The Extra 269
The debates presently being carried on in this “Extra” section of American Literature mirror those taking place in the literature departments of our colleges and universities. Faculty are engaged in an exciting, and often hotly debated, process of canon and curricular revision, critical and cultural reevaluation. While there are strong disagreements expressed in this process, teachers of literature still share a common goal to achieve a fuller understanding of the function of language in society, of the forms and purposes of expression, and of methods of reading and interpreting texts. What makes these engagements- and the writing of literary history today- different from similar debates in the late 1940s and 1950s is that few scholars today would not agree that in the largest sense these goals are political as well as educational.
Because the criticism of the last twenty years has raised fundamental questions about the nature of literature and history, indeed about the very meaning of America, participants in the Columbia Literary History of the United States project are admittedly far more cautious and tentative in their assertions than were the editors and contributors of the 1948 LHUS. Whereas the goals of the LHUS were to consolidate interpretations and to establish a canon, the aims of the CLHUS are to incorporate recent developments in scholarship and canon reassessment in order to create a book that will fairly represent the diversity of the literature and the variety of current critical opinion. The result should be to unsettle rather than reassure the book’s readers.
In this essay, which is partly intended to continue the conversation established in some recent “Extra” pieces, I want to discuss some of the various dimensions of doing literary history that are political by nature and then to consider some special problems and possible solutions. For this purpose I have defined the poles of the arguments more sharply than they usually exist in the debates of the moment. I shall broach three main issues: first, whether a commercial enterprise can be free enough to ask tough questions about the literary canon; second, who ought to be included in our study and in what fashion- that is, whether writers who were formerly excluded but are now received into the fold will be set
Robert E. Spiller et al, eds., Literary History of the United States (New York: Macmillian, 1948)