Themes, Topics, Criticism

For many years the flood of work devoted to symptomatic reading—understanding American history and culture as depicted or critiqued in literary artifacts—has been dominated by attention to novels (and the occasional Hollywood movie). Short stories, essays, poems, and plays have only occasionally been taken as signs of the time, most often in studies specifically limited to one or another non-novelistic genre. An admirable exception to this trend is Caleb Smith's The Prison and the American Imagination. Smith examines both verse (Emily Dickinson, Simon Ortiz, Jimmy Santiago Baca) and prose (Mary Rowlandson, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others), and his claims about the national imagination are the stronger for it.

Coincidentally, Smith also breaks the mold in seeking continuities and changes that span the time between the 17th century and the 21st. More common now and in recent years is to single out one period as formative. Recently the Cold War period, especially the 1950s, and the run-up to modernism from 1890 to 1920 have been especially prominent; notably underrepresented in contemporary work are periods that once seemed central: the 17th century, the 1850s, and to a lesser extent the high modernist 1920s and 1930s. In other words, broad perspectives on American literature are now being constructed less by challenge to earlier readings than to earlier assumptions about where the center of historical gravity is best to be found.

Symptomatic reading, like the historicist and cultural studies movements that provide its methodological petri dish, can silently make literature the central resource about issues that are hardly literature's alone. Our cousins in other departments have not always admired this bias and at the extreme have disparaged cultural studies as ineptly done history or sociology, scholarship that depends on too narrow an archive. Be that as it may, one of the most notable features of this year's work is attention to the relations between literature and social science and an attendant expectation that each can be read as both signs of the times and commentary worthy of attention in its own right. Especially in the first half of the 20th century novelists and poets are seen as engaging with issues that anthropologists and sociologists also reflect upon, with neither party assumed to have the upper hand. Indeed, this may be the year in which Franz Boas rivals Michel Foucault as a theoretical resource.

i. Histories

Of the several broad considerations of American literary history appearing this year, Winfried Fluck's "American Literary History and the Romance with America" (AmLH 21: 1-18) most adopts the perspective of Craig Raine's "Martian" poetry, observing our oddities from the outside. "Is it possible to think America without romance?" Fluck asks. He implies by this rhetorical question that for decades and despite methodological turmoil and a succession of various critical schools we have grounded the discipline in curiously similar paradigms and that all of them are in love with the idea or promise of America.

According to Fluck's persuasive overview, everything since the 1950s falls into one of three categories: the myth/symbol/image school—think Leslie Fiedler—that first understood American literature as protomodernist and is thereby at its deepest level shouting "No in Thunder" to social and political complacency; a subsequent ideological criticism—think Sacvan Bercovitch—that deems as illusory any promise of resistance implied by the modernist literature of negation; and an expansive and now transnational ideal of diversity—think Wai Chee Dimock—that has sought in some "positive non-identity" escape from any fixed, hence ideologically compromised position. However, all three paradigms understand literature's relation to society as constitutively adversarial, and all three remain under the spell of an exceptionalist and utopian notion of American literature.

A more sympathetic view of the planetary expansion of American literary studies is taken by Trish Loughran in "Transcendental Islam: The Worlding of Our America: A Response to Wai-Chee Dimock" (AmLH 21: 53-66). Loughran admires the decentering such expansion seeks but notes that Dimock's celebration of idiosyncratic reading communities may put the cart before the horse. It is one thing to...