American Literature and the Culture Wars

by Gregory Jay

Copyright 1997 Cornell University Press. No portion of this text may be reprinted without express permission of the publisher.

Introduction: Making Ends Meet

During the past two decades, a main feature of our nation's "culture wars" has been the increasingly fierce quarrel over the teaching of American literature. Debates about such terms as "cultural literacy," the "canon," "political correctness," and "multiculturalism" have spilled over from the campuses onto the pages of popular magazines and even been featured on the nightly news. Judging from the uproar, one might think that we are seeing nothing less than the end of American literature -- or at least the end of any consensus about how to define and teach it. This sense of an ending, however, is equally matched by a feeling of opening horizons, as dozens of forgotten or overlooked books and authors come into view. Even the classic texts of the tradition have been re-opened by new methods of interpretation, so that The Scarlet Letter and Emily Dickinson and The Waste Land suddenly take on unexpected and often disturbing meanings. As the twentieth century comes to an end, much that we have taken for granted about our nation's literature is being challenged. Yet the prospect for the twenty-first century looks bright, for this challenge offers us a newly enriched tradition and a more diverse set of tools for understanding it.

This book intends to explain and advance this challenge. In doing so, I will be questioning both the scope and the purpose of American literary studies. What ends do we pursue in the study and teaching of an "American" literature? Has the idea of a traditional canon of great books reached the end of its usefulness? Where does American literature end and Mexican or Caribbean or Canadian or Postcolonial literature begin? Is multiculturalism the end of civilization as we know it or the start of an overdue regeneration of our politics and pedagogy? How has the political economy of making ends meet in an era of downsizing and privatization affected academic freedom and the course of academic study? What happens in the classroom when we try to put an end to the conventional ways in which we have conceived and taught our subject? Playing off the pun in the title of this introduction, then, I want to explore this set of questions about the "ends" of American literary studies. This exploration includes rethinking our ends both in the nominal sense of "pragmatic intention" (goal, aim, objective, design, scheme) and in the verbal sense of "reaching a conclusion" (limit, terminate, cease, halt, expire). By focusing attention on these many ends and the controversial issues they involve, I hope in part to explain how this once-arcane academic discipline ended up at the center of the "culture wars." While asking some skeptical questions about these new directions, I argue forcefully in favor of opening the borders of the field of American literary and cultural study. My intention is both to reach the unpersuaded and to challenge some of the assumptions and tactics of those who are already committed to reform.

Arguments opposing recent new directions in the approach to American culture have largely dominated public discussion, from the outcry over museum exhibitions on the American West and the bombing of Hiroshima to congressional hearings on the History Standards project and on reauthorization for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. In the trade press, virtually all the headline-grabbing volumes have taken antagonistic positions toward the reform of cultural study, including Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, Richard Bernstein's Dictatorship of Virtue, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s Disuniting of America, and Christina Hoff Sommers' Who Stole Feminism?, to name just a few. Even Michael Lind's call for a renewed "liberal nationalism" in The Next American Nation succumbs to anti-academic rhetoric, as well as echoing the neoconservative line that "multiculturalism is not the wave of the future, but an aftershock of the black-power radicalism of the sixties" (13). Likewise Todd Gitlin, a real tenured radical who helped found Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, writes Twilight of Common Dreams to lament the "breakdown of the idea of a common Left" and the rise of identity politics, which he blames on black separatists and their imitators who have unjustly demonized white male liberals. In general the American public has received a relentlessly negative picture of what the professors are up to, cast in the exaggerated and sensational language of scandal and cynicism that now constitutes the required tone of American journalism. Among the national trade press books only Gerald Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars and Lawrence Levine's Opening of the American Mind stake out positions explicitly sympathetic to contemporary innovations in the study of literature and history. John K. Wilson's The Myth of Political Correctness and Michael Bérubé's Public Access do a skillful job rebutting what they see as the exaggerations and biases in conservative attacks on higher education, but they are not mainly concerned with offering a positive argument stating how the new scholarship has improved the quality of our campuses and classrooms.

