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Are timeless, universal, and inherent in the process of literary creation.
The problem, simply stated, is that during the past decade those very definitions (of America, history, and literary canon) have been perceived as being themselves ideological. And the result, predictably, has been a fall from transcendence into history, or (in less mythic terms) from consensus to dissensus, where consensus involves the dominance of a certain literary establishment, and where dissensus has all too often issued in a militant commitment to partiality- sectarian, closed, narrowly programmatic.
To make a virtue of dissensus would be to shape this generational experience into something that later decades will view as a fortunate fall into history. That’s what I had in mind in emphasizing the problem of ideology- that is, the use of ideological analysis to specify the questions we share about canon and context, and so to open up interpretation. Needless to say, this is not necessarily to answer any of those questions; but it is to venture into the dalogic mode; it begins the process of narrative integration. Ideology, let me repeat in closing, is only one of many aspects of that process. It will not concern all our contributors in the same way or to the same extent. But I think it fairly represents their general attitude. All of them, even those I termed traditionalists, have a resistance to solutions, a healthy liminal skepticism about the formulaic, the natural, and the self-evident. That’s the negative side of our project. The other, complementary side lies in the freshness of perspective which the resistance provokes- the richness of the problems at issue, the theoretical and practical challenges involved in our inquiries. In either view, it seems likely that we will not, thank God, arrive at some sweeping new synthesis. I hope our History will set direction in American literary scholarship for the next generations; but I think it’s safe to say that it will not lead them, like the fabled pillar of fire, out of the wilderness of difference, partiality, and debate into a Canaan of unmediated truth.
Announcements
Jackson R. Bryer (Dept. of English, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742) is planning a volume of bibliographical essays surveying research done abroad in American literature. Individual