644 American Literature
American.” So what should we do with books by American authors? Spengemann says we must “remove British and American writing from the unliterary precincts of national history and from ahistorical definitions of literature and restore them to the world from which they arose and to which they remain inextricably bound: the world of the English language…Then, taking up a secure position in the present…the literary historian must identify those texts, both British and American, that appear to have contributed most significantly to the construction of the modern English-speaking world, those that the present linguistic situation denominates its ‘authors’” (pp. 479-80).
If Spengemann actually does mean “the modern English-speaking world,” then who will decide what constitutes “the present linguistic situation”? Someone in Parth, Australia? Or in Perth, Scotland? Since English is a language written and spoken in India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada- as well as Britain, the United States, and other countries- are we to assume that its “present linguistic situation” is the same regardless of place, or is its situation an average or an amalgam of the language as it is spoken and written in various places? And if the texts considered are to be from the oral as well as the written tradition, where will we find the prodigy who has mastered all the oral and written traditions throughout the English-speaking world? By “the construction” of the present world of the English language, does Spengemann mean style, diction, syntax, or all of these? Will the idioms of South Africa hold equal footing with those of Canada? Will it be an Irishman who decides whether an abstruse work such as Finnegan’s Wake (if that is in English) has had as much influence on “the present linguistic situation” as a popular work such as Valley of the Dolls (if that is in English)?
One more question: If our paramount concern is to be the English language and if place and nationality are to be regarded as playing no significant part in what makes a body of literature, then will translation from other languages into English be included in the canon? If Beowulf is a part of the body of literature in English, then the Iliad and the Odyssey- as well as
“American Things/Literary Things: The Problem of American Literary History,” American Literature, 57 (1985), 471