Andrew Delbanco - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Andrew Delbanco

American literature:
a vanishing subject?

Some ½fty years after the political es-

tablishment of the United States, the
concept of an American literature bare-
ly existed–an absence acknowledged
with satisfaction in Sydney Smith’s fa-
mous question posed in 1820 in the Edin-
burgh Review: “Who in the four corners
of the globe reads an American book?”
The implied answer was no one. Anoth-
er twenty years would pass before this
question was seriously reopened, along
with the more fundamental question
that lay behind it: whether a provincial
democracy that had inherited its lan-
guage and institutions from the moth-
erland did or should have a literature
of its own. Visiting in 1831, Tocqueville
could still remark on “the small num-

Andrew Delbanco, Julian Clarence Levi Profes-
sor in the Humanities at Columbia University,
has been a Fellow of the American Academy
since 2001. He has written extensively on Amer-
ican history and culture, including books such as
“The Puritan Ordeal” (1989), “The Death of
Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense
of Evil” (1995), and “Required Reading: Why
Our American Classics Matter Now” (1997).
His latest publication is “Melville: His World
and Work” (2005).

ber of men in the United States who
are engaged in the composition of lit-
erary works,” and he added justi½ably
that most of these are “English in sub-
stance and still more so in form.”1

Yet in every settled region of the new

nation voices were raised to make the
case that a distinctive national literature
was desirable and, indeed, essential to
the prospects of American civilization.
Literary production and learning were
conceived as an antidote to, or at least a
moderating influence on, the utilitarian
values of a young society where, as Jef-
ferson put the matter in 1825, “the ½rst
object . . . is bread and covering.” By 1837,
the most notable of the many calls for
literary nationalism, Emerson’s Phi Be-
ta Kappa oration at Harvard, with its fa-
mous charge that “we have listened too
long to the courtly muses of Europe,”
was already a stock statement. By 1850,
when Herman Melville weighed in
against “literary flunkeyism toward
England,” the complaint was a hack-
neyed one.

During this ½rst phase of national
self-consciousness, there arose a corol-
lary critique of those few New World
writers, such as Washington Irving,

1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America,
vol. 2 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 55–56.

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American
literature:
a vanishing
subject?

who had achieved international recog-
nition by copying Old World models–
writers who, according to belligerent
democrats like Walt Whitman, imitated
authors who “had their birth in courts”
and “smelled of princes’ favors.” These
outbursts of nascent cultural pride tend-
ed to take the form of shouts and slurs
(Whitman spoke sneeringly of “the co-
pious dribble” of poets he deemed less
genuinely American than himself ) rath-
er than reasoned debate. They were anal-
ogous to, and sometimes part of, the
nasty quarrels between Democrats and
Whigs in which the former accused the
latter of being British-loving sycophants,
and the latter accused the former of be-
ing demagogues and cheats.

Literary versions of these political dis-
putes played themselves out in the pages
of such journals as Putnam’s Monthly
Magazine and The Literary World (New
York), The Dial and The North American
Review (Boston), The United States Mag-
azine and Democratic Review (½rst Wash-
ington, then New York), and The South-
ern Literary Messenger (Richmond)–mag-
azines that sometimes attained high lit-
erary quality (in 1855, Thackeray called
Putnam’s “much the best Mag. in the
world”). Most contributors to these
magazines had nothing to do with aca-
demic life, such as it was in the antebel-
lum United States. The literary cadres
to which they belonged developed ½rst
in Boston; slightly later in New York;
and, more modestly, in Philadelphia,
Baltimore, Richmond, and Charleston.
Only a very few writers or critics, such
as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whom
Harvard appointed to a professorship in
1834, maintained more than a tangential
connection to any college. There were as
yet no universities.2

2 Several mid-twentieth-century literary histo-
rians, notably William Charvat in The Profession

Then, as now, the chief business of
literary journalism was the construc-
tion and destruction of individual rep-
utations, though at stake throughout
the nineteenth century were also more
general claims about how and what
American writers should be writing.
The essays of William Dean Howells,
for instance, published as columns in
The Atlantic and Harper’s and later select-
ed for his volume Criticism and Fiction
(1892), amounted to a brief for what
Howells called “realism,” as exempli-
½ed by his own ½ction. Frank Norris
(The Responsibilities of the Novelist [1903])
and Hamlin Garland (Crumbling Idols
[1894]) proclaimed as universal the prin-
ciples of whatever ‘school’–“veritism”
for Garland and “naturalism” for Nor-
ris–they were committed to at the time.
Perhaps the only disinterested critic
still worth reading from this period is
John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), whose
work belongs to the genre of the moral
essay in the tradition of Hazlitt and Ar-
nold.

But even such minor novelists as the
Norwegian-born H. H. Boyesen (1848–
1895) contributed occasional criticism
that helped to enlarge the literary hori-
zon. In Boyesen’s slight book of 1893,
Literary and Social Silhouettes, for example,

of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (a collec-
tion of essays written between 1937 and 1962),
Perry Miller in The Raven and the Whale (1956),
and Benjamin T. Spencer in The Quest for Na-
tionality (1957), have sketched the emergence
of the literary profession in these years as part
of the larger construction of American nation-
alism in the age of territorial expansion. More
recent scholars, such as James D. Wallace in
Early Cooper and his Audience (1985) and Mer-
edith McGill in American Literature and the
Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003), have
deepened our understanding of the econom-
ic dif½culties that writers without patronage,
and without much protection by copyright
law, had to overcome.

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Andrew
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he approved such now-forgotten writers
as Edgar Fawcett and H. C. Bunner for
portraying “the physiognomy of New
York–the Bowery, Great Jones Street,
and all the labyrinthine tangle of mal-
odorous streets and lanes, inhabited by
the tribes of Israel, the swarthy Italian,
the wily Chinaman, and all the other
alien hordes from all the corners of the
earth.” Novelist-critics like Boyesen and
James Gibbons Huneker (1860–1921),
an advocate of impressionism in paint-
ing and music, were among many who
tried, with a mixture of anxiety and ap-
proval, to come to terms with the im-
pact of modernity on American life.
Their critical writing, like their ½ction,
was more descriptive than prescriptive,
more inquiring than inquisitorial–and
therefore incipiently modern.

