Reconstructing American Literature: Curricular Issues

Abstract

Next to where I type, I have tacked up the syllabi for two American literature courses taught in the 1980s at well-known, indeed prestigious, institutions in the United States—one in California, the other in Ohio. Both are survey courses, one called “The American Literary Imagination,” the other “Life and Thought in American Literature.” One covers, in a single semester, thirty-two writers, including Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, John Greenleaf Whittier, John Crowe Ransom, and Ezra Pound; all are white and male, except for one assignment on Emily Dickinson and one poem by Marianne Moore. The other, a two-term course, includes twenty-three white male writers and Emily Dickinson. I do not want to argue that today such courses have no right to exist, for that kind of statement would engage the significant issue of academic freedom. But such courses are simply not truthful, nor professionally current. The pictures they present to students of the American literary imagination or of American life and thought are woefully incomplete and inaccurate. In the profession of literary study they represent what, in Psychology, was represented by generalizations about moral development based on interviews with a sample of white, male, college sophomores and juniors; or in History, was represented by conclusions about the “expansion” of opportunity under Jacksonian democracy when, in fact, white women's opportunities and those of black people were largely contracting. Were such courses titled “American Literature from the Perspective of ‘'Diner’” (a film set in 1958), they might have accurately represented themselves. But now, over a quarter of a century later, a large new body of scholarship has transformed the intellectual base of our profession. To be responsive to this scholarship and to present an accurate picture of the development of the literary cultures of the United States, teaching has begun to change. A number of recent volumes record such change and offer means for encouraging its systematic development. The changes in our profession I am describing are rooted in the movements for racial justice and sex equity.