American Literature and the Culture Wars

Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now

Henry Gonshak
English, Montana Tech-UM

In the spill-over of the academic "culture wars" into the public square, supporters of traditional humanistic education have clearly been winning the public relations battle. The snide label "politically correct" is now a commonplace in the American vernacular, while anti-PC diatribes such as Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind have become surprise best-sellers. The academic left's failure to score any comparable victories has had tangible, even dire consequences for American higher education; e.g., politicians have leveled the charge that PC radicals have over-run academe to justify legislative cuts in public university funding. Recently, however, some left-wing academics have finally started "writing back" in a way that mirrors the shrewd rhetorical strategy of their right-wing opponents. Donning the mantle of the "public intellectual," they've discarded the notoriously jargon-ridden discourse of most of their far-left colleagues in favor of language accessible to general readers, producing such books as Lawrence Levine's The Opening of the American Mind, Gerald Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars, and John Wilson's The Myth of Political Correctness.

The most recent addition to this genre of uniquely lucid pro-PC tracts is American Literature and the Culture Wars, by University of Wisconsin English professor Gregory Jay. Though the book includes some extended theoretical passages which may lose non-academics, in general, Jay cogently defends such central tenets of PC pedagogy as "identity politics" and multiculturalism, as well as outlines a clear blueprint for the radical restructuring of American literary studies. Although American Literature and the Culture Wars does contain some compelling sections and sharp, independent-minded criticisms of fellow left-wing academics, I highly doubt that Jay's brief on behalf of "academic reform," shorn of the customary obfuscating terminology, will allay the fears of many general readers worried that something is amiss in the contemporary American university.

One of Jay's most disreputable tactics is to unfairly demonize conservative opponents. For example, he says that

"the right responded to reform on campus by carefully constructing an alternate set of representative institutions [which] served as a springboard for placing its own representatives on campus in the form of the National Association of Scholars.... Trained by well-financed experts in the fields of public opinion and media, the messengers of the right soon saw their stories reprinted in most...major newspapers and magazines.... What Michael Berube...called 'the media's big lie' was in fact...manufactured by...the right-wing knowledge industry" (45).

It's hypocritical for Jay to cheer unequivocally all the radical changes the academic left has instituted, only to dredge up this kind of dark, conspiratorial language when describing conservative critics who understandably have objected to policies they consider disastrous. Why shouldn't the NAS open college chapters if there are professors at these schools who wish to join the organization? Since, as a good multiculturalist, Jay staunchly endorses educational diversity regarding race, gender and sexual orientation, why is he outraged at the thought of ideological diversity on campus? Admittedly, there may be some truth to Jay's charge that generous corporate funding of right-wing think-tanks, along with mass media's essentially status-quo mentality, have combined to bias media depictions of the PC debate. But when, quoting Berube, Jay compares the media's criticisms of left-wing profs to the propaganda techniques of Adolph Hitler, he loses any shred of credibility.

Like most far-left academics, however, Jay adamantly opposes not only right-wing ideology, but also "Enlightenment Liberalism" and "liberal humanism"--i.e., the political philosophy which intellectually bolsters American democracy generally, and the classic American university specifically. Regrettably, Jay never either clearly explains how he's defining a concept as complex and multifaceted as liberal humanism, or provides a sustained analysis of what he considers liberalism's major flaws. However, one can piece together Jay's position, especially from the part of the book containing an extended attack on one of the most seminal political documents of Enlightenment Liberalism, the Declaration of Independence. To Jay, the Declaration is a sham since Jefferson, at the same time he was writing that "all men are created equal," was not only a slave-owner, but also would soon help ratify a Constitution that denied political rights to women and blacks. But Jay's objections are philosophical as well. As a proponent of identity politics, he faults the Declaration for "depend[ing] on an ideology of American individualism that emptied the human being of his or her material, historical features--especially ethno-racial, class and gender differences" (76). "Enlightenment Liberalism's...image of the universal man," Jay contends, "turned out to be the reflection of a few European and American white guys"--a ruling elite which manipulated such bogus notions as "universalism" and "individualism" in order to reinforce their Eurocentric, patriarchal power (106).

Jay contrasts what he calls the Declaration's "enabling fictions" with "a series of subversive appropriations, as those who were left out of the original Declaration used its own utopian terms...to challenge...the practices of American democracy" (79). He finds this insurgent counter tradition exemplified by Martin Luther King's immortal "I Have A Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, when King declared:

"When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.... It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned" (95).

In contrast, I read King's speech as an attempt not to subvert America's basic ideals but to realize them--by demanding that the nation finally start practicing what it had been preaching for centuries. When King called the words of the Declaration and Constitution "magnificent," I think he meant it. No adherent of identity politics, King objected not to the principle of "universal rights" itself, but rather to the fact that this principle hadn't been extended to all Americans, especially blacks. Contrary to Jay, I would argue that King's struggle against racial segregation was so successful precisely because his fundamental appeal was so unsubversive, so rooted in the nation's liberal humanist tradition.

