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United States is to underscore the fact that “America” is a broader term that could be perceived as including Canadian, Mexican, and Caribbean literature as well as that produced in the U.S. And what is to be done with oral literature and with non-English writings produced in the U.S.? If we place the focus upon the United States, however, do we exclude or reduce to mere preface the colonial writing that precedes 1776?
It seems to me that the best we can do is what Professor Konishi does: decide our own definition of what is American and place this before the readers at the outset. Not all critics and historians will agre that our definition is the correct one, but we are using the term “American” to describe writing produced in the area of the continent that became the United States, and we view colonial literature as an integral part of that literary culture. While the emphasis will certainly be upon literature produced in English, the contributors are urged to introduce into the discussions non-English works and those not previously canonized.
No less complex and important a question is what do we mean by “literature.” The editors of the LHUS simply defined the term as fitting works of “excellent expression.” Professor Konishi carefully considers the question of whether literariness depends upon the author’s intention or the reader’s perception, and he concludes that what is literature is not limited to the intention of the author, whose own views and statements may be wrong, deceptive, self-deprecating, or passe. Today, however, as we expand the canon of the literary to a wide variety of genres, where do we draw the line between what is literature and what is not? Do we use as the main criteria the presence of imaginative power and technical excellence, or do we use the size or enthusiasm of audience response? If the latter, is the important audience the critical establishment or mass readership? Or is there indeed no audience but just audiences? When faced with this task of trying to include discussion of as much of what seems the best literature in a very limited number of pages, the best solution seemed to be to recruit first-rate and diverse editors and contributors and to let them make their own individual decisions about what they consid-
Ibid.