In short, forward-looking proponents
of American literary ideals tended to be
outside the academy. This has been so
from the era dominated by the Duyck-
inck brothers, whose Cyclopedia of Amer-
ican Literature (1855) helped establish a
canon of major writers, through E. C.
Stedman’s Poets of America (1885), W. C.
Brownell’s American Prose Masters (pub-
lished in 1909 by Scribners, for whom
Brownell served for forty years as liter-
ary advisor), and Alfred Kazin’s On Na-
tive Grounds (1942), a revelatory book by
a young freelance book reviewer who,
like his contemporary Irving Howe,
did not take a permanent academic job
until late in his career. The author who
emerged in the twentieth century as the
central ½gure of nineteenth-century
American literature, Herman Melville,
was championed mainly by critics work-
ing outside the academy, such as Lewis
Mumford, Charles Olson, and, in Brit-
ain, D. H. Lawrence. And a good num-
ber of major twentieth-century critics–
notably Edmund Wilson, whose Patrio-
tic Gore (1962) did much to revise our un-

derstanding of Civil War literature–ex-
pressed frank hostility toward academics
as hopelessly straitened and petty.

Probably the most signi½cant body
of American critical writing to date is
that of a novelist, Henry James, in the
prefaces to the New York edition (1907
–1909) of his ½ction as well as in his
considerable body of literary journal-
ism. “The Art of Fiction” (1888)–
James’s riposte to the English critic
Walter Besant’s prescriptive essay about
the Do’s and Don’ts of ½ction-writing–
still has tonic power for young writers
who feel hampered by prevailing norms
and taste. And James’s 1879 study of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, the ½rst signi½-
cant critical biography of an American
writer, brings into view in a few pages
the whole moral history of nineteenth-
century American culture. In that re-
markable book, we see how theological
ideas were being displaced and how the
artist-observer could take pleasure in
witnessing their displacement:

It was a necessary condition for a man
of Hawthorne’s stock that if his imagina-
tion should take licence to amuse itself,
it should at least select this grim precinct
of the Puritan morality for its play ground
. . . . The old Puritan moral sense, the con-
sciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful
nature of our responsibilities and the sav-
age character of our Taskmaster–these
things had been lodged in the mind of a
man of Fancy, whose fancy had straight-
way begun to take liberties and play tricks
with them–to judge them (Heaven for-
give him!) from the poetic and aesthetic
point of view, the point of view of enter-
tainment and irony. This absence of con-
viction makes the difference; but the dif-
ference is great.

The American-born T. S. Eliot once
expressed the view that “the only crit-
ics worth reading were the critics who

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American
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a vanishing
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practiced, and practiced well, the art of
which they wrote”–a statement that has
been almost universally true in America.

At the turn of the twentieth century,

however, American writing was begin-
ning to become a ‘½eld’ in the academ-
ic institutions that earlier practitioners
had, by and large, avoided. As early as
the 1880s, Dartmouth, Wellesley, and
Brown were offering, at least sporadi-
cally, courses on American authors,
though the subject remained dispen-
sable enough that nyu, which ran an
American literature course from 1885
to 1888, allowed it to fall into abeyance
until 1914.3 The scholar who ½rst in-
stalled the subject in one of the new
research universities was Moses Coit
Tyler, the child of Connecticut Congre-
gationalists. While a professor at the
University of Michigan, he wrote the
½rst serious history of colonial Ameri-
can writing, A History of American Liter-
ature, 1607–1765 (1878), based on close
study of virtually all published primary
texts. In 1881, Tyler moved to Cornell,
where he assumed the ½rst university
chair devoted wholly to American lit-
erature and produced his Literary His-
tory of the American Revolution (1897).
It is worth noting that Tyler began
teaching at a midwestern state univer-
sity and concluded his career at the
quasi-public Cornell, founded in 1865
with a combination of private benefac-
tions and public subsidies. Older, more
tradition-bound private institutions
such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,
all of which originated in the colonial
period as seminaries allied with one or
another Protestant denomination, em-

braced American writing as a plausible
½eld of study more slowly. Once its le-
gitimacy had been established, though,
professors of American literature settled
into defending the virtues of the (main-
ly New England) ancients against what
Boyesen had called the “alien hordes.”
In his Literary History of America (1900),
Barrett Wendell, of Harvard, devoted
virtually all of its ½rst 450 pages to New
England writers, followed by a closing
chapter entitled “The Rest of the Sto-
ry.” In a preface to his new anthology
of American literature (1901), Brander
Matthews, Columbia’s specialist in dra-
matic literature, followed Johann Gott-
fried Herder and Hipployte Taine in
insisting that a national literature must
be understood as the expression of the
“race-characteristics” of the people who
produce it. Writing nearly ten years after
the death of Walt Whitman, Matthews
con½dently declared that the United
States had “not yet produced any poet
even of the second rank.”4

With the consent of such ½gures as
Wendell at Harvard and Matthews at
Columbia, the subject of American lit-
erature became an instrument by which
the sons of the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ could
get better acquainted with their heritage
and, presumably, protect it from the in-
terloping hordes who were threatening
to debase it. Here was the literary equiv-
alent of the ‘Teutonic germ theory’ of
American history: the idea that demo-
cratic ideas and institutions had germi-
nated in the German forests, from which
restless tribes carried them to England,
where they sprouted again (against the
resistance of the Celtic ancestors of the
modern Irish) and from which Puritan
emigrants eventually transplanted them

3 Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the
Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a
Profession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 1986), 110.

4 Brander Matthews, “Suggestions for Teach-
ers of American Literature,” Educational Review
21 (January–May 1901): 12.

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Andrew
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to the New World.5 Seen as a branch of
this kind of race thinking, the academic
study of American literature arose, at
least in part, as a defensive maneuver
by Anglophile gentlemen who felt their
country slipping out of their control in-
to the hands of inferiors.

