  Letters Archive
Constructing
American Studies
The 1993/94 Fellows Program at the Center for the
Humanities is dedicated to "American Studies: Past,
Present, and Future," and is directed by Lewis Perry,
director of Vanderbilt's American Studies Program
and Andrew Jackson Professor of History. The seminar
was recently the occasion for a visit by Paul Lauter,
Allan K. and Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of
Literature at Trinity College, general editor of the
influential Heath Anthology of American
Literature, and the current president of the
American Studies Association. During his visit, he
discussed the origin and character of American
Studies with Warren Center Fellow Cecelia Tichi,
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at
Vanderbilt and recent past president of the American
Studies Association. The American Studies Association
will hold its 1994 national meeting in Nashville.
LAUTER: When I was at Yale in the 1950s, American
literature was regarded as something you did because
you couldn't do British literature.
TICHI: There is still some of that in literature
departments. And where it comes out is not in open
department meetings, but behind closed office doors
when the scholar in some field of British literature
says to the bright undergraduate, "Surely you're one
of us, you want to work in the real tradition, you
wouldn't want to demean yourself to work in that
colloquial, crude, upstart American literature."
LAUTER: It was very funny at Yale in the 1950s. The
reputation of American Studies was that it was at
best a marginal operation. They would do it for
undergraduates because it was easy, or at least that
is the way it was viewed. I became the first teaching
assistant for Charles Feidelson, who, the second year
I was at Yale, took over the big American literature
lecture course. Feidelson had just published
Symbolism and American Literature, which was a
significant departure from anything that had been
done before. That gave the study of "American
Literature," or at least that strategy for
approaching it, some weight for the first time.
TICHI: Finding the language to express what has been
suppressed is a crucial issue. I say this in part as
someone who had to study Emerson, who talks to young
American men. I felt that I was somehow fundamentally
deficient as a scholar of American culture because I
couldn't talk about Emerson without feeling sort of
second hand. What I didn't realize at the time was
that Emerson excluded women from his address, that he
defined legitimate participants in American culture
solely in these gendered terms. "Let him not
skulk...like an interloper in the world which exists
for him," he said, talking about young American men.
So the issue of finding the terminology for what you
intuitively understand is a crucial matter. As long
as groups are denied the vocabulary in which to
express their position vis-a-vis themselves and
others in other groups, then they are silenced, then
they are the invisible. Developing a lexicon which
could give adequate expression to a new movement was
a profound, pivotal issue. With out that language,
this movement could not proceed. You couldn't just
get to "canon" and "multiculturalism." How do you get
space for yourself and legitimate your position as
speaker when you have been denied that place? How did
you get it?
LAUTER: It just wasn’t thought about that way, and
the terminology wasn't used. What you are saying is
absolutely true: if you don't have the language in
which to talk about it, you're constantly struggling
to try even to think what you're talking about.
TICHI: You were encouraged to think that it was
self-evident or manifestly true that certain writers
were the "Great Writers." Part of that is the
ideology of post World War II U.S. politics in which
the war came out on our side. We were self-evidently
the dominant democratic power and all our pantheon of
writers would ratify that position. There is a book
on that called Creating Faulkner's Reputation,
which is about him being positioned as the resident
U.S. genius in those years. In fact, the Vanderbilt
Agrarians contributed to the edification of Faulkner
who previously had been regarded as a kind of
degenerate version of Edgar Allen Poe.
LAUTER: I did a paper on the creation of Melville's
reputation at the American Literature Association
about a year and a half ago. It was a paper about the
way in which in the 1920s Melville's reputation had
moved from being this obscure figure on the periphery
of literature to being for a lot of critics the most
important figure among American novelists. When I was
finished, an official of the Melville Society got up
in an utter rage because I was somehow demeaning
Melville, which is not at all what I was doing. In
fact, I said very carefully that I really love
Melville and think a great deal of him, but it's
interesting how his reputation was constructed.
TICHI: People experience iconoclasm and it's
outrageous to them. They really don't want to hear
about social forces that operate to valorize or
devalue certain kinds of texts. Were you surprised by
it?
