The Problem of Literary Generations: Origins and Limitations

The first recorded criticism of Henri Peyre’s Les générations littéraires (1948) came from its typist: in a lifetime of work, she said, no manuscript had been more boring.¹ Peyre must have hoped that scholars would look more kindly on his idea that literary history “would gain immensely by coming back to the idea of generations.”² Yet his book, which in too many chapters reviews the various meanings of “generation” and in too few pages recasts the history of various national literatures into successive generations, has been largely forgotten. While French, Spanish, German, and Hispano-American literary scholars have worked and continue to use the concept, the generation has not found a comfortable home in American or British scholarship despite the efforts of Robert Wohl and Samuel Hynes to give it greater prominence.³ Like the concept itself, the generation in literary scholarship has had a cyclical history: important in the aftermath of World War II, silent until the late 1960s and early 1970s, only for a tomb-like silence to reign afterward. Now, though, the next spurt of generational thinking has cropped up with the nascent study of “9/11 literature,” much of whose analysis falls back on generational concepts and terminology. This generational impulse will only grow stronger as the twenty-somethings whose formative years were marked by 9/11 and the subsequent American military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq grow into maturity.

Indifferent to this oscillation in academia, literary journalism and publishing have been powerfully affected by generational language.⁴ Obituaries invariably tie an author to a literary generation, enacting a symbolic return into the bosom of the nurturing family from which he or she emerged.⁵ Commercially, the generation sells: the Granta list of young authors is touted as “a snapshot of a literary generation” (and so the 1983 list is the “1983 generation”). Then there are the Lost Generation, the Bright Young People, the Auden Generation, the Angry Young Men, the Beats, ’68ers, Generation X, the New Generation poets, and so on. For Stephen Spender, “In this century, generation succeeds generation with a rapidity which parallels the development of events.”⁶

This is an apposite remark for Robert Wohl, who argues in Generation of 1914 that “historical generations are not born; they are made.”⁷ While Wohl means that events create generations, I contend that discourse has been even more important in their construction. As Harold Rosenberg puts it, “One may, especially today, call any age-group he chooses a ‘generation’—among ensigns or ballet dancers a generation is replaced every three or four years.”⁸ The list can be updated to include computer processors, tennis racquets, and athletic sneakers, but authors are no less exempt from generational self-fashioning. Gertrude Stein alluded to the term’s malleability by stating that “any two years can make a generation.”⁹ A little tongue-in-cheek, but Stein got it right when implicitly suggesting the generation’s connection to discourse—connected to discourse, created by it, yet also refusing to be pinned down, for the generation does not have an invariable, agreed-on meaning. Sociologist David Kertzer notes that “the term’s multivocality, a virtue in popular discourse, becomes a liability in science.”¹⁰ In 1979 Stephen Graubard observed that “there are few terms that have been as frequently invoked—but as little studied—over the last twenty years as the term ‘generations.’ In the scholarly world, in the social policy professions, and in the press, the concept of generations has become one of the most adaptable themes of contemporary discourse.”¹¹

By 2002 little had changed. “Despite the importance of the notion of generations in common sense or lay understanding of cultural change, the study of generations has not played a large part in the development of sociological theory.”¹² In literary studies, the word “generation” is employed casually, as it seems like we already know what we mean when using it. But even when used heuristically, the term retains the gloss of science because of its biological origins and its demarcation of objects (one generation is...