Infrequently Asked Questions

Yesterday I got an email from a fellow English prof and bff-level broseph, Steve, and it said this: “i feel like i have no idea what you think about american lit.”

Yes, English profs don’t always capitalize their vertical pronouns. We have earned that right. 

Steve’s the guy who asks the questions that make you feel like a sweaty hamster who’s just been asked to think about the wheel he’s been sweating on.

Dig this litany of wheel-pondering questions:

1.     Do you think studying American lit is a way to understand America, Americans, and its/their place in the world historically, today, and in the future?

2.     And what's the use of understanding America/Americans? 

3.     Would you say that America has a significant impact on the lives of many people the world over, for good or ill, and ultimately, people's lives could be better or worse based on the Actions/attitudes of America/Americans and studying them might reveal the good/evil that can befall the world?  (this one loses structural integrity, but i'm too tired to clean it up)

Now, I hate these kinds of questions. If these questions were dressed in ties and jackets and ringing my doorbell, I would hide under my sofa all day before I showed the least sign of being home. These questions want to take their shoes off and sit in the lotus position and talk about harmony while I run global searches on my laptop for the most recent draft of that article I’ll never finish.

But Steve’s my friend, so here’s my answers:

1. To the extent that it is an adjective used to modify the word “literature,” “American” is going out of style.

The idea that the U.S. is an exemplary, exceptional nation is losing ground—and for good reason. We were kids in the 1980s and we watched a president wax poetic about “a shining city on a hill.” Then we grew up and read John Winthrop for ourselves, and we realized that that “city on a hill” Winthrop was talking about was not a metaphor about how America was a beacon of hope but a warning to the Massachusetts Bay Colony about just how exposed its fate was going to be to the rest of the world. Indeed, America has always been the world’s nation and we grew up thinking it was the other way around.

So I think that “American Literature” will remain a valid category of literature to the extent that it can function as a rubric through which to gauge the interrelationship between the global and the national.

2. America and Americans have a crazy relationship to place, one that bears some seriously useful fruit.

The category of literature known as “American” includes writing that happened in a world that was un-freaking-mapped. The narrative and descriptive strategies that grow from such a context of geographical uncertainty are super interesting. And they’re super relevant in an era wherein global communities and cosmopolitan sensibilities (not to mention multi-national corporations) are eroding the very claims of territorial authority upon which national sovereignty rests (i.e., right now).

As the technologies that make sense of the world evolve, the literature written in and about a world that lacks territorial integrity (i.e., the Americas) will remain instructive, if only to be cautionary.

            (Sorry about the academese of that answer.)

3. I have to say “no” to this question, because I came out against exceptionalism in answer 1 and it would be poor form to suggest here that U.S. lit might save the world.

Heck, I think that the fact that it’s been 20 years since an American writer has won the Nobel Prize for Literature is a sign that the world doesn’t give a fig about U.S. lit anymore. Horace Engdahl, the Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary, said that U.S. lit it is “too isolated, too insular” to matter on a global stage. This trend of insularity ends the minute American soil gets delocalized, the minute we dig for worms and find instead the cords of camaraderie.

Or at least our winsome antipode!