Art and a Better America Richard Ruland "...You wanna end war and stuff, you gotta sing loud. " Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant" (1966) The current rewriting of American literary history is most readily examined in new anthologies and fresh editions of familiar ones, not, it seems, in compilations like the Columbia Literary History of the United States. I have recently seen fresh versions from Macmillan, Norton, and McGraw-Hill, as well as a new entry from Harper, but no one has sought to generate for them the prepublication anticipation and succeeding excitement of D. C. Heath's new venture. The launching of this new anthology has been orchestrated with truly impressive skill. In the spring of 1988 I received the first number of The Heath Anthology of American Literature Newsletter, with an engaging chronological account by General Editor Paul Lauter of "the project that we have immodestly called 'Reconstructing American Literature.'" With help from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, innovative syllabi collected from across the country, and 50 participants in a meeting at Yale in June 1982, Professor Lauter worked toward a two- volume anthology "to teach a reconstructed American literature" that will help in "reshaping how we understand our history, our culture, and our literature." My Newsletter contained as well an attack by its editor, Dr. Judith Stanford, on E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and Albert Shanker, president of the AFT, for "refueling of anti-new-canon fires." In the spring of 1989, the second number of the Newsletter appeared in my mailbox with course syllabi submitted by readers experimenting with fresh materials in their classrooms and a sample from the table of contents of the anthology. In a remarkably candid message, Paul A. Smith of Heath urged me to get behind this worthwhile work--he twice uses the word mission": Heath has taken a huge financial gamble, the costs have been "terrifying.... We will have invested over a million dollars by the time this text begins to show a profit." An important project like canon reconstruction justifies such risk, Smith says, for he believes that writers have been excluded from traditional anthologies "primarily" due to their gender or race. "Anthology," he reminded me, is Greek for a collection of flowers; "[w]e believe we have a more various, a richer, a certainly more colorful and more broadly considered collection than any heretofore assembled." Anthologies try to reflect "evolving values, preferences and movements"--and Heath has made "a careful, informed, yet admittedly still risky decision to publish for that segment of the market that has declared itself ready for significant change." "This," I felt his finger pointing, "is where you come in." If I wanted more information, I could call 800-235-3565, toll-free; Heath would send a complimentary copy of the Columbia Literary History to my department once any of us adopted its new textbook. In a widely circulated prepublication sales brochure, William E. Cain of Wellesley describes Heath's project as "very important.... The anthology will be a very significant--and courageous, groundbreaking--one.... The scholarly community nity eagerly awaits it." The spring 1990 Newsletter, while celebrating the eleventh-hour arrival of the first bound copy at the December 1989 MLA meeting and listing a hundred or so early adoptions, recounts a stroke of good fortune I doubt Mr. Smith could have dreamed possible. The profession at large, it must have seemed, had smiled and would continue to smile on the efforts of the publisher and its board of editors: the American Literature Section of the MLA heard Cathy N. Davidson, professor at Duke and associate editor of American Literature, name the as-yet-unpublished Heath anthology a "major contribution to scholarship," indeed "the most significant criticism and scholarship on American literature" of the last 45 years. I was not surprised when Mr. Smith cited Davidson's remarks with enthusiasm in a later Newsletter: Since an anthology is the "institutionalization of a critical moment . . . the Heath [Anthology] institutionalizes our own moment's anti-canonical imperative.... It renders as pedagogy a movement in criticism and scholarship that has, to my mind, been the most significant since World War II. As such, it is a symbol, a symbol of both product and process in the remaking of American Literature for present and future generations." The publication of this two volume textbook, it would seem, has been a major cultural event, fully justifying the aura of national consequence that has accompanied it from the days of planning to its arrival at the display booth at the MLA convention. As the widespread interest in Helen Vendler's recent review of feminism and literary criticism reminds us, the literary world can be divided into those who see art as a direct instrument of social change and those who do not. It has been ever so, at least in this country. The Pilgrims rejected Thomas Morton's song and dance for the same reasons they destroyed his plantation: since he did not think and write as they did, he would not advance God's earthly kingdom in New England. Emerson escaped Morton's fate but raised similar questions among the social activists of his time by choosing a path that did not lead to Brook Farm or Fruitlands. More recently, Irving Babbitt mocked those who met the day's challenges by forming committees to save civilization, although he and his fellow Neo- Humanists inspired many such committees to challenge, among other things, H. L. Mencken's insistence that art is no more immoral or moral than an isosceles triangle. In the first instance, the issue is the compatibility of different and competing visions of society; in the second, alternative approaches to complementary community benefits; in the third, the role assigned to art in the education and organization of human life. Each of these issues has helped shape the Heath anthology that ultmately appeared on my desk, for this is a book about power, about who has had it and used it to shape American society and who has not. It is also about power in the academy, a reaction to the political and economic success enjoyed by aesthetic formalists since T. S. Eliot concluded that "it is never what a poem says that matters, but what it is." Eliot equated literary criticism with philosophy but usually stopped in his own work "at the frontier of metaphysics." Later critics have not so limited themselves. From John Crowe Ransom and Northrop Frye to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, fundamental probing into the nature of language and literature has developed as both explicit and implied response to the political and moral positions of mid-war socialists and Neo-Humanists who saw art as direct and readily available criticism of life-- and the theoretical formalists and their heirs continue to hold most of the best jobs. World War II forced a national harmony that could only be temporary, as the 1960s dramatized so powerfully, and so it was perhaps inevitable that postmodern literary discourse would either