A New Literary History Of America, edited by Reil Marcus and Werner Sollors

Does this book need to exist? This is a weighty question to ask of a weighty book that is about 1050 pages long or so. There is no doubt that this book does exist, much to my own disappointment when I was slogging my way through it, but does it need to exist? There are several ways to answer this question. One way is to examine what a more appropriate way would be of handling the question of providing a suitable introduction to the wide body of American literature. It is clear the path that this book took was to contain a large amount of essays by people who wanted to show off their own expertise as critical theorists of literature (and that is used broadly here), who succeed at introducing the reader who is willing to slog through this mess to artists they were probably not aware of before reading the book, but at a heavy cost in paper and ink. It is worthwhile in this case to consider a thought experiment as to whether there is a better way to approach the subject of seeking to introduce the potential and desired readers of this book to the fullness of American literature. If, say, Hillsdale College was doing this sort of exercise, they would surely have a large collection of extracts or short works from a great many of the authors in question, and it would have been a far better result because you would have become familiar with the scope of American literature by reading it instead of merely reading about it.

Why then, does this book exist at all, if it would easily be done better had the editors of the book made sensible extracts of literature to familiarize students and readers with rather than collecting essays about the history of American literature? A large part of why this book exists, certainly in the size and in the form it does, is that it serves to promote the survival and well-being of the unfortunate creature known as the literary theorist. Academics trained in the Marxist ways of critical language theory have a heavy burden, in that they have no useful way to engage in their field because their field, properly speaking, has no use except to criticize and attempt to deconstruct literature. This is a task that allows one a dishonorable living at the university level but little to do otherwise, and so in order to survive, to pay the bills and put food on the table, there need to be writings that serve to pay these deluded souls for the worthless scraps of insight that they think they have to share with the world about authors and literature. This is not to say that all of the essays are entirely useless, though it is to say that the writings included here carry a heavy burden in that their purpose is at odds with the wish of the reader to celebrate and enjoy American literature because the essays here have been trained to deconstruct it in light of various tedious and worthless aspects of identity politics in which the contemporary academy has devoted its attention towards. As a result, the fact that this book is not completely worthless is largely because some of the essays manage to introduce worthwhile books to read, and extracts from those readings, almost in spite of their interests to show off their own expertise as critical theorists rather than because of their miseducation.

When it comes to the contents of this book, given its size at more than 1000 pages, the contents are as sprawling as would be expected. Fortunately, they are organized in a chronological order, which gives some cohesion to the structure of the book. That said, the contents themselves are all over the map. There are plenty of discussions of early accounts of the areas that would become the United States by explorers and other imperial figures in Europe, writings of colonial figures, discussions of poetry, novels, plays, political speeches, pamphlets, popular songs and their lyrics and music, the workings of the publishing industry and music industry, discussions of authors famous and obscure, plenty of discussions of ethnic, gender, and sexual identity politics, discussions of journalism and critical theory, philosophy, children’s literature, movies, and so on. There is even a discussion from an apparently Mormon academic on the Book of Mormon (!), which predictably argues for its authenticity despite its obviously fraudulent origins. About the only materials that are ignored, and often pointedly so, are most mainstream religious literature or positive portrayals of conservative-leaning writing in general. At least one of the essays included seeks to argue on the lack of and lack of quality of literature leaning right of center, but that is a clear attempt to fabricate the record, alas. Still, in reading this book it appears that the editors sought to split the difference in terms of coverage between works that either should be familiar or are in fact familiar to a general literate American reading audience and those works which are obscure and which the authors think ought to be better known than they are.

Ultimately, though, this book is a disappointing slog to get through. The biases of the authors are evident, nearly all of the accounts are left-wing in nature and show academics judging the past by anachronistic standards, finding early trailblazers in fault when they are of the wrong identity and no one listened to their ideas, arguing over the origins of critical theory within American literature studies, and commenting ad infinitum on the search by American writers for an authentically American literature that is neither wallowing in self-blame over the past nor slavishly imitative of European models. In addition, the authors of the essays frequently comment on and criticize people for making a rightward turn late in life after having misspent their youth engaged in the folly of leftist radical politics, and also engage in gatekeeping over who gets to count within various privileged groups. This would be wearisome enough to read one time in a world as poisoned by the identity politics this book is fond of, but this book is filled to the brim with comments about the awkward dependence of minority voices in American literary and cultural history on the largess of wealthy leftist philanthropists, and this book appears to be a similar effort to support the thinking of leftist thinkers. The world could do without such things, admittedly, and this book and all studies like it are probably a net negative to the well-being of American letters as a whole.