More on Harvard's "New Literary History of America"

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory, and Priscilla Wald, a professor of English and womens' studies at Duke, debate the new Harvard University Press reference work.

After warming up, Bauerlein comes to his main point:

The old Master Narratives and Concepts have no place either--American Adam, Symbolism, and American Literature, etc.--except for one. It resounds in the beginning, where the editors explain why entries proliferate after the Civil War: They note that "the story of the United States becomes a story of previously disenfranchised, despised, degraded, excluded, enslaved, brutalized, and even unspeakable Americans claiming their place as full citizens, demanding not only the right to speak but the right to be heard, remaking the country as surely as any before them, and, in novels, poems, paintings, speeches, and acts, judging it as it had never been judged before."

That angle, emotional and partisan as it is, calls for judgment. It seems to me a loaded approach, overemphasizing the victims, conceived in resentment, aggrandizing one kind of American experience and excluding others from the story. With two-thirds of the volume following the disenfranchised-franchised pattern, this isn't a literary history of America. It's a drama of multiculturalist emergence.

Retorts Wald:

We both see a "drama of multiculturalist emergence," but we see it very differently.… This volume includes a range of voices expressed in a variety of media and forms, and the drama it stages to my eyes resembles something more like a Bakhtinian carnival than the morality play you describe.

The exchange is in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and includes a response by Werner Sollors, co-editor of the volume.