What Is American Literature?

My title repeats a familiar question, one posed repeatedly across the history of “American” letters. Its repetition came to signal a rhetorical point of entry into an ongoing debate. Even those who purported to answer definitively did not quell the argument. In 1935, Carl Van Doren’s preface to What Is American Literature? summarized some of the by-then-routine sticking points: “Has America a literature at all? Has it a literature distinguished from all others? Is it American when it does not deal with American subjects? Is there any special attitude, style, technique, achievement in American literature? What qualities has it? What qualities should it have? Such questions assume that a literature is something abstract and general, a whole greater than its parts” (6). Accelerating professional consolidation in the mid-twentieth century produced increasing consensus among scholar-experts, emblematized in particular by F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). That, too, proved temporary. The canon wars made the point loudly enough.

This problem of definition provides the occasion for my comment on the 16 essays in this special issue. I approach them as a random sample that provides a lens on Americanist literary study as it stands at this historical moment. The data set kicks up some notable phenomena. We find clusters of overlapping primary and secondary concerns. Most prominent here, unsurprisingly, are explorations of race and ethnicity (Jesse Alemán, Patricia Chu, Erica Edwards, Sean X. Goudie, Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Hsuan Hsu, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Sean Kicummah Teuton, Trysh Travis), as well as of nation (including sub-, trans-, and prenational categories such as space and land) and region (Alemán, Brian Edwards, Jennifer Greeson, Hsu, Susan Lurie, Teuton), a strong index to current field preoccupations. Such concerns entail a post-Foucauldian attention to structures of power, and this interest in power more generally creates a shared orientation, despite differences in nominal topic, with the essays whose subjects are 9/11, terror, war (the Civil War, both World Wars, Vietnam), and the aftermath of war, including postwar cultural formations such as “liberalism,” “neoliberalism,” and historically specific forms of the school (Alemán, Jennifer Ashton, Erica Edwards, Lurie, Deak Nabers, Nguyen, Teuton, Michael Trask, Travis). In a secondary subset, we find the historical contours of gender and sexuality (Alemán, Ashton, Heather Love, Trask) and the idea of ethics and ethical criticism (Goudie, Love, Lurie, Nguyen), essays that in some cases fold back into the prior sets of concerns with power and nation. Each essay, of course, elucidates an original project with its own inflections, from black cultural production since 9/11 to Mark Twain’s representations of Chinese immigrants to biopolitics, and so on.

At one level, this engaging group of second book projects exemplifies the wider state of scholarly inquiry at the present time. The post-American exceptionalism, postcanonical, transatlantic, transnational, subnational, prenational, hemispheric, global, oceanic, planetary, world moment is forcefully in evidence. Yet my remarks focus not on the global, but on the local. Hayden White reminds us that globalization can deprive the world of places (731). The locality that persistently underwrites the larger projects described here is the institution—that is, the place of our labor. It is striking how often these scholars sound this note, how repeatedly their essays juxtapose two kinds of professional spaces—that is, the ideational spaces we conceive of as meaningful to conceptualizing “American literary history,” and the material spaces of our work as professors.

Since the occasion for this special issue is the professional genre of the “second book,” well-recognized shorthand among professors for “the book one typically writes after receiving tenure,” it is not surprising that the essays reflect on the shape of academic careers; however, it is certainly notable that those reflections share a timbre of abiding worry. As these scholars rethink what it means to pursue a field still (for now) called American literature, for a prestigious field journal called American Literary History, they carry a clear sense of an ending. Trysh Travis, for example, situates her book about the history of polite and professional knowledge...