Carla Mulford, ed. Teaching the Literatures of early America [Reseña]

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos. n. º 8 (2001 ). pp. 119- 125 BOOK REVIEWS REVIEW OF CARLA MUJ.FORD. ed. Teaching the Literatures of Early Ame rica. New York: MLA. 1999. pp. VII-XII, 402. ISSN 1079-2562. Carla Mulford 's book is the fifteenth volume in the MLA's Options for Teaching series, which. like the series devoted by this association to individual authors. Appmaches to Teaching. reflects thc growing interest in cstablishing a closer link bctwcen advanced research and teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate Ie vels. Thus, this book. withoul losing track of its didactic orientation. also reflects thc contempora.ry debate on sorne of the questions it raises in its prologue: what these «literatures» are and what constitutes «America.» If «literariness» is related. as it mostly was before thc expansion of the canon from the sixties. to aesthetic or artistic intent, it is not surprising that early American literature remained cornparatively understudied. Russell Reising. one of Lhe contributors of the volume, is surely not alone in having begun to study Edgar Allan Poe on thc fourth week of an Early American Literature course (268). Few early texts fiued those aesthetic and artistic criteria. a ndas a result thcre was a tendcncy citber to discard tcxts that did not fulfill th em as non-Jiterary. orto overemphasize this aspect in texts that <lid fulfill them. even at the expense of distorting their main purpose or their position within their culture (such was thc case with Edward Taylor's poetry). Thus, the writing of this period has benefitted tremendously from the rethinking of the concept of literature, and tbis new interesl has been manifested in numerous reccnt publicatíons, which seek both to make more primary texts available -like the Third Edition of the H1:mh Antlwlogy (1998). Gordon Sayre 's compilation of captivity nan-atives (2000) or Castillo and Schwcitzcr's The Literatures of Colonial America (2000)- and to suggest ways of analyzíng and interpretíng them on the terms Rosalie Murphy Baum suggests in this volume: in relation to theír «rhetorical effec ti veness in thcir own period,, ( 11 7). In this sense, the essays in the collection set out witb a very clear theoretical purpose in mind; in fact, oftcn with what classical rhetoric would term a «corrcctive» purpose. Thc most relevant objeclive of thcir correction is not only the concept of «literatu.re,» but also the concept of «America,» in order Lo províde a broadcr a nd more accurate picture of the different cultures and traditions coexisting in the 120 Book Review s Northern continent, heyond the British-American tradition and particularly beyond the tende nc y to encapsulate it in the writings of thc Puritan co lonies. The fir st sec tion ( «l ss ue s, Themes , Met h ods») deals with th ese rcconceptualizations, both within and wi thout British-Arnerican wri ting. Sorne essays treat general issues such as multiculluralism and colonialism, ernphasizing another of the preoccupations which mak e this collcction so perlinent: the jo int didactic aim s of connecting the past with present-day issues, and of using prirnary tex ts as a means of rcsisting «rcceived wisdom,» as Shields and Nelson arguc in a lat er essay (99). As a rule, t he authors are al so aware th at this «rc ceived wis d om» m ay include n ew oversimplifications dcrived from the post-sixties auempt to reset t hc ideological balance. Other essays in this section provide brief , useful introductions to partic ul ar traditions such as African-American or women's writings, extending their scope to includc texts from without the British-American colonies. Thre e chapters dcal most directly with cultural productions in languages ot h er than Eng lish: the Native American oral tradition. and Spanish and French colonial texts. The au th or s are convincing as to thc pcninc ncc of exploring these traditions, and as to the legitimacy of the use of translations, sincc «translation was a major litcrary form by which people of the J 61 h, 11111 and 1 g111 centuries ca rne to know about the New World» (Shields and Nelson 10 l ). They are also extremely conscious of the difficulties involved in approaching t exts whosc production. transmission and reception may take place under conditions very di ffercnt to those of the presen t. This awareness, incidcntally. is yet another of the strengths of thc collection: almosl all co ll aborators stress thc need to contextualize the mndes of literary production, authorship and rcadership in the period. and suggest useful ways of conveying to their students the effects of th ese modes. However, in spite of the authors' ca ution, and while welcoming the b roade r thi nking encouraged by such studies. it s cems necessary to wonder wheth er the l ack or a more spccific training -whether in history, anthropology, or specific philol ogies other than English-may not lead to an oversimplified or biased approach to these materials.1 This consideration