The case for a new curriculum, nonetheless, has been building since the 1970s in a steadily proliferating bibliography, though few readers off campus have had much opportunity to hear a fair or substantial report of it. At the risk of offending by omission or appearing unduly pedantic, I think it important here to mention a few landmarks, at least in the development of my own thinking about how to transform American literary studies. Taken together they indicate how the discipline is evolving in dialogue with what Cornel West cogently describes as the "new cultural politics of difference." Two highly influential volumes that helped initiate the widening of horizons are This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Scott, and Barbara Smith. These were foundational texts in opening the canon, in linking the study of race and gender, and in connecting the social change movements of the 1960s to the campus reforms of the subsequent decades. In Three American Literatures, published by the Modern Language Association and edited by Houston Baker, scholars of Chicano, Native American, and Asian American literature presented one of the first professionally legitimated volumes arguing for a dramatic reconception of the nation's literary boundaries. These new contours were reinforced by the many pathbreaking essays contributed to the Columbia History of the American Novel, edited by Emory Elliott. The process of recovering buried treasure from our literary history is the scholarly job central to the remaking of the canon, as evidenced by work such as Judith Fetterley's Provisions: A Reader from 19^th Century American Women. Recent provocative books that continue this rethinking of what and how to teach include Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Loose Canons and bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress. Many professors now write thoughtfully about their experiments with an altered American literature curriculum, as in The Canon in the Classroom, edited by John Alberti. Crossing the lines between the public and the academic are such authors as Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich. In her novels and prose (notably Playing in the Dark), Morrison extends the range of voices speaking the story of America and its literature and insists on challenging the ideology of "whiteness." Adrienne Rich's poetry and prose has likewise been one of the most powerful inspirations to the movement for connecting women's liberation, multicultural literacy, and democratic pedagogy.

The professors still have a way to go, however, in laying out a coherent, persuasive public case for academic reform in their various disciplines and classrooms. Since the canon debate has been particularly passionate and widespread in the field of American letters, and since the study of American culture inevitably spills over into the arenas of society and politics, it makes sense to use the controversies in this particular discipline as a point of focus for clarifying what is actually happening on campus. The teaching of American literature has, after all, always been part of larger efforts to transmit social, political, moral, and even religious ideals to new generations of students. Pedagogy in this discipline stumbles quickly into questions such as Crevecoeur's "What is an American?" The question of what makes a book "American" often gets combined with the question of what makes a book "great," especially when we must choose which books to read of study. Eventually we have to ask, "What is the aim of teaching 'American' literature?" Is it the appreciation of artistry or the socialization of the reader? The achievement of cultural literacy or training in critical thinking? Can it be all these things without contradicting itself (or hopelessly confusing the student?).

Intentionally or not, the selection of books and methods for teaching holds a mirror up to our nature and offers a vision of our future. When a teacher assigns Harriet Jacobs instead of Herman Melville or Elizabeth Bishop instead of T. S. Eliot or Arturo Islas instead of Saul Bellow (and such dilemmas are unavoidable, if only because the semester is finite), these choices are value judgments that may alter the interpretation of American cultural history offered to students. To those many commentators who glibly quote the maxim that academic politics is so nasty because so little is at stake, I would counter that (at least in American cultural studies) the arguments are so fervent because the stakes are so large. We are arguing over nothing less than our understanding of who we have been as a people and where we are going as a society. Insofar as some academics have supported their profession with traditional defenses of aesthetic education or protestations that their work has no political dimension, they are naive. Here the conservatives have the better case, for they begin with the common sensical observation that pedagogy is always to some degree an instrument for the transmission of values and the shaping of a society. The conservative attack itself becomes deceptive, however, when it fails to make clear whether its goal is to purge pedagogy of any politics (which cannot be done) or to make pedagogy into the instrument of only one political perspective (which should not be done).

