Michael Soto
Michael Soto Those among us who were active professionally when John Crowe Ransom declared “An Age of Criticism” in 1952 are fewer and fewer in number, but most of us lived through a proliferation of theoretical ‐isms unmatched except by the rise of avant‐garde ‐isms informing our modernist predecessors. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the period since 1914 has been a succession of theories of American literary expression that are by turns illuminating and constraining and too often ill equipped to describe our fast‐moving culture. The biohistorical emphases of the first generation of Americanist literary scholars – think Barrett Wendell and Fred Lewis Pattee – ultimately gave way to the nuanced and still important work of F.O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance (1941) cemented the reputations of those nineteenth‐century trailblazers who came to be seen, thanks in part to Matthiessen, as proto‐modernist harbingers of an “American century” (to borrow a phrase) in poetry, prose, and drama. Along with Matthiessen, important scholar critics such as Henry Nash Smith, Richard Chase, and Leslie Fiedler simultaneously explained the idiosyncrasies of American literary history and provided a yardstick against which to measure their more creative contemporaries.
And so the writers and works explored in this volume of the Companion to American Literature emerged during the age of fully professionalized American literary study, when our predecessors fought and eventually won the battle to include Irving and Melville and Dickinson among the canon of Anglophone writers worthy of continued assessment and appreciation. We all owe at least a small debt to those totalizing frameworks – myth and symbolism, romance, escapist flight, even the idea of a homegrown renaissance – spun from a far thinner thread of writers than this Companion takes into account. The scholarly pioneers listed above were born between 1902 and 1917, so each one of them experienced that unspeakable calamity, World War I, directly; even so, their grand theories of American literature, even those written or published during World War II, seem strangely untouched by either war’s reach. Perhaps following the pattern, this period in American literature is often understood according the escapist rubric that neatly divides the century into the “modern” and “postmodern” halves.
This is not to say that modernism and postmodernism, when considered as period markers or as aesthetic tendencies, steer us far from the brute facts of world war and the pernicious aftereffects of global conflict. The ‐ism that we attach to “modern” and “postmodern” assumes in both cases cataclysmic transformation. But if earlier generations of Americanists broached geopolitical conflict obliquely, they tended to shy away from class conflict more scrupulously – even though these scholars held profoundly political, and sometimes radical, views. Too often lost to literary historical oblivion are those critics who wore their politics on their sleeves. (Just think of all those critics who are described as an “American Raymond Williams”; the comparison sheds a bright light on what’s not there.) And by now, most readers will have noted that my examples – with the loud exception of Dickinson – are exclusively white and male. (Only recently has it mattered that not all of them were heterosexual.) There will be more to consider when we open up the discussion to include a wider variety of personal and professional backgrounds; but for now, it is worth mentioning how much the “age of criticism” occludes from view.
The major problem with exceptionalist models of American literary scholarship – and all of us who call ourselves American literary scholars are guilty of this to some degree – is their tendency to strip out examples that fail to conform to a particular theory’s requirements. Theories of American literature map out the contours of the culture, and like all good maps – excepting perhaps Borges’s “Map of the Empire that was the size of the empire” – much is left hidden from cartographic view. The last three decades of American literary scholarship sought with a vengeance to make up for lost ground, to fill in gaps identified some time ago by feminist and race/ethnic studies scholars and later by scholars of gender and sexuality and more recently by scholars who hope to reveal patterns observable only with the aid of computers. When Toni Morrison reminded us that in fact a concern with racial difference makes American literature American, she redrew the familiar map to make it more faithful to the facts on the ground. With Morrison’s insights firmly in place and extended to other modes of social experience and identity, the contributors to this volume have produced a literary historical map not quite Borgesian, but far more intricate than anyone would have conceived a century or even 50 years ago. We do so with much humility, certain only that in 50 or 100 years from now, our intellectual heirs will correct our inaccuracies and oversights.