As a more miscellaneous blend of

students began passing through the uni-
versities, these gentlemen hoped that
the study of American literature could
be a means of sweetening and enlighten-
ing them before they presented them-
selves for positions of power no longer
reserved exclusively for the Brahmins.
Some professors went further, claiming
for themselves the moral authority once
reserved for the clergy. Consider Irving
Babbitt, who specialized at Harvard not
in American but in French literature,
and who became a public commentator
on issues of the day by waging war in
general-circulation magazines against
what he considered the American ten-
dency toward vulgarity and self-indul-
gence. Here, in a 1928 essay on H. L.
Mencken, with a nod to Sinclair Lewis,
Babbitt writes his own version of how
Americans had fallen away from the
moral realism of their forebears. James
had told the tale as the story of Haw-
thorne liberating himself from the sup-
pressive weight of his ancestors, but
Babbitt tells it as a moral descent from
self-knowledge into self-deception, as
exempli½ed by Mencken:

If the Protestant Church is at present
threatened with bankruptcy, it is not
because it has produced an occasional
Elmer Gantry. The true reproach it has
incurred is that, in its drift toward mod-
ernism, it has lost its grip not merely on

certain dogmas but, simultaneously, on
the facts of human nature. It has failed
above all to carry over in some modern
and critical form the truth of a dogma
that unfortunately received much sup-
port from these facts–the dogma of
original sin. At ½rst sight Mr. Mencken
would appear to have a conviction of
evil . . . [but] the appearance . . . is decep-
tive. The Christian is conscious above all
of the “old Adam” in himself: hence his
humility. The effect of Mr. Mencken’s
writing, on the other hand, is to produce
pride rather than humility . . . [as he] con-
ceived of himself as a sort of morose and
sardonic divinity surveying from some
superior altitude an immeasurable ex-
panse of “boobs.”

Yet even as it served social ends, the
study of American literature remained
a secondary or even tertiary (after clas-
sics and English) part of the program
for making boys into gentlemen. To
read through the ½rst scholarly history,
The Cambridge History of American Liter-
ature (1917)–a book more encyclopedic
than discriminating–is to be reminded,
as Richard Poirier has remarked, that
into the third decade of the twentieth
century, American literature “was still
up for grabs.”6 As classics departments
continued to shrink and English depart-
ments to grow, even books by the New
England worthies were still treated with
condescension. As late as the 1950s, Har-
vard graduate students in English could
propose American literature as a doctor-
al examination ½eld only as a substitute
for medieval literature, which was com-
ing to seem arcane and archaic, even to
traditionalists.

With the continued decline of philolo-
gy and of Latin and Greek as college pre-

5 See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The
“Objectivity Question” and the American Histori-
cal Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1988), 87–88.

6 Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature:
Emersonian Reflections (New York: Random
House, 1987), 19.

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American
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requisites in the 1930s and 1940s, the
study of American literature ½nally at-
tained a certain academic respectabili-
ty. Yet the Harvard English department,
which preserves in its name, “Depart-
ment of English and American Litera-
ture and Language,” a trace of its origins
in philological studies, did not add the
phrase ‘and American’ until the 1970s.
My own department at Columbia, the
“Department of English and Compar-
ative Literature,” to this day does not
include in its of½cial name the term
‘American’–and, as far as I know, has
no plans to add it.

Today, though some professors of

American literature still feel outnum-
bered and even beleaguered, the ½eld
is populous. Since the founding of the
American Literature Section of the
Modern Language Association in 1921,
the professional status of American lit-
erature has been secure, and members
of the guild now designate themselves
by the term ‘Americanist’–a word that,
like ‘orthopedist’ or ‘taxidermist,’ im-
plies an arduously acquired training for
a useful trade.

It is an unfortunate word for various
reasons, not least because it obscures
the fact that for many years after their
subject achieved academic acceptance,
Americanists were among the least pro-
fessionalized of professors. Especially
at a time when English departments still
devoted themselves mostly to philologi-
cal research and to the recovery of reli-
able texts, the ½eld of American litera-
ry studies was something of a mis½t. It
attracted students with current political
and cultural problems much on their
minds and scholars who seemed unable
to rid themselves of what detractors re-
garded as chronic presentism. For exam-
ple, the immensely influential Main Cur-
rents of American Thought (1927–1930), by

V. L. Parrington, an English professor
at the University of Washington, was
an effort, as tendentious as it was ambi-
tious, to trace the genealogy of demo-
cratic populism all the way back to dissi-
dent Puritans. Perry Miller’s great revi-
sionary works on the Puritan mind, con-
ceived in the 1930s partly in response to
Parrington, ran parallel to the writings
of such neo-Calvinist theologians as
Reinhold Niebuhr, who retrieved from
deep in the past an account of human
psychology that might still serve as a
competent description of contemporary
reality as the horror of fascism engulfed
Europe.

As American literary studies gained
in prestige, it became apparent that its
leading scholars did not trust, and were
not to be trusted with, the ways and
means of the English department. Many
of the vanguard ½gures were openly and
overtly concerned with the world out-
side the college gates. Some forged at
least a tacit partnership with such histo-
rians as the senior Arthur M. Schlesing-
er, who, as early as 1922, had insisted in
New Viewpoints in American History that
no serious history could be written with-
out attention to the experience of wom-
en and that “contrary to a widespread
belief, even the people of the thirteen
English colonies were a mixture of eth-
nic breeds.”7

Yet the originating ½gures of Ameri-
can literary studies have been described
in recent years as narrow-minded men
(until the 1970s and 1980s, they were
almost all men) with retrograde minds
occluded by the sexual and racial preju-
dices of their time. This is, at best, a cari-
cature and, at worst, a slander. F. O. Mat-
thiessen’s ½rst published book was a

7 Arthur M. Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in
American History (New York: Macmillan, 1922),
3, 126–127.

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Andrew
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study of the ½ction of Sarah Orne Jewett
(1929). In The New England Mind (1939–
1952), Miller showed, long before the
‘New Historicists,’ how close scrutiny
of what most of his colleagues consid-
ered subliterary forms could reveal an
alien culture. Constance Rourke, who
never held an academic post but exerted
formidable influence on academic liter-
ary studies, anticipated in her American
Humor (1931) the ‘anthropological turn’
of forty years later by breaking down the
distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cul-
ture and reveling in the mix.