is most certainly n ot an argum en t against their use, but a call to collaboration and to truly interdisciplinary studies. The essays on the more familiar British-American tradition (which co mp ose the rest of Scctiou 1 and the body of Section II. «Genre St udies») also take up the theoretical issues of the nature of literature and American identity, and mostly offer similarly useful introductory approaches in which direct reading and modern cri ti ca ] considerations are ccnnbined wi th a clcarly didactic intent. The variety of genres and lraditions discussed -ca ptivity narrativcs. Pur itan texts, poetry, drama, the novel, autobiographies. Southern writing, political essayscompletes the «Wo rld vision» of a pe ri od of g re at co mplexity , alw ays e mph as izing its relevan ce to the A me rican present. ~ lt is in thís section, howcver, where some hints of a failing not uncommon in 1. For in ,l ance. Baum's cxtcn,ive >Ccondary bibl io graphy on French colonial wri!ings d ocs nol in dudc a single French sourcc. 2. In this sen se, l wo uld likc 10 ca ll special allcntion tu rrank Shuffleton 's essay 011 t hc A1m:rican Enlightenment for its lucid analysis of the resistanccs to Enlightcned thoughl on the part of present-day studcnts and for í ts c qu ally lucid criticism and validation uf Enlíghtened ideas. Book Rei•iews 121 this MLA series ma y be dctected: two or three papers threaten to foil into the development of a particular, almos! punctual thesis in relation to specific texts rather than deal with lhe issues involved in teaching that period or genre as a whole. Section lII, «Selected Courses,» is in theory the most teaching-oriented, as it offers specific examples of courses based on Ear ly American material. Whilc acknowledging that. li ke t he rest of che book, lhis sect i on is extremely well <locumented and theoretically argue<l, it seems to me the least relevant to non- American teachers. Conditions in most Spanish universities, for instance, preclude the high-intensi ty, smallgrou p framewo rk that is assumed in thes e proposals; postgraduate courses may offer the 1ighl numbers, but generally ca nnol offer the righl leve] of foil-time commitment. Even given ideal conditions, most of the courses offered seem to me over-ambitious in the amount of material they intend to cover, especially if it is to be accompanied by sophisticated theoretícal discussion.·~ Thus. paradoxically. as a whole these «Selectcd Courses» are less helpful from the didactic perspective than the pr evious sections, where s ug gestions for teaching abound. Sorne of them, again. are unlikely lo be carried out in a Spanish context: whether it be out of a reluctance to establish highcr <legrees of intimacy with students, or out of the difficulty of sheer number s. unfortunately T cannot imagine many teachers here rca<ling and discussing students' self-narratives in imitation of Early American autobiographical fonns, or engaging them in dialogue about their personal conception of «freedom» or «the people.» However, even less adventurous readers of Mulford's volume will tind a variety of adaptable ideas, ranging from the conscious introduction of theory through guided rea<ling to the use of electronic discussion groups, thealrical readings. or visual material such as facsimilcs of early editions. There are also interesting suggestions for assignments, such as lhe preparation of an anthology entry for a 1101 yel anthologi zc<l ear ly author. re view essays on secondary sourccs, or the claboration of annolated bibliographics. Yet beyon<l these specific ideas. what is most praiscworthy is that thc book's approach as a whole practically always kccps the teaching-Jeaming proccss in mind. The last section of the work is an extensive annotatc<l bibliography prepared by E<lward Gallagher which includes further bibliographies, films. CD-ROMs, and other electronic resourc cs . Apart from thc inevitable - a nd sometimes quite intentionally hum orousflippancy involved in oneline summaries of comp lex argument s. this section is invaluable, pai1icularly in its spec ifi c reference to articles an<l chapters in book collections. Although growing interest in the ficld has led to an increase in the publication of volume-length studies, much vali<l research still appears in articles in such journals as the William and Mary Quarterly or Early American Studies. Toge th er with the generally extensive an<l «u ser -friendly» bibliographies that follow each essay, this section renders the work of gr ea t value as a reference guide. 3. Incidcntall y. while nol fully avoiding this <.Jan gcr. José F. Ar anda 's improbabk -sounding jnxtaposit ion of Chicano/a an<.J Purilan wr iters in a pnst· graduatc coursc seemed to me a mosl en li ghtening way of analyzing lhe constructcd naturc of national «my ths of origins». 