American Literature

During the past two decades, a main feature of our nation's "culture wars" has been the increasingly fierce quarrel over the teaching of American literature. Debates about terms such as "cultural literacy," the "canon," "political correctness," and "multiculturalism" have spilled over from the campuses onto the pages of popular magazines and even been featured on the nightly news. Judging from the uproar, one might think that we were seeing nothing less than the end of American literature - or at least the end of any consensus about how to define and teach it. This sense of an ending, however, is equally matched by a feeling of opening horizons, as dozens of forgotten or overlooked books and authors come into view.

Even the classic texts of the tradition have been reopened by new methods of interpretation, so that The Scarlet Letter and Emily Dickinson and The Waste Land suddenly take on unexpected and often disturbing meanings. As the twentieth century comes to an end, much that we have taken for granted about our nation's literature is being challenged. Yet the prospect for the twenty-first century looks bright, for this challenge offers us a vitally enriched tradition and a more diverse set of tools for understanding it.

Arguments opposing recent new directions in the approach to American culture have largely dominated public discussion, from the outcry over museum exhibitions on the American West and the bombing of Hiroshima to congressional hearings on the History Standards project and on reauthorization for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In the trade press, virtually all the headline-grabbing volumes have taken antagonistic positions toward the reform of cultural study, including Dinesh D'Souza Illiberal Education, Allan Bloom Closing of the American Mind, Richard Bernstein Dictatorship of Virtue, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Disuniting of America, and Christina Hoff Sommers's Who Stole Feminism? to name just a few.