Lost amid the grander categories “modernism” and “postmodernism” are themes unique to the American experience, or at least heightened by the American experience, that capture modernist and postmodernist innovation, angst, and rootedness in a particular zeitgeist. We might ponder these themes diachronically, in terms of the evolution of ideas and technologies and societies across time. We might ponder them spatially, in terms of movement through space or oppositional relationships experienced geographically. We might ponder them politically, in terms of the exercise of power to achieve particular advantages for individuals or for clearly defined groups. Put another way: It’s worth reflecting on how uniquely American themes emerge in time, in space, and in broad political terms.
As a manifestation across time, twentieth‐century American social identity and its cultural offshoots no longer emerge from the untrammeled frontier; if anything, quite the opposite is true: We are a nation of neighborhoods and towns and cities. After all, Frederick Jackson Turner could only ponder the significance of the frontier after it was officially deemed closed. The twentieth century witnessed the consolidation of American identity as a distinctly urban phenomenon; indeed, the meteoric rise of New York City and Chicago as world metropolises during the nineteenth century – distinct from the towns and cities of previous eras – defines how we understand social life in the twentieth‐century United States. Within these modern metropolises we encounter the things and places that register as motifs in literature aspiring to be modern (that is, “modern” in the merely descriptive sense of “recent”): subway trains and fast‐paced cars, steel‐frame high‐rise architecture, and street lamps. In the latter half of the twentieth century, these things and places have their suburban counterparts: station wagons, gated culs‐de‐sac, tract homes with attached garages, and private security forces. The evolving physical layouts of the paradigmatic twentieth‐century landscape has counterparts as well in distinctly American social types and the experiences that they embody. The ghetto‐dwelling immigrant – a kind of upwardly mobile version of the ubiquitous Victorian street urchin – casts a shadow over the early twentieth‐century metropolis; his late‐twentieth‐century foil takes varied shapes, including the streetwise African American and the beatnik poser. The striving New Woman evolves into the sexually liberated professional of the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Sex in the City eras. Even the voices behind the language of creative works take different shapes to suit the eras’ divergent needs. The all‐seeing Modernist Poet (with capital letters firmly in place) evolves into the confessional poet who gives us provisional glimpses into partially knowable and always contingent, small “t” truths. Similarly, the all‐knowing, often coldly clinical narrator of the naturalist novel gives way to the hyper‐subjective and teasingly ironic fabulist of the late twentieth century.
Just as movement across time requires a spatial awareness, movement through space occurs against the backdrop of historical time. If we reflect on how uniquely American themes emerge in space, then the early twentieth century amplifies the previous era’s fascination with transcontinental speed and interconnectivity and increasingly shows us Americans abroad as a humdrum matter of course. One of the paradoxes of American modernism is that as the nation’s population pushed further and further westward, and as cities from coast to coast began to dominate social life, the culture was increasingly perceived as transcontinental and monolithic. The mass culture that made the transmission of cultural forms virtually instantaneous, via newsprint and radio and film and eventually television and the Internet, shrank the distance between Gotham and Gopher Prairie, between the City That Never Sleeps and the City of the Big Shoulders. The so‐called culture industry introduced the idea of a transregional, truly national “civilization,” one often predicated on youth and energy – and against which modernist and postmodernist experimentation often rebels. Even if we can’t assume that today’s students will immediately grasp, say, John Ashbery’s references to Andrew Marvell, we can be more confident that they’ll quickly unlock the subject of his “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.” Against the backdrop of uniformity imposed by the culture industry, our greatest writers insist on an irreducible difference between a bus ride from inner‐city Los Angeles to the suburban coast on the one hand, and a commuter train ride from Manhattan to Westchester County on the other. The age of theory gives us numerous valuable frameworks for appreciating pedestrian or bird’s‐eye experiences. As several essays in this volume reveal, spatial embeddedness divulges not only instances of local awareness and nationalist confidence, but also moments of imperialist design and overreach.