American literary studies in these
formative years was emphatically un-
or even anti-academic. There was a nat-
ural af½nity between professors interest-
ed in the history of their own literature
–a short history, after all–and under-
graduate writers who hoped to make a
place for themselves in the literary his-
tories of the future. Richard Wilbur,
who was a Junior Fellow at Harvard in
the 1940s, recalls that F. O. Matthiessen
was always alert to “any stirrings of the
creative spirit” in his students (he taught
undergraduates almost exclusively) and
made himself available to read manu-
scripts by the hopeful young poets and
playwrights who passed through his
courses.8 Lionel Trilling, though he nev-
er carried a portfolio as an Americanist,
wrote extensively about American writ-
ers past and present–Fitzgerald, Twain,
Dreiser, Hemingway, and Frost, among
others–and took a special interest in his
gifted and eccentric Columbia College
student Allen Ginsberg. When Trilling’s
colleague Mark Van Doren wrote his ex-
uberant critical biography of Hawthorne
in 1948, it was as if he had just heard the

8 Richard Wilbur in F. O. Matthiessen (1902–
1950): A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezy
and Leo Huberman (New York: Henry
Schuman, 1950), 145.

young Hawthorne reading in a college
common room and had rushed away
to report his discovery of a new talent.
Professionalization, of course, was
inevitable. By the 1940s, New Criticism
was the reigning orthodoxy in literary
studies. Among Americanists, it was
deployed to best effect in Matthiessen’s
American Renaissance (1941) and in the
books and essays of Newton Arvin,
who spent his career at Smith College.
The techniques of New Critical analy-
sis revealed that at least a few Ameri-
can works had a density and complex-
ity comparable to the most dif½cult,
and therefore (according to the criteria
of the New Criticism) most rewarding,
modernist poems. Matthiessen made
his case for Melville by setting Ahab’s
speeches in verse and presenting them
as every bit as intricate as the soliloquies
of Hamlet or Lear. He brought to his wri-
ting the kind of formal scrupulosity as-
sociated with F. R. Leavis and William
Empson in England, and along with fel-
low travelers Robert Penn Warren and
Cleanth Brooks (who eventually con-
verged at Yale), he inaugurated a tradi-
tion that continues today in the work
of such adept close readers as Richard
Poirier and William Pritchard.

Although Matthiessen and the best
of his followers were never doctrinaire
(½fty years after its publication, Daniel
Aaron described American Renaissance as
“fully cognizant of the social context”
of its subject), the vogue of explication de
texte threatened to become a formalist
dogma.9 Matthiessen himself was never

9 Daniel Aaron, review of H. Lark Hall, V. L.
Parrington: Through the Avenue of Art in the New
Republic, September 5, 1994. By the early 1960s,
one of Matthiessen’s successors at Harvard,
Howard Mumford Jones, faulted Ralph Waldo
Emerson for writing essays that amounted to
“paragraphs on a string” and thereby failed the
New Critical test of formal coherence. H. M.

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narrowly a ‘New Critic.’ He was a man
of the Left, who after the war was to
write a naïve report, From the Heart of
Europe (1948), about how impressed he
was with life and spirit in the solidifying
Soviet bloc. And in his preface to Amer-
ican Renaissance, he declared that what
linked his ½ve authors (Emerson, Tho-
reau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whit-
man) was their “common devotion to
the possibilities of democracy”–an odd
assertion about Hawthorne, though one
that helps explain the absence of Edgar
Allan Poe from Matthiessen’s book. By
the 1950s, the turn inward away from
politics was in full swing, and testing
an author’s literary signi½cance by any
political standard was coming to seem
eccentric.

One dissenter from the aesthetic turn,

Henry Nash Smith, who was among the
½rst recipients of the Ph.D. from the
Harvard Committee on the History of
American Civilization–and whose dis-
sertation became a remarkable book,
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol
and Myth (1950), a study of the frontier
myth in pulp ½ction, James Fenimore
Cooper’s novels, Wild West shows, and
the writings of Jefferson and Twain–
complained in 1957 that “the effect of
the New Criticism in practice has been
to establish an apparently impassable
chasm between the facts of our existence
in contemporary society and the values
of art.” Smith, who by then held a pro-
fessorship in the Berkeley English de-
partment, lodged his objection not on
behalf of a historicist understanding of

Jones, introduction to a new edition of W. C.
Brownell, American Prose Masters (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), vii.
This sort of opinion mongering in the guise of
objective judgment was not a healthy develop-
ment for the ½eld.

the context in which works of the past
had been produced, but on behalf of
what would soon come to be known
as ‘relevance’ to the present. Here was
the keynote of the American studies
movement, which flourished in the post-
war years as an eclectic alternative to
both English and history at a number
of universities, including Pennsylvania,
George Washington, and Case Western
Reserve, as well as at Yale, Harvard, and
Berkeley.

On many campuses, American stud-
ies seceded, in fact if not always in name,
from the English department. American
studies scholars sometimes clustered
within English as a quasi-independent
subdepartment or broke away into de-
partments or programs of their own.
They were impatient with the parochial-
ism of what they regarded as Anglophile
literary studies, but also, as Smith went
on to suggest, with the empiricism of
traditional historians: “We are no bet-
ter off if we turn to the social sciences
for help in seeing the culture as a whole.
We merely ½nd society without art in-
stead of art without society.”10 At its
best, American studies was a hugely am-
bitious enterprise that aimed to lay bare
the heart of “the culture as a whole” by
exposing myths and metaphors that op-
erate below the level of consciousness
and by which, according to Smith’s de½-
nition of culture, “subjective experience
is organized.” To these ends, it assumed
a wide mandate, taking into its purview
not just literary monuments but monu-
ments of all kinds–there is a direct line
from Lewis Mumford’s Sticks and Stones:
A Study of American Architecture and Civi-
lization (1924) to Alan Trachtenberg’s
Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965).

10 Henry Nash Smith, “Can ‘American Stud-
ies’ Develop a Method?” American Quarterly 9
(Summer 1957): 203.

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Even in its more strictly literary mani-
festations, such as R. W. B. Lewis’s The
American Adam (1955), the American
studies method was to look through
and beyond particular literary texts to
½nd what Lewis called the “recurring
pattern of images–ways of seeing and
sensing experience” by which Ameri-
cans apprehend meaning in their lives.11
Leo Marx, in The Machine in the Garden
(1964), showed how writers such as Tho-
reau and Twain tried to chart a path be-
tween rapacious capitalism and radical
utopianism–a via media that Marx de-
scribed as a uniquely American version
of pastoral. Smith’s Virgin Land and
Lewis’s The American Adam disclosed a
national dream of recovering a prelap-
sarian condition in which the world
could begin anew–a dream painfully
lost when the dreamer awakes.

