I'm re-reading this thread as I'm preparing to pull together my American Literature survey course syllabus. It's great to have a discussion like this with interested non-specialists. Several people have, in passing, asked for "reports from the trenches." e.g.--
I think it would be useful if someone could give me an idea about the actual state of academia and teaching, to properly understand the debate. Alas?
--and I love imagining myself as being in a trench, of course--who doesn't?
And so first I'll say that I pretty much agree with everything diz says--especially his first post. I think he's right that our main job in most survey courses is the "mapping of the territory" -- what are the major genres, schools, periods, and trends and texts that seemed to emerge in different contexts and why, and let "geeks" in the specific subfields help us decide what texts will help us at least hit the high points and low points of the terrain so students have a rough idea of the lay of the land and how to find their way about in it--terminology and reading skills that will help them detect patterns in other works of the time. (L'Anima/Lurid: he was talking about more than showing them the library, that wasn't a fair critique, to my mind).
But I can also sympathize with L'Anima/Lurid's sense of disquiet, especially, his argument that diz's answer seems to leave something, something at least vaguely qualitative, out. I agree that Diz's answer does feel a little nebulous, because I think there is a kind of qualitative understanding that still operates for most of us (esp. us liberal "multiculturalists" so to speak) because we do make decisions all the time about which texts we value more than others. But I'll argue that this value judgment is not based on a sense of an "intrinsic" kind of quality, that e13 was initially arguing for, and then pulled away from--for good reason.
And I think e13 is on to something when he realizes it does distort history a bit to imply they [Poe, Melville, Hurston] had a big impact on their contemporaries...an impression which any chronological lit survey can't help but create.
Ah! But I think a GOOD course CAN avoid that impression!
So here's what I think is the missing piece of the puzzle: [drumroll?]
Most academics, today, think in terms of a text's "cultural work"--i.e., what a specific work sought to accomplish with its readers, what impact sought to have in the broader culture--rather than the more "intrinsic" notion of "quality." (My gut tells me that Diz would agree?, because this concept is completely inextricable from context.)
So what I'm thinking of, as I make decisions about which texts I want to teach (beyond just "do I like this?"--the most important one!), is: what kind of cultural work did this text (or, if there are several possibilities, texts like it) accomplish, or seek to accomplish, by being published? I tend to be most interested in texts, even "failed" texts, that have an ambitious agenda--they seek to make a difference in the way things are--to comment on the way things are and, possibly, even to create a grass roots change in the culture as a whole. Or in texts that are audacious simply in daring to speak truth to a powerful audience. My question is "How did they do that? What language did they use to try to reach this audience?" (One of my favorite genres, as a result, is the slave narrative tradition.)
Some works like this are immediately powerful, and powerful with its audience--the Declaration of Independence was and is a powerful text in this regard. I always teach it in my (early) survey. I like to get my students to think about the United States as a nation founded on written documents--as a literary nation in that regard. (Is it "literature"? Yes. Anybody wanna fight about that?)
Uncle Tom's Cabin is a powerful text, today, TO ME and many others, despite its sentimental language and style, partly because it sought to accomplish amazing things: it wanted to turn the value system that undergirded the United States and the global economy--patriarchalism and capitalism and slavery--on its head. (Was it racist? Yes.) It was still audacious for a white woman to speak to an audience of mostly white women in a way that implied those women, her readers, were powerful political agents whose moral suasion in the home could turn the world upside down. The book wanted to change the way the world works! It placed women at the center of the social universe--not the periphery! It clearly played a role in making slavery visible to the broader culture. Yet it's debatable how powerful it ultimately ended up being in terms of its own goals. I love reading James Baldwin's critique of its sentimentalism and the problems with that sentimentalism, too, but it doesn't make the book less important. To me, it's a great text--not crap at all.
And then there are the "failed but fabulous" texts: There's MOBY DICK, which many readers hated in its day. But it was bravely experimental in its approach and asking questions about the relationship between humans and the natural world that were in the air, but not asked in quite the same way. It was trying to make a big difference--and we can now see its prescience when we look at the global economy and environment. But mostly people said, "Huh?" back then.
Then, even more failed: take, for example, Harriet Jacobs's INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL. The text was lost, derided as probably being written by a white woman, and forgotten. I teach it because it is amazing on many levels, not so much because " I gotta teach a black woman" but because this woman, from a position of virtually complete legal and social and economic powerlessness sought to talk about, for one thing, sexual exploitation in a culture that made a frank, public discussion of such a topic, by any woman (let alone an enslaved black woman who always had to fight the dehumanizing stereotype of being a kind of animal-in-heat), almost impossible. I'm fascinated by the way she negotiates the minefield of this topic, and how she helps me see the world she lived in, in a way that no other writer does. But for a variety of reasons, from racism to sexism to bad timing to bad luck, the book couldn't be heard by most people in its day.
So: cultural work. Some texts essentially serve to reaffirm the status quo, which is a kind of cultural work. I am not so interested in those texts. (I do, however, teach Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, which makes the overtly racist argument about orangutans mentioned above, so that I can watch David Walker demolish it! And to offer a complex picture of Jefferson, alongside the Declaration. And to then talk about what happened to David Walker--dead on his doorstep, in obscurity, although belatedly his words galvanized the abolitionist movement.) And, Hawthorne: Hawthorne has ALWAYS been critically hailed and remains a powerful writer. He's an interesting case, too...
I could go on and on but I will stop now. |