If we reflect on how uniquely American themes emerge in the exercise of power, then we necessarily look to some of the traditional configurations of American exceptionalism, but we must also look beyond them. The idea that the Puritan founders laid the groundwork for subsequent generations of American identity and culture remains a powerful figure in our self‐understanding, but the notion is challenged and partially displaced by ongoing reappraisals of aboriginal cultural formations and the recognition, often buoyed by archaeological and archival research, that what is now the United States has always been a plural, polyglot society. (It is entirely possible that the first native‐printed texts to circulate in what is now the United States were produced in Mexico City, which housed a printing press a century before the first press was established in New England.) The popular idea that American identity was forged in the crucible of an untrammeled frontier similarly requires some consideration of the Native American population whose collective experience found little room for notions of frontiers or squatters’ rights. What’s more, the east to west pioneer paradigm now rubs uncomfortably against the west to east movement of Asian American societies and against the transborder, or transfronterizo, sensibilities of the Spanish/Mexican/Chicana/o inhabitants of what became the US Southwest. The space between these competing figures – Puritan founders and frontier settlements versus Native peoples and la frontera – has been the site of consistent, critical reconsideration of American cultural history. Leo Marx’s powerful “machine in the garden” metaphor anticipates the tension; indeed, the metaphor itself exists in a tense relationship with a more recent, post‐androcentric reconciling of pastoral and progressive ideals. The founders of American literary study sought earnestly and ultimately with great success to bring marginal figures into the mainstream of Anglophone literary scholarship. As their insights gained a central place in intellectual history, the boundary between center and margin has been the site of heated and ongoing negotiation. This volume doesn’t quite represent the vanguard of the discussion, but contemporary efforts to reimagine the field strongly influence this collective effort.
By now, it should be abundantly clear that my three prisms for viewing American cultural history are arbitrary and somewhat artificial constructs. The view supplied by one inevitably bleeds into that supplied by another, so much so that the overlapping images defy easy categorization. The feminist movement has for over a century understood that we must consider time, space, and politics simultaneously; indeed, the movement has by now so thoroughly infused the study of American cultural history that we tend to take for granted its colossal influence. In this volume, for example, feminism leaves its imprint in previously unlikely places, including Hazel Hutchison’s and Philip Beidler’s respective surveys of World War I and World War II literature and film, which demonstrate how deeply questions of gender identity inform the social, political, and cultural consequences of global military upheaval. (It is no surprise that feminism informs Mark Heberle’s discussion of Vietnam War literature and film.) Karla Armbruster’s sweeping discussion of American nature writing leans heavily on writers such as Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson, whose post‐androcentric visions of our existence within a wider network of organic life and ecological space extend Simone de Beauvoir’s fundamental maxim – that “One is not born, but rather becomes a woman” (Beauvoir 1974: 267) – to include all manner of existence: One is not born, but rather becomes a human, a Galápagos finch, a rain‐shadow desert, and so on. In my own study of how the Lost Generation responded to the economic uncertainties of the post‐World War I era, Gertrude Stein’s patronizing defense of patriarchal systems (the throne, the family unit) looms large. At this same historical moment, modernist American theater, as both DeAnna Toten Beard and Brenda Murphy explain, took inspiration from the social reform message, including the struggle for equal rights, as it defined new conventions for the stage. And David Sterritt acknowledges how homosocial retreats figure into the artistic clichés that underwrite Beat Generation studies.
