Problems in the Writing of American Literary History: The Examples of Poetry and Ethnicity

Some 20 years ago, in the fall of 1983, I began my tenure as general editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature. I've described its premises elsewhere in detail and for present purposes only two aspects of our venture need recalling. ¹ The first is that this history, unlike others, was (and remains) the expression of a time of dissensus. Earlier histories built either on common fundamental assumptions about literature, history, and the relation between them (that is, on a literary-historical consensus shared by all the contributors) or else on some synthetic grand view set out by a certain literary historian. Neither of these options was available to us. Accordingly, our history reflects a variety of methods and outlooks, some of these mutually contradictory, each of them representing an important constituency in the current field of literary studies.

My second point concerns the unusual (monograph) length of each part of our history. All previous collaborative histories solicited relatively short contributions from experts in the subject: 15 pages on Faulkner, 30 on Romanticism, 5 on Anne Bradstreet. The rationale was consensus. On that basis the general editor(s) assumed the right to weave the many contributions into a harmonious whole. Our case was just the reverse. Each contributor required the space to explain his or her special approach. We needed not just to "cover the ground" (texts, movements, genres, etc.), but to allow for the development of different voices. In place of a long series of authoritative proclamations, we would offer groups of disparate but connected narratives, each of which would constitute, at best, a coherent dialogic narrative in its own right. Our authors represented a period in literary history that was (and remains) distinctive for its diversity of claims to authority and for its skepticism about such claims.²

In short, one of our major aims was to highlight the problems in writing literary history. We thought it would enrich our history to make those problems central to the experience of exploring American literary history. As the contributions gradually came to fill one volume after another, it became clear that the most problematic areas were poetry and ethnicity. Specifically, the difficulties involved dealing with traditions of poetry in what was basically a historical-cultural undertaking—that is, conveying formalist lines of continuity and change within a context appropriate to broad historical developments—and dealing with the diverse stylistic influences, social pressures, and political concerns that come with representing ethnic literatures.

To all appearances these problems are diametrical opposites. Ethnicity stands for the cultural extreme in current literary-cultural studies; poetry, for the literary extreme. But part of the effort of our history was precisely to integrate these extremes, to break down the barriers between them, or else to show their reciprocities and discordances. From their divergent perspectives, all the contributors felt committed in some way to link poetics and culture and to confront the question of the aesthetics of ethnicity. Now, after almost two decades, with four thick volumes of the History in print and another four about to appear, the time seemed right to consider the results. To that end I organized a forum of representative contributors—representative of work published, of work in process, of varieties in method and approach, of different periods in American literary history, and of generational differences among our contributors (in academic terms, reckoning by decade).

For scheduling purposes, the forum was divided into two panels, on poetry and on ethnicity. My hope was that the panels would make for a challenging juxtaposition, even for a complementarity of sorts. And so I believe they did. My only regret is that this published version cannot convey the liveliness of audience participation or spirited debate among the speakers following their presentations. ³