I am delighted with this book. Normally I can't imagine anything more boring than (yet another) anthology. Not so here. These a essays about historic literary events (in chronological order) and virtually every single one provides material for conversation with my bookie friends. In fact this book seems to be a reliable source of material for Garrison Keillor's "Writers Almanac". ( )

Oh, c’mon, guys. A literary history of America with an article on one Carl Shurz, a relatively unknown senator from Missouri, whose only work was an unfinished memoir, which he couldn’t decide whether to write in German or English? With articles on The Sacred Harp and the blues and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”? With Mickey Mouse lined up facing T.S. Eliot in the table of contents and Grant Wood on the same page as Arthur Miller? With Gone with the Wind in the same chapter as Absalom! Absalom! With Life magazine and Superman and Jelly Roll Morton, one right after the other, then bebop and “Roll Over Beethoven” and Dr. Seuss and “Pete” Rozelle’s National Football League? And the Winchester rifle and the skyscraper and the atom bomb. And – oh yes, don’t forget – Linda Lovelace. Oh, c’mon guys.

At least that’s the tone of many reviews of this book. And, I can imagine, untold conversations in faculty lounges. All this folderol in a book published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University, too. How could they? How dare they?

But, thank you, Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (whoever you are), for the most delightful, refreshing, and surprisingly informative reference work I’ve encountered in a long time. Now I am not accustomed to reading reference works from cover to cover, from page one straight through. But this one is a different story. Oh, mind you, I can’t help skipping around, jumping ahead to articles that arouse my curiosity (like Carl Schurz), or pique my interest (like “The Mouse That Whistled”; i.e., Mickey) or amaze me with their chutzpah (like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”). So I’ve set myself a little regimen. First, I read the next article listed in the table of contents, beginning with 1507, “The name ‘America’ appears on a map.” Then I allow myself to skip ahead to one that captures my attention (I’m headed toward “The Book-of-the-Month Club” next), then back to the next article in the table of contents.

I’ve just passed Edward Taylor, and here at least I was expecting a conventional article about one of our more conventional poets, who is usually given a few pages in an anthology of American literature – well, out of respect for the time, I suppose. But would you believe this article was as surprising, as charming, and as informative as any I’ve read yet, placing the arch-Puritan pastor squarely in the tradition of Walt Whitman and James Joyce and Ezra Pound? And, after reading the article myself, I might add Gerard Manley Hopkins and e.e. cummings.

I admit now I’ve grown so accustomed to this kind of surprise, this new light on conventional subjects, that I find myself disappointed occasionally when an article turns out to be just good, sound commentary, with no unexpected twists or turns (for example, the Salem witchcraft trials or sentimental fiction).

Rarely (thankfully, very rarely) an article takes “close reading” of a “text” to an extreme. A doctoral student tries his hand at “the woodcut portrait reputed to be the first American print.” It depicts Richard Mather, and every line, every shadow, every gesture gets its close analysis. Mather’s thumb holding open the Bible turns out to be a surrogate penis and the glasses he holds in his other hand, his balls. But that’s just the beginning: just as this “print” represents Mather, Mather and all his brethren find an “image” of God imprinted in humankind. And this leads – I’m serious – to John Calvin and memory registration and theological questions as to whether the image of God is imprinted on our bodies or our souls. Fortunately, this article jumps ahead a bit to Edward Taylor and we discover the image imprinted in his verse before it is discovered for us by the more professional critic who composes that article:

Am I new minted by thy Stamp indeed?
Mine eyes are dim; I cannot clearly see.
Be my spectacles that I may read
Thine Image, and Inscription stampt on mee.

And while I’m quibbling, let me worry just a bit about what the book title really means. The new literary history of America is not a history of American literature. It goes well beyond that, including not only film and oratory and journalism but also music and art and artifacts and the social/cultural dimensions of Reno gambling and Alcoholics Anonymous and the integration of the military and cybernetics. Nor is it American history as seen in its literary texts, though it comes closer to being that. For an explication of the meaning of their title, one turns to the editors’ introduction, but (one should not be surprised, I suppose) what one finds instead is their explication of an inexplicable novel, A Secret History of Time to Come by Robie Macauley (1979), in which Americans have forgotten their history and keep trying to retell their story, to rename places that used to have names, to rediscover America. Oh well, when I had almost given up and told myself I would have to make up my own meaning for their title (having re-read their explication at least three times), they up and tell me what they mean, or at least I think they do:

Throughout [this book], the search has been for points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea of a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable. The goal of the book is not so much to smash a canon or create a new one, but to set many forms of American speech in motion . . . . Thus this broadly cultural history – a history of America in which literary means not only what is written but also what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form.