continue to ask its often-discomfiting ontological and epistemological questions about the nature of art and the ways it means or return to the enduring and ever-more-insistent issues of social and economic justice. The editors of these volumes pay little heed to recent theoretical debates but draw instead on several decades of multidisciplinary research in the social sciences to address once again the inequitable America challenged by Mike Gold, Granville Hicks, and V.F. Calverton. But their renewed cry for relevance has a freshly sharpened cultural perspective nowhere evident in the work of their predecessors. In place of an earlier exploited proletariat whose values and worldview often proved little different from those of its more fortunate capitalist overseers, here we have the far more incisively defined powerlessness of women, African, Spanish, Asian, and Native Americans. "Good politics does not necessarily produce good writing. Paul Lauter (1:1193) This powerlessness, its deliberate infliction by what the Heath editors call "mainstream" cultural force, and the confidence that a new day has brought marginalized voices a hearing--these assumptions shape what is otherwise a diverse collection of editorial selection and comment As the old Cambridge History of American Literature, Spiller's Literary History of the Uted States, and the recent Columbia literary history demonstrate, the work of many hands often makes a book of several kinds. At some moments this one urges alternative canon composed of writing by the select groups mentioned above (not all the nation's victims of prejudice by any means); at others, it warns of an inevitable opposition between mainstream art and suppressed underground waterways; at still others, it offers an upbeat vision of tributary currents enhancing that mainstream. Coloring the whole is the doubtless unavoidable conflict between those editors who rejected traditional anthologies as contaminated by the inequitable culture that produced them and a publisher--so rumor informs me-- who insisted on sufficient representation from the mainstream to ensure that his texts could compete with those same traditional anthologies. Though the many hands involved must have lightened the labors, the mere quantity of written material considered and the efforts to conceptualize a nation's literature afresh represents a prodigious undertaking. Lauter worked with a 13-member editorial board, which was assisted in turn by 171 subcontractors who suggested and introduced one or more selections. None ofthe editors' commentary is indexed, but their names are listed in Lauter's prefatory remarks and appear after their essays. Selections were determined by the board after surveying and consulting more than a thousand teachers of the national literature who nominated some 500 writers for inclusion. "Instead of basing our initial selection on that of previous anthologies or on our graduate school training, and then supplementing or subtracting according to our own principles," Lauter writes, "we began with the vast range of the literary output of this country and have narrowed from that," discovering, he adds, "virtually a new literary world" (1: xxxviii). According to Smith in the Heath Newsletter, the final text offers selections from 300 writers, "assembled by over 300 scholars, editors, and reviewers, amassing almost 6000 pages of text." Not an Anacharsis Cloots congress, to be sure, but occasionally reminiscent of the horse designed by committee. Here the committee was very large, so it should surprise no one that the results are uneven. Not all of the contributing editors write well, nor, as I have indicated, do they all share the same sense of purpose. While some use their allotted space for special pleading, many confine themselves to the customary biographical detail in entries much like those of their innumerable dedicated predecessors. As Lauter puts it, somewhat disingenuously, the shared responsibility of the enterprise "offers readers differing approaches to authors and varied writing styles in headnotes and introductions. In a way, these critical differences reflect the very diversity ofthe literature included here" (1: xxxviii). Not all these differences have such a discernible critical orientation, but when the circumstances are remembered, the hundreds of individual author introductions are almost always competent and useful sources of biographical and bibliographical information. Many indeed might rest comfortably in more traditional anthologies, perhaps seeming a little old-fashioned even there. If "a new literary world" is to be found, its location must be traced, not through a synthesis of the brief introductions to individual authors, but in the major essays contributed by Lauter and his editorial board. Even here, as we might expect with such an ambitious venture, not every part of the book seems aware of what other parts have done or will do. (We have, for example, Bradford's and Morton's Merrymount, but not Hawthorne's.) Indeed, we might best consider the two volumes in their several major sections, sections which in effect form several independent books. Depending on how one counts, there are six or seven such separate entities, each introduced in a lengthy essay written by one or more of the general editors, often with the supporting advice of other editors, and most containing additional commentary that supplements the opening remarks and defines subdivisions of the larger units. After Lauter's 10- page preface, the pages devoted to the "Colonial Period: to 1700" (445 pp.) and the "Colonial Period: 1700-1800" (730 pp.) are introduced by Carla Mulford and Wendy Martin. Lauter himself concludes volume one by guiding us through the "Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865" (1740 pp.), while Elaine Hedges takes responsibility for the "Late Nineteenth Century: 1865-1910" (930 pp.), which opens volume two. Charles Molesworth's "Modern Period: 1910- 1945 " shares 130 of its 830 pages with Hortense Spillers's "Harlem Renaissance" before the final 830 pages of volume two turn to Linda Wagner- Martin's selections from the "Contemporary Period: 1945 to the Present." At first glance, these volumes recalled nothing so much as the first anthology of American literature I ever saw, the Scribner's edited by Joe Lee Davis, John T. Frederick, and Frank Luther Mott that appeared in 1949. That text opens with reference to "our complex times" and promises to present "the significant sociological aspects of our literature" along with "the ideological . . . problems faced" by our writers. There are travel accounts, diary entries, letters, speeches, and sermons, along with the more familiar belles lettres currently in favor, all grouped in thematic sections such as exploration and settlement--where "translations supplement the English documents to show the polyglot nature of our early culture"--or religious thought and experience, or the issues of democracy. In short, it was, like all our books, representative of its time, a time of insistent inter- disciplinarity and the burgeoning social and cultural questioning we have institutionalized as American