The patterns that interested Ameri-
can studies scholars tended to be ex-
pressions of progressive hope, and it
is perhaps a measure of their intense
personal investment in the promise
of America that a striking number of
leading ½gures in the ½eld fell into dis-
appointment and even despair. Like
Matthiessen, John William Ward, a lead-
ing member of the ‘myth and symbol’
school (who, during the Vietnam era,
became an outspokenly antiwar presi-
dent of Amherst College and later a pol-
itical activist on behalf of public hous-
ing), died by suicide. Perry Miller has-
tened his own death at age ½fty-eight

11 A cogent critique of the ‘myth and symbol’
school is Bruce Kuklick, “Myth and Symbol
in American Studies,” American Quarterly 24
(4) (October 1972): 435–450. Kuklick doubts
that we can apprehend anything so vague as
‘popular consciousness’ by elucidating the
structure of artifacts, such as books or paint-
ings, or even political events, such as speeches
or elections.

by poisoning himself with alcohol a few
weeks after the assassination of Presi-
dent Kennedy.

The range and imagination of these
scholars were far-reaching, but their in-
tellectual force was centripetal. They
wanted to penetrate through a great va-
riety of texts to some unitary core of
Americanness. (They construed broadly
the word ‘text’ long before the ‘cultur-
al studies’ movement of the 1980s and
1990s discovered the semiotics of fash-
ion, advertising, or sports.) The titles
of their books commonly included what
today’s scholars would dismiss as ‘total-
izing’ or ‘reifying’ phrases, like ‘Ameri-
can character’ (the subtitle of Constance
Rourke’s book on humor was “A Study
of the National Character”) or ‘Ameri-
can mind,’ as in Alan Heimert’s Religion
and the American Mind (1966) or Roderick
Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind
(1968).

Recently, their movement has come

under sharp attack as a collection of
insouciant dreamers–men who elided
ethnic, racial, class, and gender differ-
ences and confused the fantasies of
elites with the experiences of ordinary
people. In a recent retrospective essay,
Leo Marx, now in his eighties, vigorous-
ly defends the American studies move-
ment as having always acknowledged
discontinuities between America’s
claims to egalitarian democracy and
the realities of life in a brutally compet-
itive society, where equality of oppor-
tunity, much less equality of condition,
has never been fully achieved. There was
always, Marx insists, an emphasis on
the ‘un½nishedness’ of American socie-
ty as well as a sense that scholar-teachers
could contribute to the tradition of “dis-
sident social movements, including, for
example, the transcendentalist, feminist,
and abolitionist movements of the ante-
bellum era; the populist movement of

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the 1880s and 1890s; the pre–World War
I progressive movement [of which Par-
rington’s Main Currents was a belated
expression], and . . . the left-labor, anti-
fascist movements (and Cultural front)
of the 1930s . . . . ” By and large, American
studies scholars looked for inspiration
not to the mainstream academy, but to
what Marx calls an “uncategorizable co-
hort” of “deviant professors, indepen-
dent scholars, public intellectuals, and
wide-ranging journalists and poets”–
among them, Constance Rourke, Thor-
stein Veblen, Alexis de Tocqueville, D. H.
Lawrence, and W. E. B. Du Bois.12
Amid the enormous upheaval of the

1960s to which Steven Marcus alludes in
his overview essay in the present issue of
Dædalus, American literary studies, like
virtually every other activity in Ameri-
ca’s universities, was profoundly trans-
formed. A series of traumatic assassina-
tions (John Kennedy, Medger Evers, Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy,
Malcolm X) and the spiraling disaster of
the Vietnam War inevitably darkened
the myths and symbols that drew Amer-
icanists. The individualist frontiersman
of Smith and Lewis became the maraud-
ing Indian-killer of Richard Slotkin in
his Regeneration Through Violence: The
Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–
1860 (1973)–a book that read the Viet-
nam War back into the nineteenth-cen-
tury Indian wars. Henry Nash Smith is-
sued a mea culpa in a late essay (1986) in
which he wrote that when he had com-
posed Virgin Land as a young man, he
had been under the spell of Frederick
Jackson Turner and had already “lost
the capacity for facing up to the tragic
dimensions of the Westward Move-

12 Leo Marx, “Believing in America,” Boston
Review 28 (6) (December 2003–January 2004):
28–31.

ment.”13 By the 1970s, Perry Miller’s
protoexistentialist Puritans, who had
struggled to preserve their Calvinist pi-
ety in the face of Arminian rationalism,
were giving way to Sacvan Bercovitch’s
Puritans in his The Puritan Origins of the
American Self (1975) and The American
Jeremiad (1978)–millenarian crusaders
who proclaimed themselves a chosen
people charged by God to seize the “wil-
derness” from the heathens and erect in
it a New Jerusalem.

A leader of what might be called sec-
ond-wave American studies, Bercovitch
tried to come to terms with the ½rst
wave by dissociating himself from the
“tribal totem feast” at which a new gen-
eration of scholars was feeding on Mil-
ler’s corpus. In 1986, having moved from
Columbia to Harvard, he dedicated to
Miller and Matthiessen an edited col-
lection of essays by a number of youn-
ger scholars whom Frederick Crews,
in an unfriendly essay-review, grouped
under the rubric “New Americanists.”14
But reconciliation was elusive. The New
Americanists accused Matthiessen of
“silencing dissenting political opin-
ions,”15 by which they seemed to mean
that he had been locked into a binary

13 Henry Nash Smith, “Symbol and Idea in
Virgin Land,” in Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra
Jehlen, eds., Ideology and Classic American Liter-
ature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 28.

14 Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing Ameri-
can Literary History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1986). Crews coined the term
in “Whose American Renaissance?” New York
Review of Books, October 27, 1988, and carried
his critique further in “The New Americanists,”
New York Review of Books, September 24, 1992.

15 Donald Pease, “Moby-Dick and the Cold
War,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered,
ed., Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), 119.