As the citations in this book demonstrate, I am well aware that many have preceded me in making parts of the argument I am advancing. In Canons and Contexts, for example, Paul Lauter offers what may be the best collection to date articulating the history of debate over the character of American letters and the rationale for new methods of study. Not content with theory, Lauter also served as general editor of the ground-breaking Heath Anthology of American Literature, now widely adopted by reformers in the discipline. In fact, I take the position represented by Canons and Contexts and the Heath Anthology as my starting point, and hope to show where we can go from there. Whereas Lauter and others labored mightily to open the canon, revisionists now face many thorny questions about what to do in the wake of the end of consensus and the advent of multiculturalism. Controversies over "identity politics," for example, or about whether multiculturalism is a panacea or a ploy, mark the new stages of development into which reformers are heading. Likewise, just as the opening of the canon resulted from the progressive social movements of the 1960s, the current moment of reappraisal borrows much of its machinery from critical theory - that body of literary and cultural analysis associated with the methods of European structuralism and deconstruction which arrived with such fanfare in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Although denunciations from the cultural Right often lump the canon-busters, feminists, and multiculturalists together with the semioticians and deconstructors, in practice these various movements are radically distinct and often in disagreement. One thing requiring explanation today, then, is how to mediate the competing claims and divergent concerns of these various reform movements. In the end, how can American literary and cultural study accommodate these often contradictory agendas? Can it do so and still maintain both its disciplinary integrity and its reformist zeal? If there is to be compromise, which agendas should be stressed and which deferred? Will these decisions be made by focusing chiefly on the internal arrangements of academic business or with one eye also on higher education's embattled place in American cultural politics?

My frequent use of the plural pronoun ("we" and "our") in this book raises the question of whom I imagine myself addressing. Traditionally a book is written or marketed with a definite idea of its "central audience." It is perhaps a result of today's debates over multiculturalism and (in Schlesinger's phrase) the "disuniting of America" that the notion of a central audience appears out of date. If there is any new consensus in American literary studies as we go into the 21st century, it is that we have reached the end of the era of consensus (see Bercovitch, "America as Canon"; Pease; Carafiol). My book is written with the knowledge that there is a diverse audience out there, and that the dividing lines intersect in unpredictable ways. Some of these divisions are matters of race and ethnicity; some of generation; some of politics and social position; some of sex and gender; some of the gap between the academy and the larger educated public. Teachers, students, and readers of American literature are my primary audience. But I assume that this audience holds a range of positions on the fundamental issues under debate today, and I endeavor to respect that variety of opinion even as I try to persuade people to my points of view. I also imagine my readers to include some beyond this main audience, including people in other fields as well as people in other walks of life. With that broader audience in mind I have tried to write a more accessible prose and to occasionally restate my points in different ways (at the risk of appearing to repeat myself).

It would be simplistic, I think, to approach the question of audience by dividing readers into two hypothetical camps, those "for" change and those "against." When we get down to details about what changes people have in mind, we find a bewildering array of alliances and resistances. Some are for changing the canon, but may also be against deconstructionist theory. Some are against the "politicization" of teaching, but may also be for a more historical approach to literature. Some advocate feminist criticism, but may also be partisans of rigorous aesthetic standards. There simply isn't one "side" that could form a "central audience." Such a division would not work even if one wanted to put it right down the street between the Ivory tower and the real world, since on both sides of that line we will find the same disunities. On a range of issues the book stakes out independent territory, sometimes agreeing with the reformers and sometimes disagreeing, depending on the particular issue at hand. Although I am on the whole more an advocate than a critic of change, the reasons for my advocacy and the specifics of the changes I envision may often put me at odds with my allies or in strange conjunction with my antagonists (as, for example, when I argue that multiculturalism should be understood as an ethical matter).

Part of my purpose, then, remains to reach people who are skeptical about changes in the American literary canon or about "political correctness" on campus. I hope to persuade them that there has been much misrepresentation in attacks on today's professors, and that the case for progressive reform in the curriculum of American studies is a solid one. I believe that some who share my views may benefit from exploring with me how we might persuade our colleagues and the public (and most evidence indicates that we haven't done this well yet). Thus this is not a handbook for the already converted. Readers who begin in sympathy with my arguments will, however, find a good amount of practical advice about how to go about reforming our practice as well as our rhetoric. I also hope to persuade some of the champions of change to reexamine the theories, terms, and strategies on which proponents of the new American studies have relied.

