274 American Literature
Important excavation of a great many minority writers whose status in the canon cannot be determined for several years. At this point, only specialists in the particular ethnic literatures are fully aware of many recently recovered figures. As long as special topic essays do not prevent those figures from appearing in different contexts elsewhere in the volume, and as long as we provide a clear explanation of why we resort to this categorizing, this approach ensures that lesser well-known authors do appear in the book. Surely the next generation of critics will be in a better position to integrate those writers who survive the critical reappraisals that have only recently begun.
Of course, we do not delude ourselves that these solutions will please all members of the political spectrum. Already we have had questions from Italian, Jewish, and Polish colleagues who want to know why their groups do not receive special treatment. In my conclusion I want to suggest a way for expression of objections and continue to play an on-going role in the process of reevaluation and canon development.
Finally, a third, overarching political issue concerns the definition of national language itself. After much discussion, we have chosen to entitle the volume the “Literary History of the United States” (as opposed to a “History of American Literature”) in order to distinguish its contents from the literature of other nations in the Americas. Meanwhile, at least one scholar has questioned the validity of doing a history of the literature of the United States at all. He proposes that literature be studied only on the basis of language rather than nationality, thus reducing the literature of the United States to a subordinate branch of English literature. This argument is, of course, actually a very old one upon which our departments of English were founded and against which scholars like Willard Thorp had to struggle in the 1930s and 1940s in order to get American writers admitted to the curriculum at all. To the regret of some colleagues in English studies, the people of this country have organized themselves as a nation separate from England for over two hundred years, and the fact of nationhood has
William C. Spengemann, “American Things/Literary Things: The Problems of American Literary History,” American Literature, 57 (1985), 456-81.