A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature: An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation by W. Lawrence Hogue (review)

In A Theoretical Approach to Modern American History and Literature: An Issue of Reconfiguration and Re-representation, W. Lawrence Hogue disrupts the dominant history of modern America (1870-1930) as the exceptional period of "the modern" and "modernity," a historical span of great economic, industrial achievements when spectacular cities rose and Americans became the modern subjects of middle-class prosperity and progress, when America led the world in democracy and freedom—ultimately, when the paradigmatic modern American identity was forged. This narrative and vision of the exemplary modern American identity still underpin the prevailing sense of modern American history and literature, Hogue argues, and in its stead, he presents a reconfigured modern American history that allows modern American literature to be read in "a multicultural, multiracial, and postcolonial way" (vii), thereby "reterritorializing the term 'modern America'" (262).

Hogue tracks the falsity of the dominant narrative by highlighting the histories of those who had been excluded—the racial and ethnic minorities, the Indigenous peoples, the immigrants, the women, the poor, and the laboring class. Interweaving their repressed histories through the hegemonic moments of American history constitute the first two chapters of the book. The sociological, political, economic, and cultural information that Hogue brings to bear, along with Althusserian, psychoanalytic, and poststructuralist theories that reveal the repressed alterity of the dominant history, create the illuminating context in which the literary and theoretical analysis that follow—of Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded, Agnes Smedley's Daughter of Earth, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and Younghill Kang's East Goes West—convincingly show that "the modern" and "modernity" of America was never white, Eurocentric, and male, but was always multicultural, multiracial, and postcolonial.

In reconfiguring modern American history, Hogue aligns his project with the scholarship of New Americanists, such as Amy Kaplan, Robyn Wiegman, Janice Radway, Donald Pease, and others who have decentered the hegemonic, normative history of American national formation and uniqueness. While that alignment is informative, I would point to the lively field of revising American literary modernism as sharing the aims of this book more closely. Border Modernism: Intercultural Readings in American Literary Modernism (2002); Strangers at Home: American Ethnic Modernism between the World Wars (2005); African, Native, and Jewish American Literature and the Reshaping of Modernism (2007); Performing Americanness: Race, Class, and Gender in Modern African-American and Jewish-American Literature (2008); and Ethnic Modernism and the Making of U.S. Literary Multiculturalism (2016) are some examples of works published in the last two decades that revise American literary modernism through the lens of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, immigration, gender, and postcoloniality, and the minority writers under Hogue's examination—Hurston, McNickle, and Kang—are prominent figures in these studies.

While "modernism" is the literary and critical lens through which these studies interrogate the dominant paradigm of American literary modern-ism—as the interwar literary achievement of formal experimentation by Anglo-American writers—"modernism" as a literary tradition is not part of Hogue's analytic framework. Instead, Hogue gives primacy to reconfiguring the history of America between 1870s to 1930s, and by reading the literatures of 1920s and 1930s in dialectic relationship with this history, shows how modern American novels by writers excluded from the dominant narrative of American modernity expose the falsity in the normative, homogenous, and unified American self and history.

One compelling effect of this dialectic historicist approach is the synchronous view of the turn-of-the-century American historical moment. The 1920s New York City that is the setting for The Great Gatsby is the same spatiohistorical setting in which East Goes West's protagonist, Chungpa Han, struggles as a newly arrived immigrant from Korea, making it into the country just before the Immigration Act of 1924 that excluded Asians from immigration. The...