Where in the World Is US Literature?

Abstract

Where is US literature relative to “the world”? How do Americanists understand “the world”? How does shifting our understanding of “the world” transform the study of US literary history? Or, does simply posing the question of US literature and the world imply a dissolution of the field? Are operative concepts of the “Americanness” of American literature rendered obsolete once the question of “the world” is posed? There was a time when such questions belonged to American studies. That time has passed. On the occasion of the death of one of the most eminent and earliest practitioners of the field, Harvard literature professor Daniel Aaron, the historian Richard Pells argued that the defining mission of American studies during the period of its foundation—“to explain America to the world”—was destroyed by New Left populism. Pells bemoaned the rise of specialization and the splintering of American studies. Even for those more sympathetic than Pells to the multiethnic approaches that now preoccupy the discipline, the 1980s-era shift has signaled a retreat from the problem of “the world” as it had previously been posed.