Studies. Though the Scribner's contains work by women, African Americans, and Native Americans, and much uncanonical material reprinted by Heath, 40 years does make a difference. We know much more now about Native-American life and the role played in it by oratory, dance, and song; we understand marginality and some of its effects on the work of women, African Americans, and--at long last--Asian and Spanish Americans; and we have experienced some five decades of questioning on the nature of art and meaning, on art itself as a value and a shaper of value, on the relation of texts to a world of diverse and contradictory ideologies--from the inquiries into the interpenetration of form and content of the New Critics to the epistemological perplexities of poststructuralism. Not all this experience is directly apparent in the Heath anthology, but most of it is either there or quite designedly not there. With 1740 pages devoted to the early nineteenth century, Lauter's section stands near his anthology's center, in bulk as well as in principles and freshness of selection. And it comes the closest to resolving the tensions that bid fair to doom his entire enterprise from the start. For the general editor under- understands that what he has undertaken is the marriage of two distinct theories of art that have rarely cohabited comfortably. In his desire to retain the centrality of an American Renaissance originally conceived in terms of aesthetic value, he brings us Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman. It is a Renaissance cleansed of romantic Idealism, but it nevertheless holds in place a canonical tradition that will stretch to Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and Longfellow. In his desire to expand this canon, however, Lauter embraces an art of social relevance, its value based in copies sold and readers motivated to action. Unlike some of his collaborators, Lauter grasps both the different criteria and the stakes involved. In his effective comparison of Longfellow and Dickinson (1: 2639~0), he shows himself in full command of formalist methodology and the cultural analysis it can support. But his heart is in the quotation from Tocqueville condemning the dissolution of community caused by the vice of antisocial individualism -(1: 1212) and in the five sections of "Issues and Visions in Pre-Civil War America" that fill 300 of his pages. Lauter knows that many of the voices he celebrates, those of women, abolitionists, Native and Spanish Americans, do not have the aesthetic aspiration or speak with the formal effectiveness valued in the mainstream canon and normally presented in anthologies of literature. He confronts this dilemma head-on again and again: "[M]uch literature of the early nineteenth century was directed to influencing the audience's ideas about issues of the time and thus their actions in the world. Today's readers have often been taught that such hortatory writing is inherently less valuable than what is called 'belles lettres,' which appear to make no claims on our actions . . . that 'literature' and 'propaganda' are as different as elephants and ivy. But in the early nineteenth century there were few advocates of such 'art for art's sake' theories in the United States" (1: 1752, 1185). But there are now, or at least many who will distinguish between effective artistry and successful propaganda and who will assume that an "Anthology of American Literature" undertakes to guarantee the aesthetic consequence of its contents. Explaining the historical context and popular appeal of sentimental fiction is not quite the same thing as establishing its beauty, and Lauter knows it (1: 1197). He tries to have it both ways--or three ways, actually--by adding that, "apart from their inherent interest," the materials he collects "also affected the conceptions of character and conflict in many of the period's fictions, like The Scarlet Letter and Uncle Tom's Cabin." Moreover, "while the issues provide our organizing principle, we have not included works simply because they are of historical interest. Rather, we feel that the essays, poems, sketches, and letters printed here continue to speak ef~ectively to readers today" (1: 1753; emphasis added). This combination of historicism and twentieth-century activism leaves us without "Snow-Bound" and "Hawthorne and his Mosses," without "A Fable for Critics" and the Deacon's "Wonderful 'One-Hoss-Shay,' " or any Lowell or Holmes whatsoever. More remarkably, we are explicitly denied antebellum Southern writing. Although "good politics does not necessarily produce good writing, nor does even the most vile politics pre- prevent the creation of interesting art," the plantation novels of James Kirke Paulding, John Pendleton Kennedy, and William Gilmore Simms, "whatever their other virtues, consistently display gross racial stereotypes and long-discredited apologies for the slave system.... The victors, it is said, write history; perhaps, too, they establish the terms on which culture continues" (1: 1193, 1194; emphasis added). Remarks like this last one-- Lauter's awareness of his slippery ground--render his contri- contribution to the Heath anthology a fascinating achievement. There is charm in recognizing the issues, anticipating challenges, and taking one's stand. And there is literary sophistication in acknowledging that art too might have its claims, even when they are denied because their social relevance is not obvious or acceptable. A similar sophistication informs the two large divisions that follow Lauter's, while its absence weakens, in differing degrees, the opening and closing portions of the two-volume anthology. Both Molesworth and Hedges adopt Lauter's "Issues and Visions" and "Explorations of an 'American' Self3' classifications to house writing selected primarily for its cultural marginality or sociopolitical significance. (Some may start at finding Henry Adams rubbing shoulders with Upton Sinclair or John Crowe Ransom with Clifford Odets.) But neither Hedges nor Molesworth asks us to abandon our literary judgment when entering their pages. Like Spillers, who contributed an admirable account of the Harlem Renaissance, the editors of the two major sections that carry us from 1865 to 1910 and then on to 1945 remain first and foremost students of verbal art with an interest in widening our sense of what riches our past can supply. In the best American Studies tradition, we are provided with an abundance of political, economic, and social history, all made to serve a literary history that sees art whole as a formal verbal construct always redolent of its originating time and place. Every section of this anthology systematically addresses, along with the mainstream authors of its period, the lesser-known writing of women and ethnic minorities. But only in the survey from 1800 to 1945 do we recognize literary sensibility, an awareness that the roots of our discipline reach deep into the masterworks of the English language. Molesworth's section holds the fewest surprises in the anthology, but it is none the weaker for that. His Modernism is a cultural and aesthetic moment, and he defines it almost