From "What Killed American Lit.?" by M-mv favorite Joseph Epstein (WSJ, August 27):
In today's university, no one is any longer in a position to say which books are or aren't fit to teach; no one any longer has the authority to decide what is the best in American writing. Too bad, for even now there is no consensus about who are the best American novelists of the past century. (My own candidates are Cather and Theodore Dreiser.) Nor will you read a word, in the pages of "The Cambridge History of the American Novel," about how short-lived are likely to be the sex-obsessed works of the much-vaunted novelists Norman Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth or about the deleterious effect that creative-writing programs have had on the writing of fiction.
With the gates once carefully guarded by the centurions of high culture now flung open, the barbarians flooded in, and it is they who are running the joint today. The most lauded novelists in "The Cambridge History of the American Novel" tend to be those, in the words of another of its contributors, who are "staging a critique of 'America' and its imperial project." Thus such secondary writers as Allen Ginsberg, Kurt Vonnegut and E.L. Doctorow are in these pages vaunted well beyond their literary worth.
4 comments:
This excerpt makes him sound like a cranky old man complaining about how the world's gone to heck in a handbasket. Given you're a Vonnegut fan, how do you feel about how he picks and chooses?
Well, I'm a Cather fan, too, and, if pressed to rank or sort, I'd say her body of work would appear higher on my list than Roth's or, yes, even Vonnegut's.
This is, of course, always a problem, isn't it? Which books? Which authors? But I can see the ranking, shifting, sorting at work with my own students: They all met "Harrison Bergeron," but if time runs short, Slaughter-House Five will be a suggested title, whereas O, Pioneers will be required.
Epstein *is* a cranky old man, by the way. That's part of his appeal. I don't always agree with his assertions, but he always makes me think.
As do you.
Ooh, came across this article earlier this evening and enjoyed it, glad to see it here.
I first wrote you regarding a Joseph Epstein post, years ago. I knew you were a kindred mind.
I felt a bit cheered, even though he was cranky, since he defends the culture with a light touch. He is our best American essayist, is he not?
Epstein's sweeping generalizations about what we are supposedly doing in English departments are simply baseless. Every single member of my university's large English department, in fact every English professor I know across the country, became a professor because he or she loves literature, and in turn passionately cultivates that love in students. Love of literature, as well as careful analysis of its formal features, is in no way incompatible with responsible attention to its many contexts. In fact, all three -- emotion, aesthetics, context -- are inextricable in today's teaching of literature, making our classes all the richer.
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