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view of the world that pitted American
individualism (of which Whitman’s
poetry and the free consciousness of
Melville’s Ishmael were his prime ex-
amples) against repressive totalitarian-
ism (as exempli½ed in Captain Ahab).
Bercovitch himself made a potent argu-
ment, similar to that of Louis Hartz in
The Liberal Tradition in America (1955),
that America lacked any political alter-
native to a property-oriented, individu-
alist liberalism. His implication was that
Americans were peculiarly impoverished
in the realm of political ideas, and were
condemned, by their inheritance from
the millenarian Protestantism of the Pu-
ritan founders, to live with the illusion
that the American Way is God’s Way.

For the generation of New American-
ists who followed Bercovitch, the failure
of earlier critics such as Matthiessen
(who was often dubbed a ‘cold-war in-
tellectual’ even though he did his major
work before the United States entered
World War II) was in having erased
“potentially disruptive political opin-
ions” from what amounted to a sani-
tized account of American culture. Mat-
thiessen and his ilk had left conflict out
of the story–or so the charge went. As
Crews put it, the New Americanists re-
pudiated their predecessors as “timidly
moralizing” scholars in thrall to a “ge-
nially democratic idea of the American
dream and its gradual ful½llment in his-
tory.”16

The patricidal assault took place on
two fronts: by trying to show how the
major (according to Matthiessen & Co.)
works of American literature obscured
the oppression of racial minorities as
well as America’s history of imperialist
expansion, and by recovering from the
putative prejudice of the Matthiessen
school what Crews called “an ethnic-

16 Crews, “New Americanists,” 32–34.

and gender-based anticanon”–literary
works by racial minorities and women,
who had been ignored and who revealed
in their writing that the American dream
had always been an American night-
mare.

By the late 1990s, the heat of the po-

lemics was subsiding, and the New
Americanists were starting to sound
old. They fought with their predeces-
sors, after all, mainly over texts whose
signi½cance both parties assumed. Af-
ter the sound and fury of the 1980s–
the decade in which the 1960s college
generation came into tenured positions
and Ronald Reagan came into the White
House–a heightened awareness of sexu-
al as well as racial and ethnic difference
now almost universally informed Amer-
ican literary criticism. A number of new
anthologies, notably the Heath Antholo-
gy of American Literature (½rst edition,
1989), edited by Paul Lauter, and well-
researched literary histories, such as
Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations:
Race in the Making of American Literature
(1993), synthesized the work of the pre-
ceding two decades and presented a
new narrative of American literary his-
tory. Previously marginal writers (Mar-
tin Delany, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hur-
ston, Nella Larsen) were now key ½gures
in the story; writers who had long been
central, such as Cooper and Melville,
were revealed as struggling with unre-
solved racial and sexual preoccupations.
In 1983, while the Heath Anthology was
still in progress, Lauter could write that
“only a few syllabi meaningfully inte-
grate the work of Hispanic-American,
Asian-American, or American Indian
writers.”17 His choice of verb was tell-

17 Paul Lauter, ed., Reconstructing American Lit-
erature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues (Old Westbury,
N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1983), xiv.

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ing. Representation is one thing, but
integration is another. The con½nes of
what had once been regarded as Ameri-
can literature had been exploded. There
had once been a more or less of½cial lit-
erature, in which writers from John Pen-
dleton Kennedy (Swallow Barn [1832]) to
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind
[1936]) portrayed black people chiefly as
plantation darkies. And most critics had
passed over such representations of the
serving-class–the sort of people whom
Edith Wharton blithely referred to in
The House of Mirth (1905) as “dull and
ugly people” who must, “in some mys-
terious way, have been sacri½ced to pro-
duce” her delicately bred heroine, Lily
Bart. But now the reviled and exploited
moved to the center of the story–and
their voices were heard strongly in the
classroom for the ½rst time.

“The changes in our profession,”
Lauter wrote, “ . . . are rooted in the
movements for racial justice and sex
equity. Those who worked in the move-
ments came to see that to sustain hope
for a future, people needed to grasp a
meaningful past.” In this sense, the re-
vision of the American literary canon
was what the Yale cultural critic David
Bromwich, playing on Clausewitz’s fa-
mous de½nition of war, has called “pol-
itics by other means.” The good news
was the enlargement of the canon–an
expansion that was, in fact, consistent
with the spirit of openness characteris-
tic of American studies from its begin-
nings. The bad news was the implica-
tion that progressive-minded people–
people committed to diversity and in-
clusiveness–could ½nd nothing ‘mean-
ingful’ in what had once been the main-
stream American tradition.

But even the changes that made read-
ing lists unrecognizable to students who
had attended college just twenty years
earlier did not tell the full story of what

had happened. Leslie Fiedler, a proli½c
critic who participated in both waves of
the American studies movement, issued,
in 1982, what amounted to a farewell to
the whole business of academic literary
study. “Literary criticism,” he wrote,
“flourishes best in societies theoretically
committed to transforming all magic in-
to explained illusion, all nighttime mys-
tery into daylight explication: alchemy
to chemistry, astrology to astronomy.”18
This was a restatement of the call for the
“grass-roots anti-hierarchical criticism”
(Fiedler’s phrase) that Susan Sontag
had made in the famous title essay of her
book Against Interpretation (1967), where
she proclaimed an end to pleasure-dead-
ening literary analysis and called for an
“erotics of art.”19

Fiedler went further. Always a mar-
ginal ½gure with respect to the academ-
ic power centers–his teaching posts
were at Montana State University and
the State University of New York at
Buffalo–he had his ½nger on the pulse
of the larger culture. In the age of televi-
sion and video, he saw that literature
was being permanently demoted, at least
as a category to which only certain aca-
demically certi½ed books were allowed
to belong. (Consider the valedictory title
he gave to his 1982 collection, What Was
Literature?) In Love and Death in the Amer-
ican Novel (1960), Fiedler had long ago
ventured into sexual and racial themes
that previous critics had evaded; for
him, popular culture was where one
heard the heartbeat of America. If one
were to pay attention to novels, it was

18 Leslie Fiedler, What was Literature?: Class
Culture and Mass Society (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1982), 37.

19 Ibid., 117. Sontag’s essay was itself a restate-
ment of an argument against argument put
forth around the same time by Roland Barthes.