The last five decades of feminist scholarship teach us just how precarious movement in time and space and power can be. The theories of exceptionalism that birthed American literary study, as Nina Baym long ago pointed out, systematically excluded women as they yielded up foundational myths. Indeed, we might extend Baym’s powerful trope – melodramas of beset manhood – to explain how the belated canonization of Harlem Renaissance writers (explored here by Maureen Honey) tended to hide from view the women writers, especially the prolific women poets, who made the renaissance possible to begin with. A retrospective dismissal of the Harlem Renaissance as a narcissistic failure took shape during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s (explored by Amy Ongiri), a trend that cannot be untangled from the latter movement’s fraught gender dynamics. (Michael Hill’s survey of African American fiction during the post‐World War II era illustrates how women writers quickly overcame Black Arts Movement setbacks.) We might also consider the intra‐ and interethnic struggles that led to the emergence of an Asian American literature (explored by Una Chung). The very public rift between playwright Frank Chin and novelist Maxine Hong Kingston played out along gender lines that both reinforced and subverted gender stereotypes. It should be no surprise that these and other marginalized communities would trace familiar gender patterns as they negotiated social and cultural belonging. From its very beginnings in colonial contact, the centers of American identity consolidated power by feminizing and exploiting cultural others, starting with the so‐called Vanishing American, then extending to the victims of America’s peculiar institution, and radiating outward from there to encompass a multiplicity of social difference.
If any single method characterizes the scholarly work in this volume, it would have to be broadly historicist, although not all chapters located here subscribe to historicism. Still, all of the contributors have a keen sense of how individual writers fit into the arc of literary history, and many see cultural production as acutely influenced by sociohistorical concerns and contexts. The manner in which the Companion addresses periodization – the entry point for this volume is 1914 – reveals the editors’ wish to account for the historical contexts that shape literary production and reception. There is something quite traditional about the historical approach to literary study – after all, the earliest scholars of American literature took up the cause – but this particular volume reflects an important tendency of the Companion: the self‐conscious effort to posit an inclusive, historically representative, and sociologically accurate literary canon. And so within the contours of traditional literary periods – 1914–1945, postwar, the contemporary – we find here a variety of approaches defined not by the old historicism (whatever that may be), nor, strictly speaking, by the New Historicism. Rather, the essays in this volume begin with the New Historicism’s skepticism about exceptionalist models of American culture and add to this an appreciation for patterns in social history along with an enduring commitment to honesty and transparency. We are not the first revisionists on the scene, and so we don’t mind admitting on occasion that an idea needs no revision, that our predecessors sometimes got it right from the beginning. And as with all volumes in this Companion, the contributors to Volume III are intrigued by the evolving influence of print culture, mass media, and technologies of reading on literary expression and reception.
A commitment to honesty and transparency shows itself most obviously in this volume’s concern with social identity categories, including in some cases a concern with the sociohistorical conditions that give rise to social difference registered in thought and language. Many of these discussions were made possible by feminist and gender studies scholars, by scholars of race and ethnicity, and by scholars who unpack tactical and accidental institutional coercions. Several scholars in this volume even question the worth of identity categories imposed by institutions and less organized but still powerful external agents. And so, for example, Una Chung’s and Tom Gannon’s suspicion about what constitutes, respectively, Asian American and Native American literature pushes our thinking toward a healthy, critical position vis‐à‐vis the larger project embodied here. They ask indirectly, “If ‘American’ identity is an ever‐moving target throughout its relatively brief, five‐century history, and if we can (as we must) envision an era in which ‘Americans’ no longer exist, then what are our obligations as scholars of American literature?” We won’t presume to answer the question definitively, but we do not hesitate to ask it.
If historical accuracy increasingly takes on the mantle of sociological representativeness, then it stands to reason that future versions of historical revision will track the shifting status of social identity groups. Twenty years ago, the present‐day centrality of transgender identity in American political discourse would have been unthinkable; now, we take for granted that viewing cultural history through the lens of gender fluidity provides useful insights. Fifty years ago, it made little sense to speak of gay or lesbian identity outside the realm of psychoanalysis or criminal justice, and often this discussion took on a grimly negative undertone; now, we have learned to understand cultural efforts as a routine expression of sexuality. Sixty years ago, it was impossible to understand Chicano literature because the era’s sociohistorical conditions had yet to produce a coherent Chicano social identity. These days, the multinational “Latinx” label captures the fluidity of ethnic identity floating in a sea of differential possibilities.
