102 American Literature
Twenty-two spokespersons for dissensus! I cannot say that the prospect filled me with great confidence. The third step in our venture was to bring the group together and see what assurance could be worked out. Partly the conference centered on practical matters. But most of it, and by all accounts the most reassuring part, was devoted to the moot-points. Without compromising on their basic differences, the contributors found they could agree on what the central problems were; on the central importance of history in dealing with those problems; and on a narrative form that would embody, in texture and substance, the questions they brought to the literature. When Nina Baym invited me to participar in this panel, my first thought was to offer a summary of their discussions. No doubt that would have been the more interesting paper. But it would have been theirs, not mine. So I offer instead this overview of the problems behind the Conference; and now (in the space remaining) some speculations on the sorts of problems I expect we’ll face in the process of writing the History. And in the interests of controversy, as well as time, I’ve singled out one issue in particular- one of many, but characteristic of the others, I believe, and relevant to questions of canon and context alike. Who knows, this may prove here and now that dissensus can be the basis for fruitful discussion.
The issue is ideology and it begins with the word “America.” Professor Elliott offers a sensible solution to the choice in title between American and the United States- “American Literary History,” or “A Literary History of the United States.” The United States, he points out, dates from 1776, and we want to include the colonial period. But as he also implies, the alternative involves more than chronology. For the fact is that America, as it was appropriated by the United States- as, indeed, it came to distinguish the United States, in the view not only of self-styled Americans, but of other groups of Americans as well from Canada to Brazil- America, as it was thus conceived before and after the Revolution, from the Magnalia Christi Americana through The Rising Glory of America and “The American Scholar” to An American Dream- America, in all these various forms and contexts, from Mather to Mailer, is quintessentially an ideological term. By comparison, the United States is humbly descriptive. America was