So, you see, the new literary history is a “broadly cultural history,” to be utterly prosaic. Or, as one might put it more imaginatively, it is a history of American imagination, or the imagination of American history or an imaginative history of America. Use your imagination: that’s the key. What your imagination creates may be a poem or novel or play or essay; but it may also be a map, a sermon, a Supreme Court decision (well, maybe not these days with this Supreme court, but use your imagination), or a painting or monument or comic strip or country music or – okay, you get the point. “Texts” aren’t necessarily texts; “literary” is not necessarily literature or literate, but it’s – oh, yeah – imaginative. I might rearrange the words in the title: An American Literary History of the New.

Never mind. The editors conclude (well, sort of), saying, “it is hoped that the reader will find A New Literary History of America entertaining as well as informative.” Be assured, Dear Rear: you will. Both entertaining and informative. I promise. The editors wish “to arouse the reader’s curiosity, to open questions, not to close cases . . . .” They do, they do indeed. Finally, they say, “It is the task of this book to remind the reader of what is most familiar [like Edward Taylor and Arthur Miller and the Salem witch trials] and to raise the specter of what remains out of sight – forgotten, suppressed, or biding its time [in other words, a “secret history of time to come,” right?].” Last of all, and perhaps most important of all, they “invite the reader to think of countless other moments in the American story that could be addressed as this book tries to speak to its subjects.” Well, I, for one, am a reader who can’t wait to begin. Hmm, there’s “Little Black Sambo” and Little Brown Koko (I’ve already done that one), and President Eisenhower’s farewell address (“the military/industrial complex”), and Ike’s Interstate Highway system, and John Dewey’s Art as Experience, and Robert Rauschenberg’s freestanding combine Monogram (the one with the goat encircled by a tire, standing on a collage), and the names of automobiles (from Mustang and Firebird and Cougar and Thunderbird to Prius and Escape and Equinox and Focus). Not to mention Labor Day and Fall Creek Falls State Park and A New Literary History of America.

Perhaps that would be a good conclusion for this review, encouraging you to find the book in your public library, or even purchase a copy from your local bookstore or Amazon (as I did). But I can’t resist this opportunity to share just a few examples of articles that have intrigued me (and I certainly haven’t read the whole book yet; after all, it is encyclopedic).

For instance, let me start with Tarzan. Of course, once one becomes accustomed to this “new” approach to “literary history,” there is no surprise that Tarzan makes the “canon.” Nor to the rather glowing conclusion: “Tarzan of the Apes is in its way a profoundly important tale that is both prelapsarian fantasy in its conceit and Emersonian fable in its reach . . . . an eternal, inescapable narrative inscribed for better and for worse on the minds and hearts of us all.” So come on, guys, swing out from that limb, singing “Wah-hoo-ah-hoo-ah-hoo,” or something like that. Of course, one must admit, “The virulent racism that infects Tarzan . . . is a reflection of his temperament and his time.” “Burrough’s work contains both the arrogance and the insecurity of white masculinity of his time . . . .” And, here we get a succinct, but specific picture of that era’s racism. Even so, Burroughs, we are assured was able “to transcend its shabby politics and racial neuroses.”

The surprise in this article? Burroughs on his own never achieved a lifelong dream: to be published in the Saturday Evening Post. He kept trying, but all his manuscripts were rejected. But at age 64, his dream came true when the Post published an article about him, entitled “How to Become a Great Writer.” The criteria by which he was judged to be “America’s greatest living writer”? (1) The size of his public, (2) a memorable iconic character, and (3) the promise of readers in posterity. So be it.

