20 Themes, Topics, Criticism

An important feature of the year's scholarship is the focus on the relation of literature to the concept of identity. More than rehearsing the discourse of identity politics, this material works to reconstruct our sense of what constitutes American identities. It is worth noting that such a move does not only implicate the literature of recent authors: it also requires us to rethink our understanding of the past in crucial ways. If the conception of the unified American subject has been widely recognized as a fiction, that recognition now marks the starting point for important criticism, not the conclusion. But if American identity is an unstable site, then so must be the hyphenated or hybridized identities whose development led to the demise of the fixed idea of Americanness. One distinctive feature of this year's work is its emphasis on the actual contours and various dynamics of these multiple American identities. Just as important is a consistent interest in the methods by which the identity is not only produced in literature but also studied by scholars. As in the recent past this set of undertakings requires a scholarship combining literary and cultural study, cognizant of literature as literature but also aware of literature as a sociohistorical phenomenon with powerful implications for culture.

i Perspectives and Methods

Elizabeth Renker's "'American Literature' in the College Curriculum: Three Case Studies, 1890–1910" (ELH 67: 843–71) offers a history of American literature instruction at three American institutions of higher learning, Mount Holyoke College, the University of Washington, and Wilberforce University. Renker chooses these institutions with their varying constituencies to demonstrate the similarities between the fortunes of American literature at a small women's college, a land-grant university, and a historically black university. Renker's analysis places women instructors at the forefront of the movement to incorporate the teaching of American literature in the postsecondary curriculum. She notes that in all three cases such courses in American literature began to appear at roughly the same time, in the late 1880s. These courses disappeared at the end of the 1890s, not to reappear until later in the 20th century. Renker ties this disappearance and reappearance to the professionalization of literary study, signaled by the Ph.D. required of those seeking postsecondary teaching positions. While short on analysis and long on the factual reporting of institutional history, Renker's work nevertheless contributes to our understanding of how American literature has become a part of the college curriculum, and thus supplements the work of Gerald Graff in Professing Literature (1987) and Robert Scholes in The Rise and Fall of English (1998).

In "The End(s) of African-American Studies" (AmLH 12: 637–55) Kenneth W. Warren engages a similar question but with a narrower focus: what is the relation between the formal study of African American culture and the politico-cultural entity that study is presumed to represent? Noting discussions of this issue recently identified with such figures as Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Manning Marable, Warren correctly traces the history of such discussions to the early 20th century, locating there the genesis of the anxiety concerning the relation of black intellectual elites to the black "masses." Contemporary versions of these anxieties continue to center on the nature of intellectual responsibility—for whom and in what ways does the intellectual speak? what is the political dimension of literary or cultural criticism? As Warren points out, for all sides the "coin of the realm" is some professed investment in black communities. What ought to be called into question is "the belief that black studies can provide us with some access to the inner thought of some collective black subject." The desire to speak on behalf of this collective black subject turns the attention to expressive cultural forms, since there presumably one can find this subjectivity articulated. However, as Warren is quick to point out, this perspective is flawed because of its necessary association of intellectual expertise with political leadership. Instead of focusing on "ventriloquizing" the collective black subject, Warren argues, studies in African American expressive cultural forms would better focus...