. But one might also say that my diverse interests, marginal to the traditional discipline of American literature, are entirely typical of its current state.

Still, how hard could it be, you might well ask, to find a neglected work of scholarship deserving of more attention? After all, academic books are almost by definition neglected. Even libraries are not routinely buying the output of university presses these days, and one’s book is doing well if 1000 copies are sold. Journals do not have enough space to routinely review every book in the fields they cover, and many prominent academic organs (e.g., New Literary History, Critical Inquiry) publish no reviews at all. Many academics hope not only that members of their disciplinary community will read their books, but also that they will be noticed in nonacademic magazines and newspapers. However, the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books review relatively few university press books, and of those, works of literary criticism are rare. The result is that almost all of us who are not Louis Menand or Walter Benn Michaels feel neglected, and even such stars are not necessarily immune. A prominent scholar some years ago told me he was depressed over the lack of notice for...