entirely in what has become the familiar way, even alluding to the recent debate over the quest for affirmative synthesis beneath wasteland despair. He takes no position, relying instead on a canonical "alienation"--sometimes the more politically trendy "marginality"--to place his selections. We all know that "alienation and experimentation were linked" (2: 1163), but it is comforting to have the textbook editor explain this to our students, to provide a definition of irony, and then go on to illustrate with Stein, Pound, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. ~olesworth defines a writer as someone who works deliberately "with words and artistic forms" (2: 962), and so he separates his polemical selections from his literary history, lumping them into what he himself calls a "miscellany" (2:1668). Spillers has a smaller canvas but one that lends itself to cultural-aesthetic integration rarely achieved in the anthology's pages. "One of the United States' 'modernisms,' alongside Gertrude Stein's 'lost generation,' the Harlem Renaissance pursued a fairly amazing idea--an art directly tied to the fortunes of a political agenda" (2: 1459). Spillers's Renaissance is both a sociopolitical moment and a literary movement that sent "its roots in several directions at once" and "measured its productions against the general claims of a 'modernist' critical synthesis" (2: 1458). Of all the principal editors, only Hedges approaches her task as the teacher we would all like to be. She tells students of the things they will need to know to enjoy the reading ahead, of realism and regionalism and naturalism. She spearks--as we all should--of "exciting and important literature," and I believe her when she lists Twain and James along with Chesnutt, Dunbar, and Cable. After a richly evocative cultural analysis of the Chicago World's Fair she turns her knowledge of the times to recounting their literary history. We learn how minority groups portrayed by contemporary writers and then how members of these groups wrote of the lives they lived. But though her materials are often unfamiliar, her questions are not, for they are the questions that define what we are as students of literature. For example, how changing social conditions altered the plots and themes of earlier domestic fiction, carrying them beyond a "1ived happi1y-ever-after to the challenges of marriage and child-rearing. Hedges describes stories of "women actively seeking self-definition and self-determination" that "become the ground from which their authors can critique and challenge the social, economic, political, and religious arrangements and inequalities of American life." But such stories also, she adds " reflect the efforts of women writers to define a style and a form appropriate to their artistic concerns and predominately female readership."(2:34) Hedges writes a language--a topic curiously ill served by these editors of an anthology of literature--and explains how dialect could be controversial amoung African-American writers committed to a vernacular realism like Twain's but fearful that accurate depiction would demean their race. She connects dialect use by regional writers with the "growing formal sophistication that distinguished prose fiction in this period," the attention to "crafting artful narratives" that led to "emphasis on scenic presentation" and displacement of "intrusive authorial comment" by "carefully controlled points of view" (2: 193). This is a literary sensibility we can trust, and so when she reamrks that all "writing reflects and responds to its time and place, emerges out of a cultural context that animates and helps to shape it," we are the more willing to agree that "the line between writings that seem less governed by their immediate historical circumstances and those that adhere more closely to the issues and occasions of their origins is never hard and fast" (2: 738). For Hedges, the writing collected in "Issues and Visions in Post Civil War America" is serious literary discourse. She centers on style and language: The spare speech of Standing Bear achieves its force through its emotional control as he describes the theft of Indian lands, and it contrasts dramatically with the heavily charged prose of Upton Sinclair, who invokes a barrage of detail in order to arouse horror and disgust at industrial conditions. The richly rounded phrase, inspired by the religious imagery of generations of black preachers, is appropriate for W. E. B. Du Bois's narrative of the spiritual strivings of African-Americans, whereas the dialect style that Marietta Holley uses to call attention to women's continued lack of political rights creates its effects through an intentionally irreverent, anddeflating, humor. (2: 738) Similarly, when she turns to autobiography as an "Exploration of an 'American Self,'" she speaks of spatial metaphors that dramatize an author's sense of confinement or openness, of Mary Austin's "resorting . . . to several voices, including a first- person voice to describe her private self and a third-person one to describe the conventional role and behavior society expected of her." Booker T. Washington created "a public persona" and so reminds us that "autobiography is a literary form, governed by its own narrative conventions, and that in writing the stories of our lives we create 'fictions'--imaginative constructions through which we continue to shape, and understand, ourselves" (2: 851). Spillers closes her Harlem Renaissance essay by describing Cane as a bold "artistic project . . . that explodes generic boundaries. Not altogether poetry, prose, or drama, Jean Toomer's work encompasses all three in a symbolist poetics that offers a decisive departure from everything around it. This brooding work . . . refuses easy resolution and can be said to anticipate late twentieth-century developments in creative writing and critical discourse" (2: 1459). Would that Spillers had extended her discussion into the postwar period, for, alas, our students will learn little of these developments from the book's last pages. Molesworth abandons his efforts at synthesis momentarily and calls the result a miscellany. Like the other Heath editors, Wagner-Martin describes in rich, useful detail the social and political changes of her assigned era, and like them she embraces a multicultural nation whose marginalized women and minority writers have been bound in silence by a mainstream conspiracy of taste. Our editor, Heath tells us, is the author of 30 books on modern American literature, and they doubtless provide a context and rationale for her anthology selections; here she merely indicates her distaste for both Modernism and Postmodernism and has very little to say about either. For her, the principal literary story of the last four decades concerns the "minorities and women, homosexuals and political radicals," who have produced "some of the most important writing of this century," a "new American literature" (2: 1765, 1769). Proceeding by decades, Wagner-Martin devotes half-again as much space to the sixties as to the fifties and seventies. Most of us will agree that civil rights activism and the