Introduction of American Literature - Pre-Reading Thoughts
Introduction of American Literature - Pre-Reading Thoughts
People try to account for America and understand
America by studying its literature. Nevertheless, as successful as the American
experiment has been, most people, even college-educated people, have a shallow
and superficial knowledge of the American literary patrimony.
America’s widespread ignorance of its past feeds
popular misunderstanding. In this American literature course, we will confront
some of the popular myths and misconceptions about Americans and their
literature. Consider a few commonplace ideas about America.
Many people believe that the American settlers
introduced slavery to the new world. Another popular belief is that America was
largely uninhabited and presented vast space and plentiful untouched resources
ready for the picking by 17th-century European settlers. Another often-repeated
view is that American Indians in Pre-Colombian times were living harmoniously
in peace with each other and one with nature.
The concept of the American Indians’ love of nature
was depicted in a long-running public service media campaign, launched in 1971,
depicting a man in Indian dress crying over clutter. More recently, many people
in the 21st century, following anti-colonialist theory, see European settlers
as capitalists and colonizers who came to America on a mission to expand
European influence.
Were
America’s founding fathers, such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas
Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, supporters of slavery and morally ambivalent
about its continuation in America? This is a wildly popular thesis in
21st-century America. These and other questions will intrigue us as we complete
the course, and our view of
our heritage, both its literature and its history
will evolve. If someone reads and contemplates the implications of our assigned
texts, he/she will be surprised, enlightened, and perhaps transformed by what
he/ she will learn.
That is a pretty bold promise, but if you engage
these materials with a sincere desire to learn, this course will not
disappoint. But before we begin our journey, let me make a few introductory
remarks about our subject, American literature.
What
do we mean by American literature? What is literature, and what makes some
literature American while other literature is not?
Literature can be defined as any text of significant
or lasting artistic value.
By this definition, a cake recipe or an account ledger would likely not cut
literature. But even a political document or speech, such as The Declaration of
Independence or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, would qualify.
As
a practical matter, American Literature is usually confined to texts written or
produced in the United States, including its preceding colonies before the
American declaration of independence. But some literary critics, philosophers,
and historians have restricted the subject matter even further. For example,
the 19th-century author and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that American
literature needed to be uniquely American. In his speeches and writings, he
complained that American literature did not yet exist in his time.
Emerson
claimed that literature in America had no unique or even distinctive features.
He thought that contemporary literature from America could be written by
anybody in Europe anywhere in Europe. Emerson was uneasy because he believed
that American writers were merely carrying on European traditions. In response,
Emerson famously called for the creation of a new type of literature,
distinctly "American" literature. In his now-famous address to the
Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, Emerson proclaimed, "our day of
dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a
close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed
on the sere remains of foreign harvests.”
Emerson believed that America needed a break from the
past and a new and noble project to remake America in an American image. Is the
only thing different about American literature the simple fact that it is being
scribbled to paper on American soil?
No, claimed The Sage of Concord.
Still,
by his highly-restrictive definition, one might argue that Walt Whitman is the
first to write a text that qualifies as real “American literature.” Here, we
will examine some of Emerson’s arguments.
Nevertheless, I do not consider valid Emerson’s
restrictive argument about what makes literature “American."
By
his definition, The Declaration of Independence would not qualify as American
literature because its inspiration came from European authors such as John
Locke and Thomas Reid. The traditional definition of American literature is
also too restrictive. Written on American soil? Should we exclude The Mayflower
Compact from American Lit because it was written aboard a ship and agreed to
before the pilgrims landed? Must we exclude Christopher Columbus’s journal of
his first voyage because it was partly penned during the Atlantic crossing and
he missed mainland America? Is Herman Cortes written out of American Lit
because he sailed from what we know as Cuba and landed in what we now call
Mexico? Are John Adams’s writings from France or England something other than
American literature? What about those foreign-born texts of Benjamin Franklin
or Thomas Jefferson? When pilgrims, settlers, explorers, or adventurers came to
The New World, they knew nothing about our later political divisions, such as
The United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, and The Bahamas. They came to The New
World and their journeys and experiences of their many individual Tories are part
of a single story, Europe’s discovery, exploration, and settlement of that
world.
Breaking
up these stories in some artificial division based on political events hundreds
Of years later makes little sense. There is simply no reason to forfeit the
story of the French settlement of saying Quebec in 1608 because that French
settlement eventually became a part of an English colony, now the independent
nation of Canada.
Moreover, if we exclude such sources there is often
little likelihood that anyone else anywhere else will take up the study of many
of these American texts.
Consequently,
the best definition of American Literature is the broadest definition. While it
might be practical to limit the number of pages that students must read in a
short course, the breadth of the available material should be as broad as the
course demands. This means that we should look at the words in American
literature and concede that America is more than one nation in the northern
hemisphere. America consists of two continents. There is ample justification to
consider all of the texts in the Americas North America, Central America, and
South America as potential material for study in a course called American
Literature. Otherwise, there is another naming convention for this course. The
distinction between English Literature and British Literature is instructive.
English
Literature consists of texts in the English language, while British Literature
consists of texts from the British Isles. So, those who teach American
Literature should acknowledge that all of the literary texts written in the
Americas, by Americans, or about the land, plants, animals, or people of
America are legitimately within this course’s literary canon the American
literary canon.
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