618 American Literature
Whereas readers might expect to find a single-minded view of how American writing begins- say with the Spanish explorers or the landing of the Pilgrims, our history will have four openings: the first essay by Scott Momaday will take up Native American writing, raising especially the issue of the existence of a literary culture before the arrival of the Europeans but also discussing later American Indian literature. Next will appear Barbara Lewalski on English literature at the American Moment; followed by Wayne Franklin on the Literature of Discovery and Exploration, and then Sacvan Bercovitch on the Puritan Vision of the New World. The intention here is to suggest the presence of complexity and contradiction in the culture from the very start with the hope of carrying this sense of richness throughout the volume. In short, we aim for completeness rather than consistency, even as we recognize that true completeness is beyond the physical limits of our book.
In describing the difference between a history and a novel Bahktin says that histories tend to be centripetal and concern themselves “with strata of legal codes etc., in order to create a series of moments in which the interaction of these forces can be seen in their simultaneity as well as their continuity,” whereas the noval, he says, dramatizes the gaps that exist between what it told and the telling of it. He also says that the Bible and epic share a presumption of authority, a “claim to absolute language,” which he sees as “absolutely foreign to the novel’s joyous awareness of the inadequacies of its own language.”
Certainly a new literary history is not a novel and no editors would be so foolish to let it become so. The very list of contributors and the prestigious press behind the project give it something of the authority of a scripture. But we hope that elements of the work will convey something of the tentativeness and the exciting possibilities of the gaps that still remain in our understanding of what is literature, what is American, and what is the nature of the continuity and discontinuity in something we continue to call our literary heritage. We hope our volume will intersect the lines of tension between the centralizing and unifying forces of our society and those decentralizing powers of the individual creative and
Quotes from Michael Holquist’s “Introduction” to the Dialogic Imagination, pp. xxvii-xxxiii.