women's movement have been central moments of postwar history, and we all know that choosing to read or ignore a text can be a political act. But I wonder whether these insights will help us teach our students what literature is or provide the literary history necessary to relate an individual work to other writing of its own or earlier times. When one's focus is limited by a definition of literature that addresses only plot and theme and when one believes the world is readily knowable, one will value only agitprop and effective social and political agendas in writing "squarely and directly about the world and its problems" (2:1775). Arthur Miller's The Crucible becomes the best example of"the critical purpose of literature during the 1950s" (2: 1773), Edward Albee's plays a clear demonstration of "what a number of America's problems were" (2: 1775). Some curious results of such an approach are a preference for Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye over Joyce Carol Oates's The Wheel of Love "because the latter's flatly objective style . . . never quite explained to readers what her own views were about the social situations she etched so carefully," a conclusion akin to her remark that Susan Sontag's reportage and fiction "adopted what appeared to be a male voice" (2: 1781, 1783). The successful marketing of feminist and minority writing in recent decades, we are told, means that we can now "choose from a wide variety of good fiction, poetry, and drama" (2:1785), but "good" is nowhere defined as anything but what the editor finds socially and politically acceptable. We would never know from her account that James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain differs in any way from his other novels or his polemical prose. And when she does suggest that questions of formal mastery of material might be raised, she quickly returns to the immediate relevance of content and theme. Not surprisingly, she feels postwar modernist poetry was "distant from reality as students knew it," hiding its "message" in images and symbols (2: 1772-73), but I was astounded to read that its fragmented fiction "created texts that tried to avoid reflecting the life that seemed increasingly absurd" (2: 1775). Postmodern writing is equally evasive and comes "to no real conclusions," thereby erecting opposition to "some feminist and ethnic minority artists . . . over the latter's desire to create works that move people in specific directions" (2: 1784). That our culture is plural and that we all need moving in some direction to make it a better one, few would want to deny. And although my values differ somewhat from Wagner- Martin's--though not as dramatically as she will assume--it is not her values that I question here. It is her confident assumption that reality is easy to know and easy to represent directly in language, that telling it like it is, as we used to say, is evaded only by those with interests to hide or privilege to protect. These assumptions narrow her vision and destroy the usefulness of her survey. The past 40 years, as she says, have been extraordinarily exciting ones, but her account gives little hint of revolution in the arts or in their serious appreciation. This is an annotated annal of personal likes and dislikes, not literary history as Spillers, Hedges, and Molesworth understand the activity--indeed, I can imagine several class hours devoted to reconciling the pictures of Modernism painted by Molesworth and Wagner-Martin. If what we want from an editorial introduction is a narrative of literary development to enhance our students' reading of the anthology's texts, we will have to look elsewhere for help. The colonial sections and the final contemporary portion of the Heath anthology are notably different from the 150-year survey that separates them; they might almost have been prepared for publication somewhere else and addressed to different audiences. Their editors enjoyed an opportunity not available in quite the same way to their colleagues: both the earliest and latest years covered in the Heath survey are inchoate, both cry for shape, for identification of artistically significant material and a fresh rethinking of traditional literary assumptions. In the late twentieth century, Postmodernism has yet to be adequately defined, while colonial writing has frequently suffered dismissal as bereft of any literary consequence whatever. The and have fashioned very different responses. To my mind, neither approach is wholly adequate to the literary questions involved, but both reflect heartfelt commitment to a social vision darkened with outrage at inequality and injustice. What Mulford and Martin provide makes no attempt at a definition or survey of literary discourse. As Norman Grabo writes in the Heath promotional brochure, "If one is to ask, what is the appropriate understanding of the social and demographic and geogrpahic background of the period roughly between 1500 and 1700, this is the best introduction I know..." Here is the material we all missed in school, the broad information we vainly imagine our colleagues in history are providing our students; here too is the recent work of ethnographers and anthropologists. The perspective is revisionist as we follow the invasion of Americaby ethnocentric "Euroamericans" whose writing was an instrument for exerting dominance over the new land and its indigenous residents. Within their socioeconomic frame, Mulford and Martin expand our understanding of settlement by counterpointing the views of Native Americans with those of British, French, and Spanish explorers and colonizers, and their range remains as wide in their second section when they stretch the traditional canon to include often unfamiliar work by women, African Americans, and Spanish Americans. These materials rest side by side with more standard anthology fare. In the first section Columbus and Champlain join Smith, Morton, Winthrop, and Bradford, while Bradstreet, Wigglesworth (but no Day of Doom), and Taylor appear after 40 pages of Native-American creation myths, folk tales, and verse. The Southwest is re-created as an integral part of the colonial experience, particularly with the seminal myth of the Spanish settlers, The Virgin of Guadalupe; Spaniards and Native Americans collide in the documents of the Pueblo revolt of 1680. The second section contains ample selections from Edwards and Franklin and all of The Contrast, while Sewall and Woolman are joined by the recently recovered Quaker autobiographer Elizabeth Ashbridge. We have some correspondence not only between Adams and Jefferson but also between Adams and his wife, Abigail, not only some Federalist papers but also some Anti-Federalist argument as well, along with ballads and songs dear to nationalists or loyalists that dramatize the conflicting allegiances of the revolutionary years. There is a lengthy, coherent fragment from Brockden Brown, along with selections from Hannah Foster's The Coquette and Susanna Rowson's Charlotte, including "Chapter 33: Which People Void of Feeling Need Not Read." In introducing John Leacock, Mulford notes that he is little known because his writing "emerged