What Work is there for us to do? American Literary Studies or American Cultural Studies?

Abstract

In order to articulate a prospect for American literary study, which is the charge of this panel, one must first articulate a retrospect. My title for this talk, then, What Work Is There for Us To Do? is immediately subsumed under another title, What Work Have We Been Doing? where the we takes as its immediate referent professors of American literature, past and present. Any history that tries to answer this question will automatically be a contested history, for the we here is by no means homogenous. It is porous, fragmented, mutable, and strategic. That is to say, any history of American literary study must be, whether it admits it or not, polemical. If I were to write such a history, I would begin by foregrounding my polemical intent, which would be to argue that American literary study in the dominant institutional form it has taken to the present moment has exhausted itself-hence the insurgence of multicultural studies-and that in order to energize itself American literary study must take the form of an Americas Cultural Studies that breaks decisively with the American exceptionalism that has constituted in one way or another the dominant form. This cultural studies would take as