- A New American Canon
Correction [06.29.21]: Minor typographical errors have been corrected from the print version in this electronic version.
Modern American society is unequal and inequitable — and so too is the modern American literary canon. While F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis enjoy an unquestioned place in that canon, others such as Zora Neale Hurston, Agnes Smedley, Djuna Barnes, and Younghill Kang have struggled to reach canonical status even if they are pioneers of African-American, proletarian-American, lesbian-American, and Asian-American literature respectively. So how then should canon reformation proceed in view of its inequalities and inequities?
For some, the task is as simple as merely including these authors on our American literature reading lists under the heading of race, class, gender, and sexual diversity. But for others, the task of reconfiguring the American canon is a theoretical project of the highest order. The choice between these two approaches comes down our belief about the value of theory in literary studies: for antitheorists, literary studies need not get involved with the shape of the American literary canon. Canonical literature can be distinguished from uncanonical literature simply by appeal to critical authority. If M. H. Abrams says a work is canonical in one of his anthologies, then it is. If The Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Abrams oversaw through seven editions from 1962 to 2006, does not see fit to add more women, then they should not be included in the canon of “great” English literature. As Abrams notoriously said in 2004 to Sean Shesgreen after he was compelled by others to add more women to his anthology, “I have not found ten lines worth reading in any of the women added.” “People want these but don’t use them,” continued Abrams. “And we have to put them in to be p.c.”
But for theorists, the literary canon is incomprehensible without theory. Moreover, the process to include works by a more diverse group of writers as exemplary or canonical works of American literature requires for theorists detailed examination of the ideologies of their aesthetics — ideologies that involve social and political counter-narratives of history and subjectivity. Gone in such studies, for example, is the singular and simple tree of canonical American literature as one with roots in Ralph Waldo Emerson extending through Herman Melville and Henry James to the literature of 1920s and 1930s America. It is one replaced by counter-canonical theorists with a potential forest of ideological counter-narratives contributed by modern American writers that both resist and antagonize repressive ideological formations. A fine example of this is the work of W. Lawrence Hogue, one of the most respected critical theorists of American literature.
In his most recent book, A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature (2020), Hogue argues that the United States of 1920s and 1930s provided a fertile “context for American writers from the mainstream, different identitarian groups, and social and political movements, with different ideologies and perspectives, who were not held together by norms or values,” but who rather use this opportunity “to reconceptualize the United States, to show how it feels to live and survive in modern America.” For Hogue, these two decades of American literary history gave us a host of “diverse American writers, [who] were mostly born and raised in a much different (agrarian) United States in the early 1890s struggling to define who they are and what it means to be human, to be alive in the changing 1920s and 1930s America.”
His readings of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), McNickle’s The Surrounded (1936), Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929), Barnes’s Nightwood (1937), and Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937) show how these American authors “imaginatively reinforce and/or reconfigure the US and American subjectivity.” He also shows “how some of these diverse writers become entrapped with the social and economic structures of modern American society, how others turned to nonrational and nonmodern systems and paradigms from the past to intervene and reterritorialize the United States, becoming...