Themes, Topics, Criticism

After years in the wilderness, thematic and topical criticism has returned to the prominent position it occupied 30 years ago, when AmLS was first launched and it was decided that each volume in the series should include one chapter not organized under the rubrics of authors, period, and genres. The renewed attention to themes and topics, ushered in by historical and culturalist movements from the 1990s, has fostered a distinctive genre of scholarly monograph. Mindful of the advice about scope and market value that many of us have been giving to doctoral candidates in recent years, we propose to call this genre, with equal measures of sympathy and snark, the McThesis.

The McThesis always begins with a chapter making broad claims about some aspect of American life, followed by four to six self-standing chapters, each explicating how and where the theme can be found in a text or two. Novels most often provide the texts to be interpreted, but occasionally other documents are examined and sometimes also an event or institution that is read as if it were a text. A few current examples of this genre, such as Michele Birnbaum's Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature speed past the conceptual, comparative, and cultural issues of the introductory chapter to focus on the explications. This usually transforms the monograph into a collection of largely independent essays, each more appropriately regarded as scholarship about the text at hand than about the ostensibly broader thesis.

Others, such as the books by Brown, Fichtelberg, Kerkering, and Leverenz described below, strive more persistently to enlist close-reading in the service of cultural criticism. Whatever the depth and breadth of this striving and whatever the strength of the exegesis, however, all McTheses face a daunting methodological problem: What, if anything, do literary and especially fictional representations adequately represent? That literature willy-nilly addresses its time's understanding of The Way We Live Now may go without saying, but how accurately, influentially, or lastingly it may do so is always an issue. Indeed, despite the continuing centrality of literature to American Studies, the questions we ask about American life, past and present, may or may not best be answered by our novels, movies, poems, and performances.

i Histories

In addition to commenting on particular examples of early American minority literature, Joanna Brooks in American Lazarus unobtrusively sketches a major reconceptualization of the origins and central themes of American literature. Contesting those who have searched in early writings by blacks and Indians for the chiefly secular concerns of their modern descendants, Brooks emphasizes minority participation in the first Great Awakening. The correspondingly multiracial emphasis makes visible an alternative myth of national identity. Rather than the familiar American Adam in a new Eden, Brooks's key myth concerns one Lazarus resurrected from the social death of slavery and removal and another called to speak God's truth to the rich man. The two biblical figures named Lazarus fuse to some extent, and they then absorb other tropes from Christian, African, and Native American traditions. This makes for a literary culture tasked less with venturing westward into a virgin land than with witnessing on behalf of a rebirth from devastation.

In Blood Talk Susan Gillman boldly proposes a new cultural context for the fictional and factual discourses on race that appeared between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of World War I. She demonstrates that black nationalists and white supremacists alike regularly made recourse to occult, pseudoscientific resources such as theosophy or Masonic ritual and to the new psychological ideas of Freud and William James, attempting thereby to produce coherent prophecies about how the nation's (and humanity's) past would or should deliver a desired future. The melodramatic plots that writers of this time imagined are often regarded as muddled or self-contradictory, and hence lacking in the sort of moral legibility that melodrama is supposed to provide, but Gillman reads this confusion as honest, and even, à la Walter Benjamin, messianic and prophetic.

Gillman makes her case best with the popular fiction of the day—Pauline Hopkins, Thomas Dixon...