Timelines of American Literature ed. by Cody Marrs, Christopher Hager (review)

The extent to which intellectual inquiry in American literature and history has been bifurcated by the dividing line of 1865 is evident in even a cursory survey of job postings and course descriptions. So when Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager argued “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth Century,” they were rightfully celebrated for dethroning an idol whose veneration has obscured both the realism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the sentimentalism of Little Women. But the academy abhors a vacuum, and the two soon found themselves “feeling self-conscious about being so publicly against something without clearly being for something else” (4). This eclectic volume of essays thus carries the burden of great expectations: the hope of enthroning a new date or series of dates as boundaries for Americanist fields of inquiry.

But Marrs and Hager offer something messier than a simple substitute for the division of literary history into antebellum and postbellum periods. Indeed, what the volume advocates for is not an outcome but a process: “a continuing reexamination of widely accepted eras and a scholarly conversation featuring multiple periodizing efforts” (4). Thus, the rock-star lineup of contributors to this collection offers essays proposing the re-orientation of American literature around Andy Warhol, Appalachia, and the Anthropocene; they conceive of the field anew by centering it on Confederate nationalism, cryptography, and captivity narratives.

Some of these provocative think-pieces are more persuasive than others, but that is to be expected. Re-periodizing American literature around the rise of home mortgages from 1922 to 1968, for instance, is a hard sell, given the alternative histories of land acquisition and use that might be displaced by such a formulation. But Adrienne Brown’s reminder that mortgages reordered “racial categories by assimilating certain ethnic others and once immigrant bodies into whiteness while continuing to exile others” positions the mortgage melodrama more as an outgrowth of settler colonialism and plantation slavery than an attempt to overwrite those earlier systems (47). Still, I regard Gerry Canavan’s proposal that “the calendar year 1973 represents the crucial hinge point for this sense of a transformed world, the dividing line that separates their period from ours,” as a far more cogent call for re-periodization, at least in part because it replicates the (too) tidy sense of before and after offered by a date like 1865 (97). Although I cannot help but be cognizant, while reading such a book, that this binary approach to time glosses over the messiness of history, the fraudulent promise of clarity implicit in any attempt to identify watershed moments is alluring. So the next time I embark with students on my regular, quixotic surveys of American literature from its beginnings to the present, I may well point to the year 1973 as a point of postmodernist demarcation signifying a birth year for the economic instabilities, extremely online sensibilities, and unending energy crises that characterize our current moment.

Of course, the sheer range of proposals in this volume means that it is difficult to conceive of even the most persuasive of these premises being adopted as the basis for a new, widely-accepted timeline. To be for such a variety of timelines seems also, necessarily, to be against the elevation of any one option as a replacement for the status quo Marrs and Hager challenged in their essay. This Limbo of periodic uncertainty seems like a productive space in which to write and conduct research, but its utility visà-vis the classroom is questionable, and their choice to include sample syllabi in the volume clearly signals that Marrs and Hager rightly view pedagogy as a priority.

My concern is not that students would not enjoy or benefit from courses on the Age of Warhol or the Cultures of Tactile Letters (Reader, they would!) but that the average undergraduate knows so little about history that they are unlikely to appreciate the nuanced views such visionary and revisionary courses offer. To wit...