I could go on with still more examples, but my larger point is fairly simple: Cultural analysis attentive to social difference necessarily glances backwards. Attempts to define future iterations of the American social landscape would be speculative at best; they are more likely to be comical or still worse offensive to our future selves. As I have described elsewhere, the shifting social identity categories tracked by the US Census over 23 decades (from 1790 to 2010) reflect constantly evolving political conflicts and social hierarchies. To presume that the social identity labels often organizing this volume (such as “Asian American,” “Jewish American,” and “Gay and Lesbian”) will remain widely accepted in our society a century from now would be dodgy guesswork.
We can say with greater certainty that three related trends partly reflected in this volume will continue to influence how we read and understand literature. First, the neuroscientific tools for understanding how our minds process language and literature and other symbolic structures grow more descriptive and thus more accurate with each passing year. Although universal literacy, even in an advanced industrial society such as the United States, is a relatively new phenomenon, we understand well that the human brain processes symbols differently across diverse media. Only a century has passed since most Americans could read and write – a trivial blip in the vast history of human evolution – and yet we can easily imagine and we can begin to see (as Naomi Baron illustrates) how minds have been reshaped by the digital age. Surely new schools of literary study will emerge from the increasing contact between neuroscience and hermeneutics.
Second, the exponentially expanding troves of digital texts, combined with inevitable breakthroughs in machine learning, will expose us to new ways of processing literary meaning. The theoretical breakthroughs that yielded unprecedented insights in the twentieth century will have twenty‐first‐century counterparts unlocked by data analytics. Just as I am unable and unwilling to speculate about how we will conceive of identity difference in the distant future, I am unable to predict how machine learning will open up new avenues into the study of our culture, even in the next decade. But we can once again look to the theoretical breakthroughs of the recent past (the New Historicism, feminism, poststructuralism, etc.) to appreciate the scope of change that is on its way. If the mid‐twentieth century could be identified as an age of criticism, and the late twentieth century as an age of theory, then the twenty‐first century is shaping up, for better and for worse, to be an age of data. The so‐called digital humanities is already a shopworn term not because the practice is out of date, but rather because the practice is so ubiquitous. The humanities are now fully and irreversibly digital.
Third, the passage of time will unlock texts discussed in this volume in a manner only relevant to twentieth‐century studies. That is, scholars who work on texts published in 1924 and after will increasingly have a valuable tool at their disposal: the ability to reproduce texts without worrying about distribution rights or royalty arrangements. That’s because the copyright regime that protects texts published post‐1924 is finally introducing new titles into the public domain. The so‐called Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (1998) reads in part, “Any copyright still in its renewal term at the time that the […] Act becomes effective shall have a copyright term of 95 years from the date copyright was originally secured.” Popularly known as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” because Disney lobbyists were behind the change, the Bono Act lengthened from 75 years to 95 years the copyright protection of intellectual property. (Mickey Mouse is a trademark, so the mouse, but not individual titles bearing his image, will be protected for as long as Disney puts his image to commercial use.) Without the Bono Act changes, by now several key titles in twentieth‐century American literary history would have fallen into the public domain, including Edna Ferber’s So Big (1924) in 1999, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) in 2000, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) in 2001, and so on.
Because US copyright law remains unchanged at the time of this writing, these titles have begun to enter into the public domain, starting with Edna Ferber’s So Big in 2019. By 2029, these additional titles (along with The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises) will enter the public domain: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) in 2022, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) in 2023, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) in 2024, Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) in 2025, Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) in 2026, John Dos Passos’s 1919 (1932) in 2027, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) in 2028, and Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934) in 2029. Obviously, I’m only pointing out the better known of thousands of titles scheduled to fall out of copyright protection. The consequences – for publishing, for pedagogy, for digital scholarship – will be enormous.
For now, this Companion is a copyright protected title, and unless Congress decides otherwise it will remain so until the twenty‐second century. In the meantime, we hope that students and scholars of American literature will find something of value within its pages.
Reference