I suppose if I were to choose the article that, so far, has been the most informative and the most surprising one for me, it would be “Wild Style” (1982). I was only vaguely familiar with Wild Style, a semi-documentary film exploring the art of hip-hop, which began as street pranksters spraying graffiti all over the Bronx. However, by 1981 it had been taken by to the Art Establishment, now being produced on canvases and sold in galleries for big mo. The form of lettering in the graffiti was called “wildstyle.” But what this led to was a brand-new, international, very popular culture: called hip-hop,

One endemic feature of hip-hop, I discovered, was “sampling,” simply lifting items from other sources, riffing off corporate logos, cartoon characters, nursery rhymes, prison poetry, political slogans, and masterpieces of the Western canon. DJ’s and their producers broadcast hop-hop “music”: “moving from the abrsive, minimalist sound of the mid-1980s to the cut-and-paste collages of the late 1980s, which ‘sampled’ the best melodies, bass lines, horn stabs, and drum patterns of existing songs.” Hip-hop, indeed, is the new America: “Our intellect recognizes hip-hop as artifice and performance, but it preys on our soul’s desire for authenticity, realness, heroism. It is a barbed criticism of the powers that be and the structures that them us in, yet it aspires to the limitless futures that that system promises us.” It parodies and criticizes the powers that be, all the while longing to find itself (as it has) among the powers that be. Surprise, surprise!

A book of this nature, of course, could not have a normal straight-laced table of contents. Oh, it looks normal and straight-laced. Yes. And it does proceed in chronological order, with dates indicated for each person, work, or movement as well as events. But there is no consistency in the matter of titles. Some of them are mere labels, e.g., Moby-Dick, John Dos Possos, Hurricane Katrina). But some leave you guessing -- as you are meant to be: “One sees what what one sees” (Gertrude Stein), “’You’re swell,’” (talkies and radio), “’The illusory babels of language” (concreptualism in modern art); xxxx. At the head of each artidle is a title in large and small caps, not necessarily the same as was in the table of contents, and above that, justified to the right, a headnote, in bold face type, usually one complete sentence. The running head for the article may be an adaptation of the title or the headnote. Oh well, most everything about this volume is “new.” Consistency is the hobgoblin of pre-modern minds.

For example, the table of contents lists “Declaration of Independence,” p. 98. But you turn to p. 98, and the title of the article is “A Dialectic of Radical Enlightenment,” which also serves as the running head. And the headnote, right justified in bold face, under the date 1776, is “John Adams disdains authorship of Common Sense but helps declare independence.” The article itself says very little about the Declaration as a document, but focuses on the colonist declaring their independence – not demanding it, but declaring it (as an established fact). The article focuses at first on Paine’s writings and on John Adams’ response, Thoughts on Government, which argues strenuously against Paine as the “Star of Disaster,” a revolutionary demagogue , more adept at tearing down than in building up, rebelling than governing. This sets up a perceived thematic dissent that will underlie (and undermine) successive debates: government and revolution, law and freedom, home rule (or “states’ rights”) and human rights, “enlightened patriotism and enlightened universalism,” “local circumscription” and “boundless universalism. “Each reference to a ‘common sense,’ each invocation of ‘self-evident truth’ includes the covert assumption that those who see things differently are not competent to use rational speech or to take autonomous action.”

This article concludes, curiously, by taking us back to a “new” definition of literature. What is history and what is literature?

It is certainly justified to say that American literature starts with political tracts and philosophical treatises. But to read that literature in any meaningful way is to see what those writings about common sense and the self-evident forced into existence: myriad minority reports, many of them collected in the disturbing and disturbed stock of imaginative literature written after 1776. Perhaps the true American literature – true to its nation’s wish for local circumscription as well as to its yearning for boundless universality – can be found after the Declaration of Independence, indeed provoked by it: fictions obsessed with their own provenance, mongrel genres, faux classicism, expatriate fantasies and regionalist tales, stories of migration and adventure, visions of deception and passing, raptures and conspiracies. There is almost everything – but no self-evident truth – in these innumerable competing voices. [p102f, Frank Kelleter]

Indeed, what is a new approach turns out not so new after all: history is literature, and literature is history. That’s all you know and all you need to know. Suddenly we find ourselves reading what might better be entitled A Literary History of the New America. ( )

A series of essays, arranged in chronological order, examing critical events or works in the literary history of America. An entertaining way to learn about the beginnings and the development of American literature. ( )