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best to focus on such disrespected (by
academics) books as Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or George
Lippard’s Gothic potboiler The Quaker
City–in which sadism and secret crav-
ings are unmodi½ed by literary re½ne-
ment. Fiedler was interested in prose
½ction not for the modernist virtues
of intricacy or allusiveness but for its
democratizing power as an early form
of mass art. The popular novel, he saw,
was the precursor to Hollywood movies
and tv soap operas; it had, he thought,
a power of democratic leveling compar-
able to the ‘ready-made garments’ that,
in the early twentieth century, “made
it impossible to tell an aristocrat from
a commoner.”20

While younger Americanists were
settling scores with their predecessors
over such issues as the proper interpre-
tation of Moby-Dick or The Scarlet Letter,
or whether Margaret Fuller should be
rescued from Emerson’s shadow, Fied-
ler recognized that the commercial pro-
ductions of popular culture–mass-mar-
ket movies and television, but also com-
ic books, advertising, and fashion–were
entering academia as legitimate subjects,
and that the old academic disputes over
literary classics were devolving into
quibbles. It was not surprising that by
the 1980s there had arrived onto course
syllabi such nineteenth-century best-
sellers as Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide
World (1850) and Maria Cummins’s The
Lamplighter (1854)–now championed
by feminist critics such as Jane Tomp-
kins (in Sensational Designs: The Cultural
Work of American Fiction [1985]), who
made the case for exactly those books
that Nathaniel Hawthorne had dis-
missed more than a century earlier as
drivel by a “damned mob of scribbling
women.”

20 Ibid., 99.

Dædalus Spring 2006

Today, students of American literature
are still working out these issues: What
kinds of cultural artifacts allow access
to the inner life of the culture? What
role, if any, should aesthetic judgment
(and according to what criteria) play in
the study of written texts? New lines of
internal relations within American liter-
ature have lately emerged with the rise
of a movement known as ‘ecocriticism’
–lines that run, for instance, from Tho-
reau through Aldo Leopold to Rachel
Carson and up to Barry Lopez.21 The
histrionics and name calling of the ‘cul-
ture wars’ are gone if not entirely for-
gotten–yet literary studies seem likely
to remain divided for a while between
those who follow the Frankfurt School
critics Theodor Adorno and Walter Ben-
jamin in regarding mass culture as a kind
of soft propaganda by which the public
degenerates into the mob, and those
who celebrate popular culture as a roil-
ing scene of imaginative liberation–as
does University of Pennsylvania Ameri-
canist Janice Radway in her influential
book Reading the Romance: Women, Patri-
archy, and Popular Literature (1984), and,
more recently, in her Feeling for Books:
The Book-of-the-Month-Club, Literary
Taste, and Middle Class Desire (1997).

Today, the situation seems strikingly

symmetrical with that with which this
essay began. In the early nineteenth cen-
tury, a case had to be made for the exis-
tence–not to mention the signi½cance–

21 The impact of environmentalism in Amer-
ican literary studies is well represented in two
books by Lawrence Buell, The Environmental
Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), and
Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Litera-
ture, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Be-
yond (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2001).

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of American literature. In the early years
of the twenty-½rst century, this case has
to be made again.

There is reason to feel a certain sense
of déjà vu. For one thing, the legitima-
cy of the very idea of the nation-state is
under siege in academic circles, where
perhaps the most cited book of the last
three decades is Benedict Anderson’s
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983).
Shocked by the resurgence of national-
ism in a century when Marxist intellec-
tuals expected it to decline before the
advance of international worker solidar-
ity, Anderson de½ned nationalism as a
kind of atavism for which deluded mil-
lions have been willing to kill and die. In
this context, the idea of a national litera-
ture seems, at best, to furnish an oppor-
tunity to expose the mechanisms (such
as the literary creation of patriotic myth)
by which the nation-state maintains it-
self and, at worst, to be complicit with
the criminality of the nation-state itself.
Another way to see what has happened
is to recall Robert Bellah’s famous Dæda-
lus essay written in 1967, in which Bellah
accurately predicted that the American
nation would split apart into factions of
“liberal alienation” and “fundamental-
ist ossi½cation” with respect to the “set
of beliefs, symbols, and rituals” that he
called “civil religion.”22 Among aca-
demic humanists, who are overwhelm-
ingly liberal and alienated from religion
in both its civil and fundamentalist
forms, it is hardly possible today to use
the term ‘American’ without irony or
embarrassment.

We all recognize the gestures of dis-
avowal. Scholars in many ½elds are go-
ing through the same motions; here is

22 Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in Ameri-
ca,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-
Traditional World (New York: Harper and Row,
1970), 183.

an example from a recent book on a sub-
ject that once would have been called
Chinese art:

American
literature:
a vanishing
subject?

This book is very deliberately called Art
in China, and not Chinese Art, because it
is written out of a distrust of the existence
of any unifying principles or essences link-
ing such a wide range of made things,
things of very different types, having very
different dates, very different materials,
and very different makers, audiences, and
contexts of use.23

In 1999, Janice Radway, in her inaugural
address as president of the American
Studies Association, suggested that the
phrase ‘American studies’ be deleted
from the name of the organization in
favor of the term ‘United States stud-
ies’–an act of puri½cation that would
save its members from implicitly en-
dorsing the hegemonic ambitions of
the United States to dominate (at least)
the north and south ‘American’ conti-
nents.

Without embracing the strategies of

self-acquittal these scholars propose,
one may share their wariness toward
the nation-state as an object of vener-
ation. Quasi-genetic ideas of race soli-
darity have always polluted feelings of
nationalness (as late as 1934, one ½nds
Edith Wharton blithely remarking on
the “boyish love of pure nonsense only
to be found in Anglo-Saxons”24), and
no one who has come of age since World
War II can dissociate such ideas from the
hideous consequences that have some-
times followed from them.

Moreover, there is no blinking the
fact that American literary studies must
now make their way in a postcolonial

23 Craig Clunas, Art in China (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 10.

24 Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New
York: Scribners, 1934), 157.