In the book's last chapters, "The Discipline of the Syllabus" and "The End of 'American Literature'," Jay turns to the study of American literature. Just as Jay construes the dissemination of Enlightenment's Liberal doctrine as a covert ploy enabling the establishment to maintain its hegemony, so he claims that the traditional canon of American literature slyly fabricated "an idealized face of a very real class...of individuals--what we now...call white (male) patriarchy" (189). The secret aim behind the teaching of canonical American literature, Jay insists, was to sustain both rabid American nationalism and the continued marginalization of the country's racial, ethnic and sexual minorities.

However, Jay's charges collapse once one considers the actual authors who compose the American literary canon. After all, if the critics and professors who, incrementally and rather inchoately, fashioned the canon of 19th century American literature truly had wished to inculcate jingoistic American patriotism, they would have stuck with the most popular authors of the time, a group which, in general, faithfully echoed the culture's dominant ideologies: e.g., Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. Instead, this largely flag-waving canon was replaced by one featuring such radical texts as Thoreau's scathing attack on American capitalism in Walden, Hawthorne's proto-feminist vilifying of the nation's Puritan forefathers in The Scarlet Letter, Melville's profound questioning of Christianity in Moby Dick, and Whitman's homoerotic effusions in Leaves of Grass.

Jay advocates replacing the study of canonical American literature with a field he calls "Writing in the US," whose methodology and text selection is based on two pedagogical principles: "equality of representation," which means ensuring that texts by authors belonging to every conceivable minority group are equally represented on the syllabus, and "cultural work," which translates as analysis of the "work that texts have done--for the people who wrote them, published them, sold them, bought them, read them, borrowed them, or wrote about them" (159). Regarding "equality of representation," I applaud current efforts to reclaim great works of literature by minority or women writers who were previously ignored or disparaged, for racist or sexist reasons, by an overwhelmingly white male critical establishment. But what if an instructor happens to think that writers from one minority group have created a wealth of brilliant literature, while those from another have created very little? Does Jay believe that the teacher should discard great works from the first group, while including mediocre ones from the second, in order to attain perfect "equality of representation"? Moreover, given America's multicultural diversity, how can a professor possibly include literary offerings by members of every imaginable minority without incurring curricular chaos? Most important, Jay's criteria reveal a fatal flaw in identity politics in general--i.e., they reduce writers to nothing more than representatives for a particular race or gender, incapable of expressing individual or (to use a politically incorrect term) universal literary visions.

As for choosing texts according to the "cultural work" they perform, just how serious Jay is about implementing this idea is revealed when he writes:

"I might...decide that I do not have room for Moby Dick in my course on "Antebellum American Fiction," since Melville's novel was a minor episode in light of the cultural importance at the time of texts such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Wide, Wide World, which thousands of readers eagerly bought and debated, while Melville's abstruse story of a whaling voyage sat forlornly on dusty shelves with other poor sellers such as Thoreau's Walden" (189-190).

Jay is right that English teachers should take care to avoid the New Critical tendency to dehistoricize literary study. A text's "cultural work" is surely a valid topic for class discussion. But by the logic of Jay's argument a course on, say, contemporary American literature should only include the best-selling novels of commercial hacks like Danielle Steele and Harold Robbins, since obviously their blockbusters perform more "cultural work" in American society than does less mainstream, more original and demanding literature.

Ultimately, what leads radicals like Jay so astray is their blanket rejection of aesthetic criteria for judging literature. Although American Literature and the Culture Wars contains few developed attacks against aestheticism, Jay comes close to making such an argument when, late in the book, he remarks that

"once one recognizes that the power of a text to move a reader is a culturally produced effect--that literary 'taste' is not natural but taught, and...in a way that reproduces values that go beyond aesthetics--then the issue of power becomes of vital pedagogical concern" (209).

This suggests that literary critics who focus on aesthetics, rather than being truly free of political concerns, have ostensibly "depoliticized" literary study in order to further, ironically, a hidden political agenda--i.e., the upholding of the status quo by draining literary interpretation of any potentially subversive political content. But does this claim hold up? Would it be fair, say, to damn as a bourgeois reactionary any art critic who felt it was vital in analyzing a painting to consider, e.g., color scheme, brush stroke, the shape and arrangement of objects, etc.? Similarly, close literary study of such matters as language, form, imagery, symbolism, tone and metaphor is not a dodging of the political, but rather a recognition of the centrality of these concerns to any accurate assessment of how great literature affects a reader.

