632 American Literature
Has been the use of the word “America” to impose coherence on the writing Americans have produced in order to justify the independent institutional identity of American literary studies.
In current revisionist criticism of American writing, the demands of disciplinary identity have already produced a predictable critical rhetoric and canon. Ritual attacks on the fat target of aesthetic formalism, on sexism and racism, and rueful acknowledgments of part ethnocentrism are the recurrent rhetorical gestures, the passwords, of the New Orthodoxy. This rhetoric goes virtually unquestioned because it comports so completely with the expectations- post-1960s white liberal turned academic professional- of its audience. The textual choices these attitudes dictate have quickly become at least as predictable as those of the traditional canon they would replace. What Bercovitch, for example, calls his “unlikely” examples- Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass- might once actually have seemed unlikely, but these titles have appeared so regularly in recent studies by Jane Tompkins, William Cain, Annette Kolodny, and Russell Reising that by now, they seem positively inevitable, not because they are essential examples of American writing but because they have become mandatory in current talk about American writing. They are the official representatives of the excluded, and their predictable cameo appearances in the discourse of the New Orthodoxy are a sort of tokenism turned to totemism. They are invoked in a ritual way to ritual effect and attest to the ideological catholicity of the speaker. To omit them would not so much be to leave a hole in the argument as to commit and impropriety, a political gaffe.
Nor is the effort to point out a new direction for American literary studies governed by exclusively intellectual considerations. Academic producers and products are as much subject to market conditions as any other. Like professionals in other fields, they must shape their works to fit professionally prescribed criteria. Despite their recommendations for changes in American literary scholarship (and in fact, the most of it amounts to little more than still another round in the almost continuous expansion of the canon that has characterized American literary history from the first), the New Orthodoxy simply cannot afford to let go of the established faith that, regardless of current confusion, criti-