Teaching the Literatures of Early America (review)

As is perhaps inevitable given the mission that underwrites the MLA's Options for Teaching series, the experience of reading these essays collected in Teaching the Literature of Early America is only somewhat more exciting than working through the teaching statements in a stack of job applications. And in addition to the often numbing effects of repetition, the nature of the enterprise of writing about one's teaching involves a level of self-promotion that can be—there is no other word for it—grating. But the contributors to this volume make as much of the unpromising task as possible, and their qualifications, experience, and energy go a long way toward compensating for the pitfalls inherent to the genre. Indeed, among those who engage in the task of mapping out options for the teaching of the literature of early America are both the most experienced and the most promising scholars in the field.

This text is designed to be of primary value to the young teacher facing her or his first classes in early American literature, or to the seasoned professor who has decided to expand offerings in early American materials in response to the growing critical interest in the period and the expanding number of readily available materials. But I wonder if in fact the volume might do more to discourage than inspire those new to the field, and it is perhaps as a mirror to the state of the profession that the volume will have its most lasting impact.

As Carla Mulford spells out in the introduction to the volume, the last quarter century has witnessed a renewed interest in a period that had long been understood as a dry antiquarian footnote, and which now is a scene of some of the liveliest debates and theoretical exchanges in American literary studies. The old model of "early America" in which many of us were trained—a scene of Puritan "origins" narrated by "proto-American" scribes—has been exploded by the "recovery" of the multinational,multilingual, multiracial, and multicultural energies that are now understood to be integral to anything that can reasonably be called early America. This volume reflects the degree to which these battles have been won, at least in (critical) theory if not in (pedagogical) practice. That is, while many readers might be sure to agree with the assertion, for example, that French-language colonial texts are an understudied and vital aspect of "early America," it will be a slim minority who will find a way to work these texts into their surveys.

It is this sense of a growing split between theory and practice—or better put, between critical and pedagogical commitments—that came to interest me on reading this volume. As a field of critical study, ours has benefited immeasurably from the ideas and energies that have been generated by the perforation and dissolution of borders long imagined to be immovable, by the interrogation of the constructed nature of identities long understood to be "natural," and by the historicization of canons long defined and defended as inevitable. As the voice of the Puritan Elder who once monolithically defined the field area has been put into dialogue with a range of other voices—men and women of varied regions, languages, cultural origins, and class positions—the whole field (the Puritan Elder included) has become richer, more complex, and more exciting.

But, equally, the field, once narrow and circumscribed to the point of tedium, is now so very much open and in flux as to present an almost dizzying array of options and challenges. And the new teacher is asked to bring the increasingly borderless and seemingly limitless field within the ongoing calendrical borders of the semester (or, heaven help me, the quarter). I am in many ways grateful for my ignorance of some of the challenges facing my field when I set out to put together my first survey in early American literature almost 10 years ago. I struggled mightily (and I...