As time goes on, it will only be more difficult to fit everything into our literature courses. Moya and Saldivar explain that we currently live in a period of “rapid economic internationalization” in which “transformation is being played out before our very eyes” (12). The transnational imaginary is inevitable. As American literature progresses throughout this century, the current literature will be in more and more of an interplay with the rest of the globe. Scholars of the future will have an even bigger task ahead of them, so we must begin the transition for them. For now, maybe the answer is changing the American literature curriculum to reflect Carolyn Porter’s “quadruple set of relations between (1) Europe and Latin America; (2) Latin America and North America; (3) North America and Europe; and (4) Africa and both Americas” (510). Dividing American literature courses into these four categories could help professors tackle the problem of showing the relationships between the different continents while still doing justice to the writers from each place.
Monday, September 16, 2013
The Transnational Conundrum
After
reading the numerous arguments for why and how we should expand our conception
of American literature, I felt overwhelmed. Clearly it’s important to decenter
the United States and include the voices of many currently marginalized writers
from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. However, I struggle to see how we could
possibly do them all justice within American studies alone. Moya and Saldivar
mention in “Fictions of the Trans-American Imaginary” that “the literature that
is enshrined in a canon has less to do with what is valued at the time of the
making of an individual work than it does with what is valued at the time a
canon is put together” (6). Values have shifted since the traditional American literary
canon was put together, and it would be crazy to stick to that traditional
canon with everything we now know about American history and the dialogues
taking place across borders for hundreds of years. The hardest task that I
envision for the future of American studies is choosing which writers to now
include, and which ones to exclude. Even if scholars can theoretically keep
reading more and more neglected works, American literature classes are limited
in scope. My undergraduate courses in American literature struggled to fit in the
important canonical works, let alone works by marginalized writers. Whenever we
were assigned works by ethnic minorities, we rarely discussed how those works
conflicted with or related to the canonical works.
As time goes on, it will only be more difficult to fit everything into our literature courses. Moya and Saldivar explain that we currently live in a period of “rapid economic internationalization” in which “transformation is being played out before our very eyes” (12). The transnational imaginary is inevitable. As American literature progresses throughout this century, the current literature will be in more and more of an interplay with the rest of the globe. Scholars of the future will have an even bigger task ahead of them, so we must begin the transition for them. For now, maybe the answer is changing the American literature curriculum to reflect Carolyn Porter’s “quadruple set of relations between (1) Europe and Latin America; (2) Latin America and North America; (3) North America and Europe; and (4) Africa and both Americas” (510). Dividing American literature courses into these four categories could help professors tackle the problem of showing the relationships between the different continents while still doing justice to the writers from each place.
As time goes on, it will only be more difficult to fit everything into our literature courses. Moya and Saldivar explain that we currently live in a period of “rapid economic internationalization” in which “transformation is being played out before our very eyes” (12). The transnational imaginary is inevitable. As American literature progresses throughout this century, the current literature will be in more and more of an interplay with the rest of the globe. Scholars of the future will have an even bigger task ahead of them, so we must begin the transition for them. For now, maybe the answer is changing the American literature curriculum to reflect Carolyn Porter’s “quadruple set of relations between (1) Europe and Latin America; (2) Latin America and North America; (3) North America and Europe; and (4) Africa and both Americas” (510). Dividing American literature courses into these four categories could help professors tackle the problem of showing the relationships between the different continents while still doing justice to the writers from each place.
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Cristy,
ReplyDeleteI think your critique about where to draw the limits on "expansionism" is very apt. As we discussed in class, it seems as if an attempt for inclusion can end up becoming a stronger form of exclusion. The experience you describe as an undergrad serves as a good example of how multicultural writers can become tied to the roles of the "Other," which must be presented for required purposes only. However, I am still thinking along the lines of Kolodny, and Moya and Saldivar and their idea of an orientation shift, which can defy binary notions. In such case, we could consider the transnational subject even within canonical works. For example, the field could study the contact zones depicted by John Steinbeck in his novel Tortilla Flat.
I like how you draw upon Porter to propose alternative models for literary surveys of the canon. You're certainly right that the "transnational turn," and the recovery efforts it sparked, have made it impossible to write/teach/speak about an agreed upon literary canon. The rise of multiculturalism cannot be disconnected from this development, which means that the consensus on the canon has been weakening since the 1960s. As you point out, it is very challenging to select which writers will represent some aspect of US national culture. If we keep in mind what Kolodny suggests, and what Sara points out in her response, our decisions might owe more to how we perceive "history" rather than "literature." For example, the Civil War used to the primary turning point in studying the 19th Century US; now, however, the earlier US-Mexico War has challenged Civil War as THE watershed moment. Consequently, this transnational event has shifted the "critical gaze" toward Latin America, making it possible for the sorts of essays written by Moya, Saldivar, Kolodny, Aleman, Gruesz, etc.
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