Article
Reference
[Review of :] The Future of Literary Theory / Ralph Cohen. - London : Routledge, 1989 ; American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the
Eighties / Vincent Leitch. - New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 ; The Annals of American Literature 1602-1983 / Richard M.
Ludwig & Clifford A. Nault, Jr. (eds.). - Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1986 ; A Mirror for Americanists : Reflections on the Idea of
American Literature / William C. Spengemann. - Hanover, NH : University Press of New England, 1989
MADSEN, Deborah Lea
MADSEN, Deborah Lea. [Review of :] The Future of Literary Theory / Ralph Cohen. - London : Routledge, 1989 ; American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties / Vincent Leitch. - New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 ; The Annals of American Literature 1602-1983 / Richard M. Ludwig & Clifford A. Nault, Jr. (eds.). - Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1986 ; A Mirror for Americanists : Reflections on the Idea of American Literature / William C.
Spengemann. - Hanover, NH : University Press of New England, 1989. Journal of American Studies, 1991, vol. 25, no. 1, p. 127-129
DOI : 10.1017/S0021875800028334
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:93093
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Journal of American Studies, 25. 1 (April 1991), pp. 127-129 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800028334
Ralph Cohen (ed.), The Future of Literary Theory (New York & London: Routledge, 1989, £14.95).
Pp. 445. ISBN 0 415 90078 6.
Vincent Leitch,American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, $20.50). Pp. 458. ISBN 0 231 06427 6.
Richard M. Ludwig & Clifford A. Nault, Jr. (eds.),The Annals of American Literature 1602-1983 (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, $14.9;). Pp. 342. ISBN 0 19 505919 0.
William C. Spengemann,A Mirror for Americanists: Reflections on the Idea of American Literature (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989, £6.95). Pp. 183. ISBN 0 87451 483 5.
"The crisis in American studies" - Is there one? William Spengemann seems to think so. And what's more, he claims to have discovered it. But, in fact, what he rehearses is the familiar litany of questions concerning the "Americanness" of American literature: is it American because written by Americans? in America? about America? And why does "American" literature always happen to be written in English? Why is America identified with the United States only? The project of the book is to ask how the canon of American literature is constituted and how discourses about the canon are organized yet we are given a closely documented account of Spengemann's discovery that
"American literature" is a conceptual category, an idea, and not the object itself. And I found the tale of naïveté transformed a little tiresome, not least when it was suggested, in an incredulous tone, that perhaps "the institution [academe] was engaged in a vast conspiracy to foist a counterfeit subject ["American" literature] upon an unsuspecting world" (p. 3). The response to this must be YES! The canon always has been a conspiracy, a part of the power structure that sustains the dominance of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males of the United States. Has this man never considered before the mechanisms and implications of canon formation? Is he serious when he asks,
"Is the geography of American literature, then, political rather than physical?" Unfortunately, yes and, again, yes.
So why does Spengemann not take heart from the contemporary debate over precisely these issues? The theoretical trends documented by Vincent Leitch and the essays in Ralph Cohen's collection indicate a lively scene of debate which contradicts Spengemann's vision of an
"unproductive and demoralizing" critical climate. Cohen has gathered together twenty-five commissioned articles by eminent theorists into a highly informative and comprehensive guide to the directions available to literary theory in the nineties. Contributors include Hélène Cixous, Hayden White, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Hans Robert Jauss, Catherine Stimpson, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Wolfgang Iser, Gerald Graff, Jonathan Culler, Rosalind Krauss, Alastair Fowler, Gregory Ulmer, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Elaine Showalter – indeed, an impressive line-up which covers the spectrum of critical approaches. The book could be improved only by the inclusion of an index: of particular importance in a collection of individual essays where there is no internal cross-referencing. The format of the essay collection does have one major advantage over organization according to critical movement or school, chosen by Vincent Leitch, and that is the enhanced representation of critical work which transcends the bounds of single critical movements and so can fall through the net of literary history. But what Leitch may lack in coverage (and that is only a small body of work) he more than makes up for in terms of cohesiveness and lucidity of argument.
Leitch's really is an excellent advanced introduction to the history of literary theory in America, written in a lively style accessible even to the novice. This is a book worth recommending to students who are coming to literary theory for the first time as well as all those who are interested in the historical, economic, cultural, social, intellectual and, importantly, institutional (i.e.
2 publishing, pedagogy, funding, research support) contexts of contemporary theoretical debates and critical developments. The book is very user-friendly, having a full index and a good set of references. Thirteen schools are discussed: Marxism, New Criticism, the Chicago School, the New York Intellectuals, myth criticism, phenomenology and existentialism, hermeneutics, reader- response criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, black aesthetics and ethnic studies, and leftist criticism (neo-Marxism and cultural studies). Many -isms and -ologies omitted from this list do appear in the text. And yet William Spengemann claims that, "[e]ach year we have said more and more about less and less, until we now find ourselves left with a half-dozen masterpieces and nothing more to say about them" (p. 20). Why?
Spengemann's problem is that he does not want a theoretical solution to his perceived problem. He wants to discover the "Americanness" of American literature in the language of literary texts. That is, he wants an intrinsic answer to a set of questions that are extrinsic to the text.
Precisely those areas where Spengemann's reservations about justifying the study of American literature find their proper context he dismisses as the "half-worlds of American studies, popular culture and ethnic studies" (p. 15). Instead, he recommends that we seek the definition of
"Americanness" by comparing the American with the non-American, and ignores the dizzying hermeneutic circularity of this "test." In the event, this is not the direction pursued in the body of his book, where Spengemann argues for an extension of the concept of American literature to include all writings produced by the New World since its European discovery (though this seems an arbitrary starting point, given the principle he argues). Rather than attack an outmoded vision of a
"crisis in American studies," Spengemann would more profitably attack reference works likeThe Annals of American Literature which embodies the Eurocentrism that is his primary cause for complaint. This bibliography of American literature is, on its own terms, an extremely useful, enlightening, and entertaining guide which, through the use of a side-column running parallel to the main text, places the literature of British America in the context of major world events and non- American literary trends. But it does have significant omissions: for instance, by focussing on the genres of fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry, it ignores screen and radio writers. America is treated as synonymous with the United States and the entries are almost exclusively texts written in English. This kind of institutional Eurocentrism is Spengemann's proper target. But by aiming so wide of this mark he shoots himself in the foot and reduces his intended polemic to the status of a period piece.
DEBORAH L. MADSEN University of Leicester
