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Thousands of other works in translation- must also be seen as part of the canon of English literature. To deny that assertion (as common sense says we should) is to admit that nationality and place are significant determining factors in the constitution of a body of literature. Spengemann’s mistake is to insist, along with those whom he criticizes, that we must find something unique in our literature before we can call it American. That is like insisting that biologists should find something unique in an animal in a particular place before they can justifiably study it apart from similar animals in some other place.
Spengemann is one of the theorists who, according to Peter Carafiol, “stand outside the New Orthodoxy by questioning the usefulness of an American literary history.” This “New Orthodoxy,” says Carafiol, “offers exactly what we have always had, though like every new generation of American literary scholars, it dresses it up in fashionable critical terms that conceal the worn out, but comfortably familiar, figure beneath” (p. 636). Although Carafiol has astutely spotted these wolves of orthodoxy in their sheeps’ clothing (the rhetoric of revisionism), he complains unduly about their haste “to establish new stabilities before we have exorcised the pervasive and still potent ghosts of the old” (p. 638). Call for the exorcist, by all means; but while he or she is on the way, the orthodoxies (old, new, and un-) should continue to meet the need for useful literary histories. And before objecting that literary histories cannot be written because authorities have proven that the form is dead, it might be well to reflect upon the fate of the novel- a genre said to be in a state of rigor mortis in the 1950s yet somehow miraculously still with us today. Indeed, the CLHUS, in spite of its weaknesses, offers more than enough to justify the publication of a new literary history. Its editors are either among or in sympathy with the “New Orthodoxy”; and their “Preface” and “Introduction” set forth what Carafiol has identified as their outlook, which might be called the Social Contract theory of literary history, for it holds that if every critical position is represented among those who write the history, then the resulting work will be as fair
“The New Orthodoxy: Ideology and the Institution of American Literary History,” American Literature, 59 (1987), 627