as much from propaganist motives as from a traditionally valued 'literary' aesthetic or impulse" (1: 882); her formulation describes many of the less familiar writers represented here. It is good to have the Leacock selections, as it is to have those of Prince Hall, the African-American Mason; Samson Occum's temperance address at his execution; and the numbing tetrameter of 11 prewar women poets. The editors occasionally make limited literary claims for their choices, but they speak more often of ideological hegemony, power groups, and economic motivations. We are invited to read the selections by Champlain because they show his "curiosity about the new world he was exploring and his first fight with the Iroquois Indians," while the chronicle of Edward Wingfield "illuminates the personal pressures facing colonial leaders and identifies a number of critical political and social issues central to the founding of democratic governments in the new world" (1: 131, 164). As a result of the editorial preoccupation with historical statement, a few perplexining questions are never addressed If "colonial culture . . . was an oral culture" until the mid-eighteenth century (1: 460), in what way are later transcriptions the verbal embodiment of the original expression? More troubling yet, what about translation? In the multicultural nation celebrated by the Heath editors, there are apparently no language barriers. One would never guess from these pages that the structuralist debates of the seventies and eighties, with the work of Paul de Man and George Steiner on translation, had ever occurred. I found no discussion whatever of the literary--or even historically distorting--implications of translation throughout the anthology and only one identification of a translator. This is the case with all the writing from the Spanish, and it surfaces later in the poetry carved on the walls at Angel Island by Chinese immigrants and with selections from other Asian-American authors who do not write in English. The Native-American materials, in particular, prompt us to question the relationship of language and art. As we have the Native-American tales, songs, and speeches, they all resonate with much the same translator-ethnographer-anthropologist voice, a kind of movie Indian--how this would sound if they had known English or had set it down in English. If our literary canon is to be broadened to include the whole of a multicultural, multilingual nation, we must ask at the outset how we are to gain access to these varied materials and just what we are doing when we read a Native-American song heard years before and only partially followed at the time. Gaspar Perez de Villagra's History of New Mexico is an attempt at epic, with divisions into cantos and long verse sec- sections that give way to prose. Here is an opportunity missed to dlscuss translation, literary aspiration, the suitability of epic form for exploring the American adventure. Similarly, Rowlandson's captivity narrative prompts no reference to formal precedent or rhetorical structuring, and Bradstreet is commended as "a model for future generations of women" (1: 257). I am sampling here from a few of the contributing editors; since their work is not indexed or identified in the table of contents, it is difiicult to bring together separate pieces by the same individual, so it was something of a happy accident that I found several exemplary brief introductions by Kenneth Alan Hovey. His John Smith entry gives us 1609 and 1624 versions of a single episode for rhetorical comparison, and he does the same quite delightfully by interleaving William Byrd's public diary with his italicized private one. There is a similar sense of aesthetic value in his Cotton Mather discussion, and his intro to seventeenth-century wit turns most fruitfully on the very literary-historical concerns the general editors neglect. There are other trustworthy guides to the artistic challenges of colonial writing: Karen E. Rowe on Taylor, Laraine Fergenson on Rowson, David S. Shields on Freneau, David M. Larson on Franklin. For general editors Mulford and Martin, literature is what- whatever written materials have been left to us. Like the editors of the Literary History of the United States, they set out to bring us the historical America portrayed in these documents. And they succeed; their two sections show the latest developments in cultural study to their very best advantage. Both their America and the writing they deem relevant range more widely than is customary in earlier anthologies, and I learned a great deal. I suspect that is why, with Cathy Davidson, I found this material "rich, exciting, new." Like most of my generation, I am least familiar with this period and so, perhaps, more receptive to redefinition. Then, too, colonial research has long been a favored heir of American Studies and interdisciplinary approaches generally because the theoretical questionings of art are rarely introduced to challenge the less complex domain of broad cultural inquiry. Unfortunately, once a text's aesthetic meanings are addressed, whether in poem, cockfight, or wrestling match, the admirable and ambitious goals pursued by the Heath editors come to seem ever more elusive. "What validates us as human beings validates us as writers." Gloria Anzaldua (2: 1765) In a democracy, every voice must be heard. The effort is long overdue to see and feel the multicultural presence in the nation's discourse, to understand America as a complex heerogeneous culture from its very beginning.. But we lose a useful word when we insist that whatever is written is literature. Volume one contains a short poem, "Art," a welcome reminder of the distinction I am trying to draw: In placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme- But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel--Art. (1: 2584) Herman Melville is not usually associated with formalist criticism, and yet he insists that form and its fusion with substance are essential to the "pulsed life" of art. During the past two decades, as American literature has won its way to the center of many English departments, its teachers have become less and less involved with the American Studies movement that helped them secure academic legitimacy. Concern with the historical, contextual issues ofthe 1950s that created the American Studies Association and American Quarterly has passed to those committed to and trained in the social sciences (whose own economic and political power base was shrinking as their governmental funding diminished). Where American Studies initially turned on a literary-historical-philosophical axis and sought masterworks across disciplinary lines, often coming to rest on the well-written and coherent discourse of a Henry Adams or William James, today's American Studies is occasionally enlisted to support a political neo-orthodoxy descended from the shouting-down activism of the late sixties. No one wants to deny that art communicates and that what it communicates or may bear directly on our communal life. But what it is that is communicated by a movie or a poem and how that communication takes place is