Redefining American Literary History.

A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. New York: MLA, 1990. 410 pp. $45 hardcover; $19.50 paperback.

In their introduction to Redefining American Literary History, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward oppose conventional notions of cultural literacy and attendant monocultural models of American literary history while calling for multiethnic and multiracial models to "account for the multiple voices and experiences that constitute the literature and literary history of the United States" (4). The volume is important to scholars and teachers of American literature not merely because its seventeen essays pose fundamental questions while confronting the complexities of canon expansion and the cultural and ideological assumptions inherent in notions of American literary history, but because it illustrates the very diversity of thought and new critical perspectives called for by the editors.

Violating the conventional format of edited volumes--even of those addressing multicultural issues--Ruff and Ward collect discussions of African American, Chicano, Native American, Hispanic, and Asian American literature and culture in a "three-section presentation governed, not by racial or ethnic boundaries, but by critical and historical perspectives stressing the interdependence of multiracial experience and multiple voices, without denying their difference. Redefining American Literary History, then, fulfills through its very design the editors' call for "radical inquiries about the relations between literature and national identity" and "an understanding that American literature is a patchwork quilt created by many hands" (2). These opening three sections, which collect essays devoted to canon formation, oral traditions, and wide-ranging issues of critical and historical perspectives, are followed by a section of selected bibliographies and one of journals and presses that typically publish multiethnic and multiracial works. These fourth and fifth sections serve as valuable appendices for scholars seeking to pursue a line of inquiry established in a particular essay, or for teachers interested in redesigning their American literature syllabi.

Section Four, "Selected Bibliographies," contains six separate bibliographies, each produced either by a single scholar or a collaborating group. A brief, general bibliography of "Minority and Multicultural Literature, Including Hispanic Literature" begins the section. The remaining bibliographies cover African American, American Indian, Asian American, Chicano, and Puerto Rican literatures. Each is presented in four parts: Bibliographies and Aids to Research, Anthologies and Collections, Primary Works, and Secondary Works. In both the African American and the American Indian bibliographies, the secondary works are subdivided into two categories, General Works and Works on Individual Authors. The substantial African American Literature bibliography, compiled by six scholars and covering thirty-seven pages, should be of special interest to readers of African American Review. Section Five, "Selected Journals and Presses," arranges journals within the same categories used in the previous section and provides mailing addresses for each journal and press. These two sections alone, invaluable aids to scholars and faculty interested in cultural diversity, justify purchasing the volume, but the intellectual and critical heart of the volume, of course, resides in its essays.

While providing an overview of each section of essays in the following discussion, I will stress those of special interest to readers of A can American Review. I do so, however, with some regret, for such an emphasis, legitimated by practical considerations of context and available space, implicitly denies Ruoff and Ward's emphases on midtivocal radical inquiry and the transformation of traditional ways of thinking, not only about canon formation, but about the cultural and ideological assumptions underlying existing models of diversity.

Section One, "Redefining the American Literary Canon," scrutinizes recent reassessments as well as traditional views of canon formation. Essays by Paul Lauter, Harold H. Kolb, Jr., Jarold Ramsey, and Robert Hemenway expose the complementary but sometimes competing issues informing the debate over canon revision. Lauter argues for a comparative approach to American studies as a means of moving beyond distortions created by the division of American literatures into "mainstream" and "tributary" works. The longest essay in this section, Lauter's "The Literatures of America: A Comparative Discipline" continues the practice begun in his Reconstructing American Literature (1983) and prepares us for his more recent Canons and Contexts (1991), while providing an extended discussion of Chestnutt's The Conjure Woman and integrating commentary on Morrison, Hurston, Ellison, and a few other African American authors into his call for a comparative approach. Kolb's model of a "tiered set of options" allows an open-ended canon always implicitly in flux and always open to change, but nonetheless merit-structured and involving three hierarchically arranged "levels" to which authors or texts are assigned. Ramsey, in "Thoreau's Last Words--And America's First Literatures," emphasizes the necessity of canon expansion while attempting to redefine the origins of American literature through an investigation of American Indian influences on traditional American authors and works. While Kolb and Ramsey address issues relevant to redefining the canon, their arguments do not directly address the corresponding need for institutional reform stressed by Hemenway in "In the American Canon."

