Literary History USA

LITERARY HISTORY USA: ETHOS AND ETHNOS

In the post-World War II and Cold War years  (roughly 1945-1991), it was "normal" for scholars and students of American literature to assume that they knew what truly described American literature as a national literature.  Their indispensable source of information was the  Literary History of the United States (1947) and its subsequent editions.  In their "Address to the Reader," the editors of that particular history aptly noticed that "[l]iterature can be used, and has been magnificently used by Americans, in the service of history, of science, of religion, or of political propaganda.  It has no sharp boundaries, though it passes through  broad margins from art into instruction or argument….History as it is written in this book will be a history of literature within the margins of art but crossing them to follow our writers into the actualities of American life" (xxi).   In some degree, the editors accepted the dictates about formalism and the intrinsic value of the literary work that John Crowe Ransom had articulated in The New Criticism (1941), but they also provided subtle hints regarding a necessary transgression of those dictates if scholars really engaged history.

Ransom's ideas were later reaffirmed in R. S. Crane's  Critical and Historical Principles of Literary History (1967), but those relatively conservative gestures of thinking about history  were called into question by the radical flames of Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968), edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, which gave new meanings to what passing "through broad margins from art into instruction or argument"  would entail.   Black Fire cast light on the matters of ethos (guiding beliefs of a person, group, or institution) and ethnos (an ethnic group) to which Literary History of the United States  (LHUS) gave scant attention.

 The  LHUS editors assumed that in dealing with how a national literature evolved,  "Americans" referred primarily to white males. Women of any color and United States citizens in the numerical minority, despite their contributions to the evolving,  were relegated to the margins of attention and significance. They could be passed over  Using the machinery of patriotic, masculine rhetoric, the editors  propagated  the exclusionary dominance of the white male gaze in the  construction of history.  To understand the implications of their choices, scholars of American literature and its ethnic components have to study such works as Redefining American Literary History (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990),edited by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr.;  Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth  Century (London: Verso, 1997); Michael Szalay's New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), and Robert Genter's Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). It is disingenuous for scholars in the transnational communities  of theory, historiography, and criticism  to think that writing the literary history (or actually, the literary histories) of the United States has any validity or credibility if ethos and ethnos are minimized, or if the writers of literary history try to escape from the vexed dynamics of history as a process.

 The culture wars from the 1980s to the present complicate ideas about what is "normal" in literary studies, and those cultural debates bring to the foreground matters of ethos and ethnos to which the editors of Literary History of the United States accorded the slightest attention or chose to ignore. The debates magnify the dialectics of knowing.  It is simply unethical for  male and female scholars to deny in 2019  that they are themselves at once "ethnic"  as well as "subjective" and  "gendered." The point is made dramatically (albeit tacitly) by Gordon Hutner, founder and editor of the journal  American  Literary History, a riff on the late Ralph Cohen's internationally influential journal  New Literary History.  I quote verbatim  Hutner's recent call for a panel on reconceptualizing  American literary history:

From: "Hutner, Gordon" <hutner@illinois.edu>
Date: May 3, 2019 at 12:26:42 PM CDT
To: "Spires, Derrick" <dspires@illinois.edu>
Subject: C19 cfp

“Exiles, Émigrés, Refugees”

Edward Said notes that “modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees.”  How might we reconceive American literary history from the point of view of such figures?  What are the cultural, aesthetic, and affective dimensions of such displaced subjectivity? If it is true, as Thomas Nail suggests, that the migrant has become the political figure of our time, how does this development lead us to reimagine and reconfigure identity, citizenship, and civil rights in the nineteenth century?  The proposed panel invites new ways of historicizing and theorizing statelessness, political and economic displacement, mobility, shelter, war, and precarity.  Does migration generate new forms of cultural memory?  How do we apprehend these forms, and their formations, that rethink such issues as agency and ambivalence, the border and borderlands, the camp, the commons, detention, dwelling, empathy, nostalgia, the right to movement, the right to return.  Papers may consider how cultural forms articulate social and political change; how histories of race manifest in the moment; how regimes of surveillance and capture give rise to practices of counter-visuality. Participants may also be interested in recovering longer histories of current “crises” over migration and consider ethics of memory and social justice beyond humanitarianism.

Please send abstracts to Gordon Hutner (hutner@illinois.edu) by July 1.

Hutner's intervention is timely, and his using Said's claim as a springboard reminds us just how relevant Said's ideas are for examining the diverging arguments that characterize trends in contemporary scholarship.  We may recall that in Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), Said asserted:

Paradoxically, the United States, as an immigrant society composed of many cultures, has a public discourse more policed, more anxious to depict the country as free from taint, more unified around one iron-clad major narrative of innocent triumph.  This effort to keep things simple and good disaffiliates the country from its relationship with other societies and peoples, thereby reinforcing its remoteness and insularity. (314-315)

No doubt, Hutner would have scholars and students create meaningful questions about why and how a nation's literary history is reconfigured, about the motives for reconfiguring, and respond to those questions by way of critical thinking about the manipulation of cultural memories and the impact it has on knowledge and interpretation of the nexus constituted by literature and politics.  Public discourse warrants sustained interrogation of the ethos and ethnos of history, particularly literary history,  as a narrative process that enables consciousness and cognition.  What matters greatly in 2019 is knowing, as precisely as might be possible, what literary history donates to our practice of everyday life.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr. May 22, 2019.