Many on and off campus share my sense that the polemical divide between "Left" and "Right" can be an unhelpful one. In his prize-winning book Beyond the Culture Wars, Gerald Graff argues that by "teaching the conflicts" we can begin to move beyond taking sides and toward engaging in a responsible dialogue about our differences. (Graff and I have co-written an essay since then that offers a sympathetic criticism of the Left's program of "critical pedagogy.") With Graff I believe that we should avoid simply writing handbooks for the initiated or denunciations of our enemies and rather should try to write even for our resisting readers. Graff's project helped inspire the National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity, an initiative designed by Sheldon Hackney, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH is sponsoring a variety of events in communities, churches, schools, museums, and public forums to encourage a dialogue that might take us all beyond the war of words. As part of that initiative, in 1995 I directed a four-week summer institute for secondary school teachers on "Rethinking American Studies," where I tried out a number of the ideas presented in this book. As a group, we reached the conclusion that our core ethic must be to bring diverse voices to the table and to facilitate a challenging exchange of stories. Those are goals I have sought to meet in these pages. Whether I have executed this plan adroitly is a different issue from whether I should adopt such a plan, which I believe I should.

The book might have been more unified in tone had I restricted it to a more narrow intended audience, but that would have harmed both the book and the debate it seeks to join. At times there is a different kind of oscillation in this book from that between defense and persuasion, and this is the movement back and forth between theoretical argument and practical advice. Although it may at times be disconcerting, this variation stems from my effort to harness intellectual debates to everyday questions of pedagogy. I believe that most readers will share my sense that such an effort is vitally important, and that questions about pedagogy have rightly gained a more prominent place today throughout the disciplines of higher education (even among the theorists). There may be something of an unavoidable trade-off here, since neither the theory nor the pedagogy can be as detailed as both might be if they ignored each other. But given that there are already many books that concentrate on one at the expense of the other, the choice to offer a unique combination of both seems to me the right one.

If my imagined audience forms any kind of coherent community, it is that of readers who believe that what we study matters, whether we do it in the classroom or in book clubs or alone at the beach on vacation. More specifically, my audience is made up of all those who have the sense that the sometimes inscrutable debate about what constitutes the "American" in American literature (or American history or American studies) is far more than an academic matter, since it goes to the heart of who we imagine ourselves to be as a society and a nation.

The sequence of chapters in this volume proceeds from a general overview of the culture wars today, through the specific ways in which it is being fought out in American literary studies, and finally to some ideas about how to teach those conflicts. I work to establish both the historical and theoretical contexts for today's dilemmas, taking readers through contributions from critical theory as well arguments over American identity conducted by writers from colonial times to the present. At the heart of this narrative is what I call the "struggle for representation." In chapter 1, which takes that topic as its title, I show how the struggle for representation in literary theory belongs to a larger clash over the meaning and justice of representation which is taking place in the spheres of contemporary culture and politics. I examine how contemporary theories of representation and identity make any blanket advocacy or denunciation of identity politics (i.e., the notion that a person's politics is determined by one factor of identity, such as race or class or gender) misleading at best. The encounter between 1960s-type social movement reformers on the one hand and 1980s-type critical theory reformers on the other is thus staged as a way to move forward articulating the promises and problems of multiculturalism.

The culture wars in American studies can be explained if we see them as not only a clash inside the academy between movement reformers and critical theorists, but also a confrontation between the (uneasily united) academic innovators and the rising tide of religious and political conservatism in post-1960s America. But this is at best only a partial way of historicizing the current polemics. The debates now raging over representation and cultural identity are at least as old as the republic; recalling that longer history could help us attain a calming distance on our own conflicts and a correcting perspective on some of the competing claims. In chapter 2, "Not Born on the Fourth of July," I provide a historical context for the present quarrels over literature and politics introduced in chapter 1 by mapping the vexed legacy of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. In examining how the working class, enslaved Africans, abolitionists, and early women's rights activists turned Jefferson's words to their own ends, I want to remind us that American identity has always been a contested issue.

