Making Contemporary Literature: An Interview with Amy Hungerford
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More than 50,000 works of fiction are published each year in the U.S. As scholars, we tend to focus on certain vaunted works, but in Making Literature Now (2016) Amy Hungerford investigates some of the alternative ways that people create and use literature, particularly outside the MFA track and the New York publishing world. Hungerford has become one of the more prominent new voices charting contemporary American literature, in her books The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (2003), Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (2010), and Making Literature Now, as well as in co-organizing the group "Post*45" and editing "Literature Since 1945," volume E of the ninth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature (2016). In addition, she has had a significant web presence with "The American Novel Since 1945," an Open Yale Course.
Born in 1970, Hungerford attended Johns Hopkins University for undergraduate and graduate degrees, earning a BA/MA in Political Science and Humanities (1992), an MA in the Writing Seminars (1993; Poetry), and an MA (1996) and PhD (1999) in English and American Literature. Since 1999, she has taught at Yale, where she is the Bird White Housum Professor of English. She also regularly teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, a summer MA program aimed at secondary school teachers.
This interview took place on 6 January 2017 at the Philadelphia Marriott in the midst of the MLA Convention. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, Professor of English and of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and transcribed by Victoria Glavin and Charlie Gunn, MA students at Carnegie Mellon.
In projects like the Norton Anthology and the Post*45 group as well as your own writing, you have been involved in redefining the field of contemporary American literature. How would you define contemporary American literature? [End Page 535]
First of all, I think of the production, or overproduction, of works that have small audiences such that the fractured readership of literature defines the contemporary reception and formation of American literature. That is not to say that there aren't works that have a unifying effect—prizewinners, the phenomenon of the literary blockbuster—and the literary press is always looking to find those and to anoint those. Infinite Jest is an example, as are Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, and Jennifer Egan's Goon Squad. They are presented to the readership for contemporary fiction as unifying points of attention, but it is always a question whether you can produce a coherent readership out of the efforts that the literary press makes, or publishers make, to create unifying works.
Around those works we see a massive production from small presses. You can see it if you look at the graphs of the numbers of works of fiction published. That started in the 1980s, when desktop publishing came into being, and suddenly lots of people had access to the technologies of publication, like Aldus Pagemaker.
You note in Making Literature Now that something like 55,000 novels a year get published. How many was it before?
It was hovering between 5 and 10,000 from mid-century until the mid 1980s.
Where would you say contemporary American fiction starts?
I would say it starts post-2000. I think that's the focal distance of the contemporary, as works from the 90s are now starting to be either canonized or to appear frequently on syllabi. A sorting mechanism has kicked in for those works—or they have attained what Richard Ohmann calls "pre-canonical" status, accorded to works that are anointed by the literary press. I would put the pre-canonical at a focal distance of 25 years, which is when works are starting to be chosen, sorted out, and attended to in the ways that canonical works have been in the past and continue to be. Whether each of those works continues to receive that attention is unclear. What you see at...