LAUTER: I was taken aback by it. Even though I had
written into the paper a paragraph of apology to say
"what you're not hearing is another attack on
Melville from somewhere on the left. That's not what
I'm doing," he absolutely did not hear this. In fact,
it's sort of interesting. An argument I recently had
with Stanley Fish has to do directly with this. He
was arguing for disciplinary boundaries. He said, in
effect, that if you do literary study it has to do
with aesthetics, and don't mistake this for doing
politics. If you think you're doing politics by doing
literary study and changing what it is you teach and
things of that sort, you're really not doing
politics. Politics is a different thing, history is a
different thing. So Fish talked about patrolling the
boundaries. As I told him, I'm perfectly willing to
grant these disciplinary boundaries. I just don't
find it very interesting, because the question to me
concerns the objects of study and methods of study
within a discipline: what accounts for whether or not
you study Stephen Crane or Charles Chesnutt? What
accounts for whether you look for questions of
ambiguity and irony and all of the new critical
vocabulary, or if you look at "change the joke and
slip the yoke," or call and response, or signifying,
those kinds of things out of African-American
experience and culture? How do those things change?
What produces this change in your discipline, in our
discipline? That after all is politics.
TICHI: In some ways, the American Studies
Association, though much smaller than the M.L.A.,
was its mirror image. It was headed up and really run
by a school of criticism called "Myth and Symbol"
made up of historians and teachers of American
literature, mostly from the northeast with a gesture
toward Berkeley now and them, and a nod toward the
University of Chicago. The organization was sort of
sealed off and very hostile to women.
LETTERS: Does the rise of American Studies, if
there is one, express what you would see as an
overall change in the political landscape?
TICHI: I think that we have to remember that there
never is a clean break with the past. At any given
time, there are those who envision changes that are
not yet in place, there are those who are coping with
the conflicts who are in the past, and there are
people who are wedded to convictions that they formed
very early on. There are people who just don't want
to read any more or open up their positions to
challenge, and so they are dismissive in terms like
"there's nothing new here," or "this represents a
degradation or a trivialization." So I think at any
point there are "old guard" people, there are some
"middle of the roaders," and there are some people
who are leading in new directions. When you were
talking about the word canon and the session that
began to legitimate it, I was reminded of a big
session that began to legitimate it, I was of a gig
session at the M.L.A. four years ago in which Emory
Elliott talked about the canon. Most of the people in
the room were feeling that they were considering a
forefront, vanguard issue at that moment, and you are
saying that this issue was introduced in 1973! We are
twenty years over the line, and there were people in
1988 or 1989 thinking of themselves as on the cutting
edge because they were in that room,. That is an
important lesson in the calendar of intellectual
process.
LAUTER: It's very slow. You have to be patient and
have long range expectations. I think what is
happening in American Studies is fascinating. It's
growing all that fast in terms of the development of
programs on individual campuses, and that is
something I really want to look at. On the other
hand, it is growing very rapidly overseas, and that
has its upside and its downside. There is one
superpower now and everybody wants to know about it.
TICHI: That is right. I hadn't taken in the reason
for this development.
LAUTER: But in addition to this, people are becoming
dissatisfied with the traditional division of the
disciplines. Boundaries are becoming more inhibiting.
TICHI: At our own campus, I see graduate students
having to involve themselves in two or three
disciplines just to write dissertations. I don't know
if this will lead to porous boundaries or if those
who want to reaffirm the boundaries will become
stronger. In any case the subversion of disciplinary
lines is well under way.
LAUTER: With the Feminist Press, there was a national
M.L.A. meeting in 1969, a year after the women in
the organization demanded equal representation. Only
two of that group of women ran for office again,
while all the men did. It was clear from this that
male "heavies" could get re-elected, while women who
would become heavies were rejected. At the time,
then, we thought about developing a press. We went
back to Baltimore and asked if people would be
interested in a press devoted to feminist issues. On
return from vacation, we found our mailbox stuffed
with responses and some money. We soon convened a
meeting and one thing led to another. We began with
children's books and some biographies. Then we did
reprints, beginning with Life in the Iron
Mills.
TICHI: These reprints were very important. Life in
the Iron Mills was written by the mother of a
swashbuckling journalist. She was struggling with the
way in which those with any sort of talent at all
were being stifled. This novel was therefore one by
which one could teach about democracy in the U.S.,
not from the point of view of doctrinaire marxism,
but symbolically, to realize dimensions of class
bias. The new edition from Feminist Press was very
powerful. That and Yellow Wallpaper, a
psychodrama of a woman oppressed in the name of
expertise. Here were texts which were not available
in our canon, texts which made a tremendous
difference in our coursework.
LAUTER: The problem was this: having texts available
was hard enough, and as times got financially
tighter, it was difficult to get people to buy them.
So we thought, "What if we put those texts into an
anthology?" There was already an early anthology of
odd western literature texts, but that was it.
TICHI: But any new anthology is typically only
allowed to deviate in its content by fifteen percent
from all other anthologies. That means that only 15
of every 100 pages can be made up of new material.