The culture wars and debates in answer to the question "What is an American?" have been with us from the start in a way that belies some of the nostalgic calls for a return to unity and consensus. Although I am in disappointed disagreement with many self-described left liberals who have joined the (neo)conservative side in the culture wars, I do concur with Gitlin's suggestion that the troubled legacy of Enlightenment political liberalism deserves a hearing before we throw it into the dustbin of history. European theory in some of its guises has joined forces with American social movement radicalism to critique not simply the shortcomings of American democracy but the very principles of its ideology. In Europe this critique has been most famously countered by the work of Jurgen Habermas, whose arguments have influenced or been paralleled by a host of American thinkers who still take the critique of liberalism seriously (whether it comes from movement radicals or poststructuralist professors). The case of the Declaration of Independence presents us with a challenge, for in it we find a tactical use of Enlightenment principles, an affirmation made strategically in the face of devastating injustice. This history makes it possible to rethink the purposes and effects of teaching documents such as the Declaration, novels such as Ellison's Invisible Man, and speeches such as King's "I Have a Dream." If these texts are themselves contradictory, tactical, and subject to diverse historical appropriations (as I try to show), what do we think we are transmitting when we teach them? What "cultural work" do we imagine we are doing in interpreting them? What ethos do we mean to espouse by our pedagogy?

As should be clear, this book grows at least as much out of my teaching experience as out of my research and writing. It appears more important than ever to insist on the inseparability of teaching and scholarship, especially in light of the often ignorant assertions about how indifferent or uninvolved research scholars are when it comes to teaching. My writing and my teaching are in constant dialogue, for each provides a check and a balance to the other. For the humanities critic, the classroom is more often than not a laboratory, a place of experimentation whose hard-earned results eventually (with any luck) find their way into publication. For me, the experiment with multiculturalism and pedagogy ended in questions about ethics, a result that surprised me at first. After all, most academic talk was (and still is) about "politics"; it assumes the priority of the political over the ethical. The central theme of poststructuralist criticism, it seemed, was "power," and its critique of liberalism pointedly borrowed from Nietzsche in interpreting morality as a disguise for the will-to-power.

My experience teaching multiculturalism led me to question the adequacy of this critique. Many of the writers I studied, and many of the students I worked with, asserted ideas about agency that once more had us discussing the ethics of the choices we make about our identities and their effects. The notion that there were meaningful choices, and that each of us was responsible for and to those choices, ran against the tide of determinism in theories about the "social construction" of the "human subject," though at the same time these theories gave us a better understanding of the history of our choices and the contexts that conditioned them. Categories of race or gender or class, because of their very historical constructedness, are not sure indexes to a person's character or way of life, even if these factors can never be ignored in calculating our identities. But even this "antiessentialist" argument raises ethical questions, as it seems to undercut the identity, and thus the power, of people who have long been discriminated against precisely because of the category with which they have been identified. To say that categories (such as race) are fictions does not seem an adequate response to the force of those categories in real life, and such attitudes seem ethically dubious coming from people who have known very little of that discrimination first hand.

When I looked around, I saw that the European theorists, too, had taken an "ethical turn," something of a surprise considering the Nietzschean roots ("beyond good and evil") of much poststructuralist cultural analysis. Chapter three, "Taking Multiculturalism Personally," pursues this ethical turn in reflecting upon the impasses of identity politics in the multiculturalism debate. It begins by reviewing the disparate definitions and practices of multiculturalism, which is now many things to many people. As in chapter five, my argument is in part autobiographical, looking into the mirror of my own conflicted identities and the role they have played in my work as a teacher and interpreter of literature. I wonder about multiculturalism as an ethos, and what the relationship can or should be between one's ethos in life (as a citizen or parent, for example) and one's ethos as a teacher. I wonder what standing ethos (from the Greek for "character") and ethics can have in the era of the deconstructed "subject" and the end of "humanism." In arguing that my version of multiculturalism constitutes the challenge of an ethical practice, I try to combine the theoretical arguments of the philosophers with the literary and historical lessons of the writers to whom I have put my self to school over the last two decades. Perhaps most importantly, I want to ask again about our ethical relations in the classroom - about the ethics of authority and responsibility in the classroom, especially when consensus about cultural values and historical truths may be at an end.