Dædalus Spring 2006

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Andrew
Delbanco
on the
humanities

world in which we are perforcedly con-
scious that nations are fragile works of
arti½ce; we have lately witnessed bloody
struggles over just what sort of nation
is (or was) Kuwait, Israel, the former
Yugoslavia, a future Palestine, Iraq, and
Ukraine, to name just a few–and Amer-
icans, as citizens of the sole superpower,
must continually consider what sort of
obligation these and other nations ex-
ert upon us to preserve what used to be
called their ‘right of self-determination.’
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that

the legitimacy of American literary
studies, narrowly–that is, nationally
–construed, is under skeptical scruti-
ny. Ever since the Vietnam War, many
American intellectuals have been more
or less ashamed of America, and the re-
cent Iraq War, with its unilateralist and
messianic rhetoric, has only made mat-
ters worse. In 1963, the Voice of Ameri-
ca organized a series of radio lectures
on American literature in which the
scholarly authorities of the day, includ-
ing some who held strong Left views,
participated: Henry Nash Smith, Wal-
lace Stegner, Daniel Aaron, Carlos Baker,
Irving Howe, Kay House, David Levin,
Richard Poirier, John Berryman, among
others. It is simply impossible to imag-
ine such a collaboration between the
government and the academy today.

Nor is it surprising that what is some-

times called America-centrism has be-
come an embarrassment to today’s
Americanists. To use a prevalent term,
the ½eld is being ‘decentered’ through
study and translation of texts written
in America in languages other than
English (one doubts how far this move-
ment can go, since our educational sys-
tem is almost entirely monolingual) by
such scholars as Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez,
Lawrence Rosenwald, Werner Sollors,
and Marc Shell. In 2000, Sollors’s and
Shell’s Multilingual Anthology of American

Literature presented a host of hitherto
unknown texts in more than a dozen Na-
tive American, European, and Asian lan-
guages, with English translations on fac-
ing pages. There is, as well, a movement
afoot–inaugurated some twenty years
ago by Bell Gale Chevigny and Gari La-
guardia, the editors of Reinventing the
Americas: Comparative Studies of Litera-
ture of the United States and Spanish Amer-
ica (1986), and lately forwarded in such
books as Anne Goldman’s Continental
Divides: Revisioning American Literature
(2000)–to reject the nation’s borders
as impermeable lines dividing ‘Ameri-
can’ literature from the literature of ad-
jacent and overlapping cultures.

In January 2003, a special issue of
pmla, devoted in a skeptical mood to
“America: The Idea, the Literature,”
included an essay asserting that “Amer-
ican literature should be seen as no
longer bound to the inner workings
of any particular country or imagined
organic community but instead as in-
terwoven systematically with traversals
between national territory and inter-
continental space.”25 And there are ef-
forts under way to ‘redraw the map of
American literature’ by pushing back
its boundaries in time as well as space.
The Yale Americanist Wai Chee Dimock
has proposed a new set of coordinates
by which she would redraw Emerson’s
literary af½liations and see him in rela-
tion not so much, say, to Bronson Alcott,
as to the Vishnu Parana or the Koran.
“Deep time” is Dimock’s name for this
temporal reorganization, and, she adds,
“deep time is denationalized space.”26

25 Paul Giles, “Transnationalism and Classic
American Literature,” pmla118 (1) (January
2003): 63.

26 Wai Chee Dimock, “Deep Time: American
Literature and World History,” American Liter-
ary History 13 (4) (2001): 760.

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American
literature:
a vanishing
subject?

So far, these attempts to develop post-
national ideas of American literature are
too diffuse to bear much weight. And, as
is often the case, transformations in the
academic humanities tend to be second-
ary to more basic transformations in
the world. Once a province of Europe,
America has become the power center
of a planet convulsed by a variety of re-
sistance movements–armed and other-
wise–against it. Yet accompanying the
sense of America as a center of consoli-
dated power is a sense that any coherent
notion of American identity is coming
apart. Can we call American a business
corporation whose employees work in
factories in Sri Lanka and whose assets
are deposited in Caribbean banks? Is
an illegal immigrant who crosses from
Mexico into Texas in order to ½nd me-
nial work an American? With such
questions in the air, why should the idea
of an American literature escape interro-
gation?

As for what kind of answers might
emerge, the old ones will clearly no
longer do. At the beginning of our sto-
ry, the proponents of an American litera-
ture proclaimed its distinctiveness chief-
ly with respect to the burdensome prece-
dent of the literature of England–but
to dwell on that distinction today would
seem to participate in what Freud called
the “narcissism of minor differences.”
Matthew Arnold’s point is again oddly
pertinent: “I see advertised The Primer
of American Literature,” he wrote in
1874. “I imagine the face of Philip or
Alexander at hearing of a Primer of Ma-
cedonian Literature! . . . We are all con-
tributors to one great literature–English
literature.” These sentences, quoted by
Marcus Cunliffe at the opening of his
The Literature of the United States (1954),
would have once pleased only cultural-
ly conservative Anglophiles; but today,
Arnold’s words (if not his tone) are per-

fectly consonant with the view from the
cultural Left, for whom the hyphen in
‘Anglo-American’ marks a trivial divi-
sion between two barely distinguishable
nations driven by the same imperialist
aims. The idea of an American literature
has come to seem provincial again.

Yet if one looks beyond the insular
academy to a new generation of young
American writers, one encounters a sa-
lient–and historically recurrent–dif-
ference in tone and attitude that contin-
ues to divide academic critics from ac-
tual practitioners. To read, say, Gish
Jen’s novel Typical American (1991) or
Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995)
is to be struck by how a few changes in
the scenic incidentals, or a few substi-
tutions of Yiddish for Chinese or Kore-
an phrases, would render these works,
with their historically recurrent tale of
Old World parents versus New World
children, almost indistinguishable in
plot and structure from the Jewish im-
migrant novels of Abraham Cahan (Yekl,
1896) or Anzia Yezierska (The Bread Giv-
ers, 1925). Writers present have always
felt the parental presence of writers past.
They register their debts with large acts
of homage, as when Ralph Ellison hon-
ors the man after whom he was named,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Invisible Man
(1951), or with small allusive gestures, as
when Philip Roth opens The Great Amer-
ican Novel (1973) with a Melvillean sen-
tence: “Call me Smitty.”

The work of rede½ning, and thereby
sustaining, American literature has al-
ways been mainly carried on by writers
who aspire to become part of it, not by
professors who dismiss its validity or
doubt its existence. In that respect, not
much has changed.

Dædalus Spring 2006

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