Heath is such an amazing anthology because it
did something completely different from anything that
had come before it.
LAUTER: Then in 1977 or 1978 we began to think about
getting a project together to try to rethink the
teaching of American literature called
"Reconstructing American Literature."
TICHI: Construction is a crucial word. We were in a
time when standards of literary excellence were
entirely unchallenged. The notion that a syllabus is
a kind of construction just wasn't available, and the
assumption was we had an organically whole language
or literature that the critic was to decipher. But
this formulation is itself rife with construction. So
this notion of the construction of a syllabus was not
recognized or understood. You can't devise an
alternative pro gram until you realize that the
present one is a construction. You must give someone
a place to stand in order to point this out. Major
things had to happen in order to provide this place.
LAUTER: One major thing was the denaturalization of
this notion of organic form. We had to point out that
human beings were creating syllabi, and there is
nothing natural about it.
TICHI: This was a time when people trained in New
Criticism were experiencing diminishing returns,
people fighting over smaller and smaller issues. The
idea of a lifetime of faithfulness to an approach
that was less and less rewarding was bleak. There was
a sense across the country of "is this all?"
LAUTER: For the Heath Anthology, our group was
insistent on bringing together people with
established reputations (white men), and cutting-edge
folks (Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates, for
example). I had done some research on anthologies and
found that no nonwhite and very few women had ever
been on an editorial board. So we talked about it and
for our editorial board selected people from the
institute and elsewhere who reflected the politics of
the essays. But it was more than symbolism and
tokenism, particularly since everyone was in
networks. Blacks knew each other, Latinos, etc. We
asked all sorts of people to edit their own works,
with success. It was quite an interesting experience.
TICHI: And as is well known, the Heath
Anthology has changed the course of literary
study in America. No other anthology is halving the
impact that book has had. How did you get yourself
into a position to know how to do these things?
LAUTER: I went to Indiana to the school of Letters in
1953 to do a master's degree in literary criticism,
which was a strange event since I didn't know very
much about anything.
TICHI: At that time, literary criticism was a kind of
vanguard thing to do, in the sense that a lot of
people were still doing more "literary history" in
the old school way. New Criticism was still somewhat
controversial.
LAUTER: It was very controversial. After Indiana I
went to Yale for the doctorate. One of my classmates
had been a conscientious objector right after the
Korean War and had served his alternative service as
a teacher in a girls reformatory outside of
Philadelphia. He was a serious pacifist. We got hired
at Dartmouth, and he proceeded to do things as he
had always done, which was to do things like post a
flyer which said "Men of Draft Age: You may be a
conscientious objector to war." A very innocent flyer
in a lot of ways, but it got torn down periodically.
All of this sort of got me involved politically.
TICHI: What was so threatening to them?
LAUTER: It utterly defeated their expectations. The
irony of all of this is, just to leap forward 25 years
or more, I went to talk at a high school around the
Hartford area six or seven years ago. One of the
people there came up to me when I arrived, and she
said to me, "I've owed you an apology for 25 years."
She was in that class, and she said, "You know, it
took a few years, but eventually it began to get
clear to me what was going on when you were talking
about invisibility, yours from us and we from you,
and other people's." I have actually met three people
who were in that class. It was a crystallizing moment
for everybody.
TICHI: Did you know at the time that you had cracked
open something culturally profound?
LAUTER: I was trying to understand what the
implications were of beginning to look at other works
that I had never considered, not that Ellison was one
of those exactly, but other things which were sort of
on the horizon. I was asking questions like "how do
you change your course? How do you change what you
do, how you teach?" We're talking about
democratization, about sharing power, things of that
sort, '60s educational reform. It really forces you
to think about things very differently, but it takes
a while to translate that into your teaching
practice, much less your daily life.
TICHI: You have been describing a sort of recurrent
pattern in which your reading, your teaching, your
collegial relationships, all forced you at recurrent
points almost to a crisis of understanding of
culture, literature, and political life. There is a
kind of volitional subjection of the safe to the kind
of conflict that forces change. Because the people
who were there would know exactly how a person might
take safe shelter in the consensus or majority
thinking of that time. But you refused; those
shelters or places of respite weren't valid and
therefore weren't viable for you.
LAUTER: You do something but you're not quite clear
what that entails, what it's getting you into. Once
you're into it, it's very hard to go back. Like the
class about Ellison. I had no idea when I started
teaching that people would get so incensed, that
other people would react to that. And what was
wonderful about the time was that in the process of
one thing leading to another, it wouldn't lead you
into trouble, but would lead you into all sorts of
wonderful possibilities.
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