The final two chapters continue this discussion of the cultural significance of teaching in the humanities, with specific attention to the past, present, and future of American literary studies. "The Discipline of the Syllabus" explains in part why the culture wars so often take the form of the mocking or championing of course titles. The function of the syllabus in constructing the discipline needs to be understood, and the history of the American canon reviewed in this light. Everyone's pedagogical situation differs, however, so I realize that the nostrums I offer may be only partially relevant in the case of each reader, and only indirectly so for readers who are not themselves faced with the practical question of what to assign at the beginning of the semester. This is not to say that the chapter does not speak to those outside the profession; on the contrary, in rehearsing something of the history of the American syllabus I hope to persuade the general reader that today's controversies over what and how to teach are best understood when we know more about the history from which they come. That historical knowledge could prevent us from over-reacting (positively or negatively) to today's changes and provide us with the information we need to evaluate these changes. Not all the focus here is on the past, however, as the chapter goes on to focus on recent attempts to use theories of a text's "cultural work" or its capacity to represent a group as new criteria for constructing the syllabus. Though these solutions have many virtues, their consequences and flaws need to be clarified.

So now what do we do? Although each of these chapters offers some guidelines or ideas for pedagogy, I felt the need to address the topic most directly in the conclusion, though even here I had to make some excursions into theory and history. "The End of 'American' Literature" shows how the struggle for representation in the canon debates can yield an expanded geography for the discipline and new approaches to teaching it. One direct result of the encounter between movement reformers and critical theory people was to push the theorists to explain how their often abstruse speculations translate into classroom and curriculum practice. What began as a high academic discourse at research universities developed into a resource for rethinking virtually every aspect of our everyday labors as educators. Deconstructing Moby Dick in the pages of a journal was something quite different from deconstructing its role in one's classroom or on one's syllabus. Similarly, movement reformers who used literature to show the arbitrary social construction of race, class, and gender stereotypes found that the logic of their argument led inevitably to questioning the legitimacy of these categories for cultural identity: what may have begun as a gesture to affirm the experience of a marginalized group could end up as a critique that undermined efforts to clearly establish the identities of such groups, so that movement reformers did indeed begin to sound a lot like the French-inspired deconstructors of representational identities. Not incidentally, this chapter (like chapter three) also includes personal reflections on my experiences as a teacher, as I trace how our re-energized concern with issues of race and geography and gender suddenly puts the pedagogue's authority at risk.

Teaching texts from previously marginalized groups cannot be advanced simply on the basis of establishing or celebrating the separate identity of the group, especially when modes of literary or cultural analysis emphasize how such identities are as much the product of representation as they are its object. This goes for the identity "American" as well. The "end" of American literary pedagogy, I contend, does not bring us to the abolition of "American literature" as a subject - as some readers might mistakenly but perhaps understandably infer from chapter 5's title. Rather, the end I aim for is a comparative curriculum of connecting the differences, one in which the competing visions and rival representations can be put into dialogue with one another. While it is important that different cultural groups find their voices, it is equally important that they listen to one another, and even learn how to tell each other's stories instead of only repeating their own. The curriculum I propose differs from the standard "celebration of diversity" or "cultural pluralist" models, which too often set texts side-by-side without putting them into conversation with one another or without asking how they might be made accountable to each other. These models often overlook the real historical tensions and differences of power between competing answers to Crèvecoeur's old question of "What is an American?" The conflicts between the texts in our literary history need to be brought into the open and engaged, not papered over either by a soothing narrative of national harmony or an equally misguided story of separate traditions.