While, as I've suggested, Jay is correct to fault New Criticism for assuming that aesthetics alone should determine literary judgments, by going to the other extreme and rejecting aesthetic criteria entirely, he turns the study of literature into a poor relation of sociology or political science--or, even worse, into little more than a means to convince students to embrace far-left multicultural ideology. American Literature and the Culture Wars confirms Harold Bloom's acerbic comment in an interview that literature professors today are a "pride of displaced social workers" (Wild Orchids and Trotsky, Mark Edmundson, editor, 202). Moreover, Jay's politicized curriculum raises a crucial issue which, true to form, he never directly addresses: classroom advocacy. What if a conservative student in "Writing in the US" insists on voicing, say, a defense of the importance of ethnic assimilation into an American common culture? Doesn't such a student threaten the very raison d'être of Jay's course? What if one of Jay's more traditional fellow profs doesn't wish to transform his canonical American literature survey course by substituting Jay's PC syllabus of "slave narratives, corridos, work songs, Indian trickster myths [and] blues lyrics" (171)? By Jay's reasoning, isn't such a professor a dangerous reactionary, countering Jay's efforts to lead students into the golden dawn of a multicultural utopia?

I wish I could say that Columbia University English professor Andrew Delbanco's Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now offers a persuasive rebuttal to American Literature and the Culture Wars, but I can't. Rather than being a sustained defense of the study of classic American literature, Required Reading is a collection of book reviews and critical essays published in such non-academic intellectual journals as The New Republic and The New York Times Book Review. Although the essays deal with canonical and semi-canonical 19th and early 20th century American writers (Melville, Thoreau, Stowe, Lincoln, Adams, Crane, Chopin, Drieser, Wharton, Wright and Hurston), packaging them as a defense of the American canon seems a marketing decision on the part of Delbanco or his publisher--one even reflected, annoyingly enough, in the new titles given to individual selections; e.g., the essay "Was Kate Chopin a Feminist?" never bothers to answer this intriguing question in any remotely coherent way. (Also, the book contains no footnotes, and is filled with unattributed quotations.)

Still, on their own terms, the essays are generally quite good. Delbanco is a lucid, judicious, unpretentiously learned critic, with a flair for biographical criticism linking a writer's life and work in a way that illuminates the latter without reducing it to an encoding of closeted skeletons from the author's personal life. Despite its misleading title, the book is sprinkled with insightful asides on the current academic culture wars; Delbanco has also added a preface and concluding essay, "Reading for Pleasure," which directly take issue with the opinions expounded in PC manifestos like American Literature and the Culture Wars. In the preface, Delbanco seconds Trilling's view that there is an "inevitable, intimate, if not always obvious, connection between literature and politics" (x). Both Trilling and Delbanco recognize that politics is relevant to literary criticism; they just don't think it's all that matters. Moreover, Trilling's qualification that the politics/literature nexus is "not always obvious" implies an endorsement of political readings of literary works which are subtle and nuanced, rather than predictable exercises in ideological dogmatism.

Delbanco engages in precisely this kind of discerning political analysis of literature in the many essays in Required Reading which discuss black and women authors. In close readings of such novels as Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Wright's Native Son, and Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Delbanco considers in depth the racial and gender issues the books raise. However, as with the male authors he discusses, Delbanco insists that ideology is not what ultimately makes these writers worth reading. In the case of Hurston, e.g., he turns identity politics on its head by claiming that the novelist's intention in Their Eyes Were Watching God was to portray blacks as individuals, freed of all dehumanizing racial categorizations, ennobling as well as degrading, by "reveal[ing] the most intimate experiences of people who have been looked upon as types" (205). Delbanco unearths a quotation from Hurston herself suggesting this is exactly how she wished to be read, and that the novelist would be aghast at the way PC profs today are teaching her books as mere political screeds.

Some writers, Hurston wrote, "think there is bravery in following the groove of the Race champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and originality.... Negroes are supposed to write about the Race Problem. I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject. My interest lies in what makes a man or woman do such-and-such, regardless of his color" (206).

With all the authors discussed in Required Reading, Delbanco champions the centrality of aesthetics in literary study. "First and last," he says of these writers, "they were inspired practioners of the English language" (xi). But rather than promoting any dandyish, world-renouncing kind of aestheticism, Delbanco argues that linguistic experimentation in great literature can be as revolutionary, in its own way, as any radical political theory. In "Melville's Sacramental Style," e.g., Delbanco writes that Melville's literary enterprise is to "rescue [language] from the deadening weight of culture...to convert it from an inheritance into an invention...to never allow [it]...to achieve the status of an...unrevisable truth" (17). But Delbanco is well aware how unfashionable any form of aestheticism is in today's academic climate, where "there is a fundamental literary pleasure from which almost all varieties of criticism has been estranged" (209). He rightly fears for the future of

"a profession that no longer does very well at introducing students to the 'experience of intense delight'...that has always been the best reason to undertake literary study in the first place" (214).