precisely what we want our students to question. If art is consulted for its surface statement, we make it didactic and invite censorship based on the supposed validity and acceptability of that statement--as in fact happens when the Heath editors suppress the writing of the Old South. We rarely see the word art these days, and Americanists discussing what literature is and what it is about are becoming equally rare. The Heath anthology shows little concern for what can be called "literariness," nor does it say much about how students are to recognize it when they see it. What is literature, and why do we teach it? To understand society so that it can be changed? Or to see ourselves and our world as a way of understanding human life and the society it deserves? Why read a slave narrative in a survey of the nation's literature? To instruct ourselves on the inequities and suffering imposed on our fellows by slavery? To recognize that African Americans too can organize their experience and commit it to paper? Or is it for the sake of the narrative itself, to appreciate it in the context of human narrative generally, to expand our grasp of what we can suffer and create? The Heath is, as I have suggested, basically an American Studies anthology that centers its attention on presenting the US, not "literary excellence." The editors believe, I am sure, that any test of excellence I might base on aesthetic or rhetorical concerns has been preempted by the corrupt society that has evolved it, but I do not think their criteria of inclusion have escaped this conditioning process merely because they have substituted the currently relevant for what others consider the enduringly well written. While we can all celebrate their supplementing the ideologically narrowed canon of our predecessors, we can wonder at taste that pays more attention to Joseph Heller than Thomas Pynchon, that finds space for Upton Sinclair but none for Vladimir Nabokov. As students of literature we must eventually either return to the vexed questions of art and beauty or abandon our discipline to the celebrated neutrality and endemic lack of discrimination of the social sciences. It is doubtless a fault of our tenure system that young PhDs have no time to learn about their new profession, its struggle to establish its credibility, the history of its ongoing conversation about its subject matter and viable approaches to it. So we reinvent the wheel each decade. It may often be a workable wheel, but it seems wasteful to ignore earlier models without making certain our innovations are actually improvements. The originating challenge in the study of American literature its need to win an academic place despite the energetic resist of teachers of English literature. Readers of memoirs and histories of the field appearing during the last two decades, or, most recently, Gerald Graff and Kermit Vanderbilt, know that the existence of any canon whatsoever is a victory worth celebrating. That students can pursue a PhD or major in American literature owes much to a half-century of nationalist politics and governmental intervention, to Fulbright and the USIS as well as to the American Studies Association and the American Literature Section of the MLA. But before these developments of the forties and fifties, there were the uphill battles of F. L. Pattee, William Charvat, H. H. Clark, Norman Foerster, Robert Spiller, F. O. Matthiessen, Perry Miller, and many others. For all its historical claims, the Heath anthology is curiously ahistorical--or rather, its historical memory begins in the mid- forties and takes defining shape in the sixties. In 1944, the journal American Literature was only 15 years old, having appeared the year after Jay Hubbell, Foerster, Pattee, and others provided the definitional clarifications of The Reinterpretation oSAmerican Literature. The next two decades produced American Renaissance and LHUS and led directly to the founding of American Quarterly in 1951. These successes were the result of constant and acrimonious struggle. V. L. Parrington twice had his salary reduced because he insisted on teaching American authors; Stanley Williams advised Charles Feidelson against working with American literature because there could be no professional future in that direction. Newer generations should remember, as William Bradford puts it, "what difficulties their fathers wrestled in going through these things in their first beginnings." The prevailing assumption regarding American literature during most of this century was that there isn't any-- an attitude that can even now be encountered in academic hallways. What readers familiar with the story will miss in this anthology is the sense of wonder some of us feel that there are American literature courses, degrees, anthologies at all. The Heath editors use canon in several different ways, but often with the implication that what we have is the result of a conspiracy, a restrictive formulation deliberately constructed by elite white males that intentionally excludes others, as Mr. Smith believes, "because of race or gender." This aura of persecution totally belies the actual history of American literary scholars fighting to establish their legitimacy in persistently hostile departments of English. Neither the MLA's Eight American Authors bibliography of 1956 nor anthologies and courses based on it were prompted by the New Critics to enclose a WASP canon in amber, as Davidson suggests in her endorsement of the Heath volumes; they were rather an effort to begin defining a national literary tradition where it seemed least vulnerable. There is an irony in the fact that eight writers like Mencken and Van Wyk Brooks a chorus or cultural naysayers, that they were the newly discovered/created Usable past, radical voices turned against the reigning genteel tradition of schoolroom poets and what Mencken called rosewater uplift. We should celebrate the courage of these maverick. there were few Jews, African Americans, women, or second-generation immigrants to expand their conventional education in the universities where they worked was not directly their doing; without their determination, the remarkable expansion of scholarship and the proliferation of courses, with the consequent opportunity for faculty appointments and textbook risk ventures such as the Heath, are unimaginable. Surely an Eight American Authors (1969) was a necessary first step toward Sixteen American Authors Before 1900 (1971). The Heath volumes take these struggles and victories for granted, just as they assume but make little use of what they call a mainstream literary tradition. All the energy expended to emphasize a richer cultural diversity as a basis for understanding our literature, and especially its genesis, has curiously neglected the traditional soil that diverse achievements tap for nourishment. Even if we agree that, for whatever reasons, the mainstream canon has been narrowly conceived, we cannot escape knowing what today's writers read and what the writers they know had read in turn. That take us not only to the Bible, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, but to those same eight