Hemenway also assumes the validity of a literary canon but emphasizes the necessity of continued reevaluation while arguing for the inclusion of African American works at every level of both the undergraduate and graduate curricula. While acknowledging gains achieved by the "democratizing of literary study" in the 1960s and 1970s, Hemenway questions the relation between the "ghettoization" of African American literature through specialized courses and programs and the preservation of the traditional canon and the "aura of privilege." Posing these and other hard questions, he exposes the theories of privilege sustaining the concept of canonization and suggests that the "more inclusive but merit-structured canon" called for by many "sensitive and decent scholars" itself preserves "the power of traditional value determination without confronting the fundamental interrelationship between social class and aesthetic value" (67-68). Anticipating certain elements of Toni Morrison's recent Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Hemenway argues that, as "black texts challenge traditional literary ideas," they begin "to assess the dialectic between white aesthetics and black aesthetics" (69). He then effectively weaves two "instructive folktales" from the African American oral and literary traditions into his final argument, thus illustrating the power of the folktale to "liberate theories of narrative, trope, and aesthetic performance" (66) while rejecting "paternal primitivism," establishing a viable, "communal sense of creation" (71), and overruling the traditional value determination at the heart of a stable or merit-structured canon. So, although Hemenway, like Kolb and Ramsey, accepts the necessity of a shared body of texts, his argument-like Lauters--more effectively questions the roles of class, privilege, and institutional power in canon formation, and more convincingly argues for the inclusion of multiethnic and multiracial works at every level of instruction and research.

Because of its final argument, Hemenway's essay also functions to link the debate over canon formation to "Oral Dimensions of American Literature," for the essays in Section Two address relations between scholarship in folklore and literary studies while suggesting the liberating effects of interdisciplinary cross-influences. This is perhaps the most engaging section of the volume, not because its essays are superior to those in sections one and three, but because these six essays better reveal the benefits of multivocal radical inquiry. Collectively, the essays provide an overview of scholarship about the oral tradition in folklore and literature; individually, they discuss historically and culturally specific voices speaking within single racial or ethnic contexts.

In "The Oral Tradition and the Study of American Literature," Theresa Melendez presents a brief history of the organizing assumptions governing literary critics and folklorists in their address to oral literature. While privileging contemporary folklorists for their "advancement of theories of verbal art as communicative process and aesthetic system," she defines a series of problematic issues inherent in the pursuit of an oral literature canon and calls for an emphasis on "social process"; that is, on oral literature as "encompassing individual experience in dialectical encounter with the immediate community and the larger society" (81). Melendez, then, effectively anticipates arguments presented by Andrew Wiget in "His Life in His Tail: The Native American Trickster and the Literature of Possibility," Nicholas Kanellos in "Orality and Hispanic Literature of the United States," Jose E. Limon in "Oral Tradition and Poetic Influence: Two Poets from Greater Mexico," and Linda Ching Sledge in "Oral Tradition in Kingston's China Men."

While none of these essays directly addresses issues in the African American oral tradition, through their emphasis on culture-specific models for the study of oral tradition they parallel John W. Roberts's argument in "The African American Animal Trickster as Hero." In a detailed and sophisticated discussion of the animal trickster tradition, Roberts summarizes the assumptions of conventional folkloristic thinking on African American folktales, while questioning existing paradigms governing normative models of heroic action and the African origin thesis. His argument, which stresses deep structural similarities and differences among various African and African American animal trickster traditions, further questions the results of motif and tale-type analyses that have previously served to "demonstrate the dominance of European influence on African American folktales" and to evaluate "the tradition in terms of the duality that governed [white American and European scholars'] own thinking about African people" (100). Roberts's conclusion that "the normative function of heroic literature must be conceptualized not only from a culture-specific perspective but also from a situational one" (113), as it links African trickster tales to the historical and material realities of African culture and the trickster tales of enslaved Africans to both African culture and their own historical and material conditions, parallels those of the other critics in this section.