I wrote this book over a seven-year period, having presented an early version of chapter five at a conference in 1989 and revising parts of each chapter through the winter of 1996. Quite self-consciously, I saw my arguments as interventions designed to change the way that we in American literary studies go about doing our business, and as forays into explaining what we do to a skeptical public. Parts of the chapters have an undisguised polemical character and are meant to provoke a response. It may be that some readers find the tone of the book too aggressive or opinionated, particularly given its academic origins and context. This is a risk I am willing to take, partly out of a desire to blur the lines between university press and trade press publication, and partly because the rhetoric of the culture wars makes such a style inevitable to some degree, though I recognize its limitations. I remember the somewhat guilty pleasure I felt in coming up with the title "The End of 'American' Literature," which I modeled after David Noble's The End of American History . (Since that time and as the fin de siècle approaches, there have been an embarrassing number of "The End of ....." books.) The appearance of the first version of this chapter as an essay in the March 1991 issue of College English changed my career to a degree that I had not anticipated. Though I had written two previous books and edited others, nothing I had done earned me the notoriety of this piece. Obviously I was on to something. The culture wars were heating up, and my article became something of a vehicle for partisans on many of its sides. In retrospect I do not attribute this response to my originality, for others were making some of the same points. There was something about my rhetoric, and my manner of combining theory with pedagogical controversy, that made the piece an effective though disputed instrument. Many of my colleagues remarked on the essay's attention to questions of pedagogy, which were then rarely on the agenda of the dominant academic discourse on "theory." For better or worse, I became drawn into more such controversies, and soon produced a series of articles that took off from the first, elaborating and qualifying and occasionally contradicting its arguments.

Those essays became the basis for this book. To fashion a coherent volume and to answer criticisms of my previous versions, I have revised each chapter to some degree, making substantial subtractions and additions along the way. The polemics have not disappeared, though they have been moderated at times, partly out of the desire to persuade the not-already-converted. In the case of "The End of 'American' Literature," however, I felt the necessity to revise most extensively. I had received a good amount of commentary about the essay (some of it published in a College English forum to which I responded), and felt there were extensive modifications and improvements worth making. I was tempted to let it stand as originally published, but it seemed wrong to reprint it without revisiting some of its weaker moments. Many new examples also came to mind, and there was fresh scholarship to account for as well. I am not the person to judge whether the changes I have made in the chapters will convince my detractors, infuriate my supporters, or just increase the army of the indifferent.

As I put the final touches on this volume, the nation remains enrolled in something like a non-stop national seminar on the topic of "What is an American?" Each election, each media event (such as the O. J. Simpson trials), and each public catastrophe (such as the Oklahoma City bombing) becomes instantly assigned to the syllabus, a fresh text for interpreters of our cultural identity. Public issues such as immigration, welfare, support for the United Nations, or international trade are added quickly to the curriculum. In these and other public cases debate quickly turns to questions that also resound in the narrower precincts of academe: who and what properly belong to the category of the "American," and how are we to preserve and protect the supposedly "exceptional" or special essence that is the meaning of America. I hope my discussions contribute to a growing skepticism about the usefulness and morality of this search for America's one essential meaning. Of course our historical moment is not the first, and will not be the last, time that the question of "un-American" activities takes center stage. It would be utopian to think that one could finally put an end to this unfortunate quarrel. Nevertheless we remain obligated, I believe, to raising the level of the debate a few notches, and this is where educators can play a role, whether in their capacity as teachers or as "public intellectuals." Much of the quarrel has taken place in an uninformed darkness, where the obscurity created by ideological stereotypes and historical inaccuracies makes the discovery of common ground impossible. So this book is in part about setting the record straight, though I do not anticipate the achievement of a new consensus anytime soon. The end I have in mind, rather, is one in which we struggle not only to represent ourselves, but to do justice to the stories of others. These other stories are also America's, and America is also their story.