American authors. As we have seen, our students can read these writers in the Heath anthology, but what they will not find is much suggestion that this is the past, narrow as it may be, that so many later writers have used to define themselves with or against--the tradition that their work undertakes to continue, counteract, or expand. As experienced instructors we know very well what this mainstream tradition is and perhaps even how it has come to dominate other anthologies of American literature. But our students will not find our knowledge validated in these pages. They will sense that somehow everything has been seen through a glass darkly till now, but at least they can engage the nation and its writing directly, face to face. In a letter to John Adams, Jefferson expressed disappointment in Joseph Francois Lafitau's study of Native Americans. "Unluckily," Jefferson remarks, "Lafitau had in his head a preconceived theory on ...mythology, manners, institutions and government...and seems to have entered on those of America only to fit them into the same frame, and to draw from them a confirmation of his general theory" (1:988). An anthology is a defining statement. though not a definitive one. Like a dictionary, it describes our practice at a specific historical moment--which is why both must be repeatedly rewritten. The Heath anthology is a major monument to Populism, Progressivism, and our long tradition of indigenous radicalism, to 40 years of American Studies movement, the widespread public disenchantment's of the sixties, and our present outrage at social inequity and the limited mainstream grasp and scant appreciation of the cultural visions shared by many of our compatriots. This book will make a better America by acquainting all of us with minds and hearts as yet unknown to our philosophy, by providing a richly stocked warehouse, a crowded two-volume library for thoughtful browsing. But it will doubtless prove most useful for those who can see how new complements old, less so for casual reader or the student unfamiliar with the wider implications of this cafeteria of choices. It has not set itself to make better readers and writers. For those among us who believe that reading a complex literary text is good practice for reading our intransigent daily world, this may not be the textbook to choose. There will be disappointment, too, among those who read American art as in some fundamental ways a romantic art, as well as those interested in the intertexual interplay of national literatures, for there is no sense of cosmopolitan literary traditions here or concern for the seminal influences of European high Romanticism. Those who have learned to see all literary history as comparatist may well feel this quest for American identities recalls a nineteenth century nationalism we cannot afford and no longer desire. Pluralism fully developed would doubtless blur all distinguishing local features and lead to a final disintegration of nationality, but this does not appear to be the goal in the Heath pages. Crevecoeur's "What is an American" is revisited to redefine the issues more popularly and complexly, to trace ethnic roots to a rich new American identity, but even this celebration of diversity and cultural pluralism may not be welcomed everywhere. The reigning premise appears to be that minorities are in fact different from the mainstream populace, that consequently their writing is different, which is why is has suffered neglect and now must be made more widely available. But in terms of their differences from the mainstream--a women's art, an African-American art, a Chicano art--these labels announce an equal-but-separate status many have worked diligently to dissolve. The enshrining of differences can reinforce the familiar sense of "doubleness" so often lamented by many of the culturally disenfranchised. Then too there is the curious topicality of the minorities selected for attention--women, African, Native, Spanish, and Asian Americans. In his second Newsletter, Paul Smith acknowledges other "minority constituencies (teenagers, the elderly, 'rednecks,' evangelicals, Canadanians) but affirms the emphasis on gender and race in the present edition. There seems something a bit faddish in offering little more than a passing nod to the rich efflorescence of Jewish writing and the Southern Renaissance of the present century, or an entire Southern corpus from the last. A final query might address the epistemological yet, even the contradiction, in some editors espousing pluralism of vision and languages of power while celebrating telling it like it is in a mimetic real language of the real world. Every book has its vision. If you share that of the Heath editors, you will find a wealth of material here to help you explore it with your students. Or if you think we already have about as much canon as we can handle in two semesters, you may happily remain with your Norton or McMichael or Bradley Beatty, and Long. But if you feel--as I do--that our understanding of the literary past could do with some stretching if it can be done without compromising the nourishing balance of formal problems and ideological texture, then look again at the new anthology from Harper. Although it has arrived among us a good deal less noisily, it has the virtues and many of the fresh materials of the Heath without its stridency. It too has its bias. Its editors define literature as an art form, and they have determined from the start that their essays and their selections address the values of a nation's art for students of a national literature. As for the Heath anthology of American writing, there is Lillian S. Robinson's suggestion that welcoming its publication might well be our civic duty. She may be right. At the MLA dinner celebrating the arrival of the first volumes, Smith linked them to recent developments in international politics- "Everywhere there are new currents of thought, new voices being heard, old walls being torn down, and a fresh attitude of acceptance for differences in perspective and human experience Our anthology embodies process, progress, change, Just as do the movements in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Thus, next week," he announced, "I am sending in the spirit of glasnost a special copy of The Heath Anthology of American Literature to Soviet President Milchail Gorbachev." Who knows, perhaps these pages will help us to a better world. But I cannot recommend them without reservation for surveying American literature unless you consciously discriminate in your teaching on the basis of gender, race, or nation of origin. Works Cited Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. "Between Individualism and Fragmentation: American Culture and the New Lit- erary Studies of Race and Gender." American Quarterly 42 (1990): 7-4 Robinson, Lillian S. "I, Too, Am America--I." Rev. of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter et al. Nation 2 July 1990: 22-24. Vendler, Helen. "Feminism and Literature." New York Review of Books 31 May 1990: 19-25. Vendler, Helen, et al. "Feminism and Literature: An Exchange." New York Review of Books 16 Aug. 1990: 58-59.