"Oral Dimensions of American Literature," then, fulfills the promise of the editors' introduction to the volume by questioning ideological assumptions through multivocal and radical inquiries and illustrating both the interdependence of diverse perspectives and the dependence of meaningful and productive inquiry on recognition of cultural diversity.

Because its wide-ranging essays do not collectively address a single dimension of literary and cultural studies, "Critical and Historical Perspectives on American Literature," unlike the previous section, focuses less on the interdependence of diverse perspectives and more on precisely defined historical or formal concerns affecting a single group. In "Canonical and Noncanonical Texts: A Chicano Case Study," Juan Bruce-Novoa examines the problematic of a Chicano canon formation pressured into existence by mainstream forces, particularly as criticizing the process itself becomes practicing canonization, while Juan Flores provides a concise historical overview in "Puerto Rican Literature in the United States: Stages and Perspectives." The interdependence of ethnic themes and traditions and American literature's conventions and formal concerns form the subject of four of the remaining essays--Amy Ling's "Chinese American Women Writers: The Tradition Behind Maxine Hong Kingston," Shirley Geok Lin Lim's "Twelve Asian American Writers in Search of Self-Definition," Ruoff's "Three Nineteenth-Century American Indian Autobiographers," and Frances Smith Foster's "African American Progress" Report Autobiographies." While these essays maintain the broad emphases of the volume, they also serve to recontextualize the earlier discussions of canon formation and oral traditions, further developing Ruoff and Ward's "patchwork quilt" image and their call to forge new critical perspectives.

However, it is Houston Baker's "Archaeology, Ideology, and African American Discourse," the opening essay of section three, that most effectively contextualizes the section's essays and most convincingly defines the project of Redefining American Literary History. Baker begins by interpolating quotations from Henry Adams, Marx, and Louis Althusser on history and historical knowledge with stanzas from bluesmen Big Bill Broonzy and Little Brother Montgomery in an illustration of an archaeology of "refigured knowledge" employing "tropological energy to decode [American] meaning" (157). Baker recapitulates the volume's emphases through his concise and pointed application of "descriptive integration," used by archaeologists to produce informed models from fossil evidence; of Foucault's "discourse" and "statement" to expose the mutual dependence on ethnic exclusion of "the conceptual structure of American historical discourse"; and of Robert Spiller's literary-historical model of American literary history.

Baker defines his own project as "an analysis designed to provide a fit ideological perspective on' African American literary history.'" He creates this perspective through discussions of the "economics of slavery . . . as a governing statement in African American discourse' (166) and of the slave narrative as the "locus classicus of African American literary discourse" (168). His analysis includes extended discussions of Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as wen as a concise address to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. These discussions serve to establish, in Baker's terms, a "subtextual bonding" between novels and their narrative antecedents. More importantly, he recognizes in these narratives "epistemological shift[s]" and "enlargement[s] of perspective" that reveal the "limiting boundaries of traditional American historical discourse" (193-94).

Baker's essay ends where it began, with a reference to "the blues artist's troping mind" (194). This image of tropological thought gives shape not only to Baker's enlarged perspective on American history and literary history, but to this entire collection of essays. For this reason, his earlier definition of tropological thought, borrowed from Hayden White but modified to suit his purposes, deserves quotation:

Tropological thought is a discursive

mode that employs unfamiliar (or

exotic) figures to qualify what is

deemed "traditional" in a given discourse.

. . . we might assert that

attempts to signify the force of

meaning of the economics of

slavery by invoking buildings and

blues . . . constitute an analytical

move designed to incorporate into

reality phenomena to which traditional

historiography generally

denies the status "real." The end of

a tropological enterprise is the alteration

of reality itself. (167)

As just such a tropological enterprise, Redefining American Literary History fulfills the promise of Ruoff and Ward's introduction and, through its various reconceptualizations of American literary history, creates what Baker labels "seismic shifts" and "epistemological cataclysms" demanding that the literary histories present here no longer be overlooked, demanding no less than the alteration of existing paradigms and traditional American historical discourse.

A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. Redefining American Literary History. New York: MLA, 1990. 410 pp. $45 hardcover; $19.50 paperback.