The Extra 627
Van Bercovitch- makes clear, this orthodoxy is constituted not so much by programmatic agreement, as by an implicit loyalty to the disciplinary assumptions that define professional scholars of American literature. This New Orthodoxy has dominated recent discussion of changes in the field at MLA section meetings, in essays in American Literature and Critical Inquiry and in “revisionary” editions of critical essays. Though it often describes its aims as “radical,” I want to argue that its discourse preserves, with only cosmetic revisions, existing critical practice. I also want to suggest that its political earnestness does double duty. It represses an uncertainty about the relationship of literature to history that, while widespread these days in the profession as a whole, particularly threatening to Americanists. And it distracts from doubts about the integrity of the field that have arisen with the loss of that confidence in a National Character that initially sustained the practice of American literary scholarship.
Like the older critical approaches generated by this American literary nationalism, the New Orthodoxy invokes a myth of genesis to legitimate its project, though in this case, the myth is not about “America” but about American literary studies. In the narrower sphere of literary criticism, it mirrors the familiar drama of the rise and decline of the American Ideal that, seventy years ago, informed the writing of dissenters from the Genteel
Reconstructing American Literature: Courses, Syllabi, Issues, ed. Paul Lauter (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1983); Annette Kolodny, “The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States,” American Literature, 57 (1985), 291-307; Emory Elliott, “New Literary History: Past and Present,” American Literature, 57 (1985), 611-21; Sacvan Bercovitch, “America as Canon and Context: Literary History in a Time of Dissensus,” American Literature, 58 (1986), 99-108, 631-53; Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986); Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). Other scholars, taking a line parallel to the one I draw here, stand outside the New Orthodoxy by questioning the usefulness of an American literary history. See Michael Colacurcio, “Does American Literature Have a History?” Early American Literature, 13 (1978), 110-31, and a series of essays by William Spengemann, the most recent of which is “American Things/Literary Things: The Problem of American Literary History,” American Literature, 57 (1985), 456-81.
On the role of mythic narratives in legitimating social institutions, see Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans., Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), especially pp. 18-20.