122 Hook Reviews In conclusion, this is a book well worth recommending. It provides a broad and serious introduction to a relatively under-researched field ; it is, for the mo st part, consistently oriente<l towards teaching; it supplies ample bibliographical reference. Furthermore, with a consistency often lacking in multiple-authored texts, it addresses, and successfully deals with. sorne of the central theoretical issues involved in the study of the literatures of Ear ly America. WORKS CITED MARÍA ÁNGELES TODA IGLESIA Universidad de Sevilla Castillo. Susan P., and lvy Schweitzer, e<ls. The Lite ratw'E' . \' of Colonial America: A11 Anthology. Ox ford: Blackwell. 2000. Lauter. Paul, et al., eds. The Heath Antlwlogy of Am ericun literature. 3rd Ed ition. Boston: Houghton Mirtlin. 1998. Sayre, Gordon M .. ed. Americun Capti1·i1y Narratives. Boston: Houghton Mifílin, 2000. Book Revie11·s 123 MARÍA EUGENIA DfAZ SÁNCHEZ, and VtOR!CA PATEA B1RK, eds. Anarchy and Dissent. American Literature in the Sixties. Salamanca: Plaza Universitaria Ediciones, 2000. 254 p. Paperback. Once the twentieth century has finally come to an end, it seems indisputable that in the United States the 1960s was a period of profound changes, a decade only co mparable perhaps to the «Roari ng Twenties.» The social, political, and cultural trnnsformations und ergone by the national fabric in the J 960s have greatly shaped how we nowadays conceptua li ze both U. S. Literature and U. S. Studies: it was the time of John Kennedy , Woodstock, Stonewall, Pop Art, the Chicago Democratic Convention, César Chávez, Vietnam, Malcolm X, or The Feminine Mystique. A conf erence was he ld at the University of Salamanca (Spain) in 1998 to assess the literary production of that decade and the proceedings have just been published. a valuab le contribution that inc lude s 10 articles both in English and Spanish approaching the litcrary legacy of the J 960s from a variety of perspectives. At rhe outsct uf her introduction, «Revisiting t he Sixties: A View from the Postmodern Age», coeditor Mª Eugenia Díaz states that «the interest in the decade has admirably resisted becoming jusi another drydust subject of scholarly inquiry» ( 13), and she then establishes the two major premises of the collection: to question the logic of dissent and to stress the links between the literature and the arts of the ! 960s anda c.letermining trend of tbe perioc.l like postmodcrnism. Appropriately enough, the opening contribution is an enlightening approach to the sociopolitical atmosphere of the time, in which historian Richard Fried develops a revisionist idea that has gained much currency lately: the or igin of many changes of the !960s mus! be tr aced back to the seco n c.l ha lf of the previous decade . Fried persuasively suggests that 1955 marks the beginning of a new era in contemporary U. S. history with seminal events such as the pub lication of Lo/ita, the first public reading of Howl, musical innovations like be-bop or rock ·n roll, or the emergence of Martín Luthcr King as the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. In the only article in the collection devoted to poetry, «T res acercam ientos poéticos para la nueva conciencia,» Manu el Brito also stresses the conn ec tion betwcen lhe l 950s and the l 960s as he studies thrce poets whose ce lebration of the se lf goes back to Eme rson. Whitman, or Thorea u: Allen Ginsberg. Robert Duncan. and Jackson Mac Low. In books like Kaddish ( 1961) or Plan et News ( 1968) Ginsberg insists on his def ense of individual freedom while Vietnam was rnging and dividing the nation. A member of the San Francisco literary scenc, Duncan also opposed the war and contributed to the ca use with a poetic series entitled «Passages,» which in Brito's analysis exhibits an innovative technique c.lerivec.l from Pound, Williams or Zukofsky. Less well-known, in the mid-l 950s Mac Low cleveloped in the wake of a gu ru of postmodernism likc John Cage an experime ntal poetics which in the late l 960s le c.! him to wrilc inl1uenced by computers and cy bernetics. In «T he New Black Consciousness: Writing and t he Construc ti on of a Bl ack Acsthrtic; or. Looking Baá al the Hanc.lwriting on the Wall» Isabel Caldeira uses Harnld Bloom 's concept of .. the anxiety t~f inJlu cn ce" to elaborate a dense analysis of how thc nationalisl r a c.lica li ~m of the Black Aesthetic was not only an answcr !o white 124 Book Revie ws cultural hegemony, but to the Harlern Rcnaissance as well. In her study of manifestos like Black Fire (1968) or The Bluck Aesthetic (1971) Caldeira stresses that Lany Neal's extremism made hirn repudiate W. E. B. Du Bois' seminal notion of "double consciousness" and explores thc heated debates that the legacy of the Black Aesthetic has generated over the years. including the one between Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates. In «From Nausea to Defeat: Norman Mailer in the l 960s» Juan José Cruz focuses on a polemical and prolific author he defines as «an existentialist rebel» ( J 00) and his main contention is that «[l]n the 1960s Mailer clearly intended a holistic opposition against the Establishment that fostered tbe "plague" of postwar America» (99). Cruz also goes back to thc l 950s when he asserts that the starting poi nt to understand the evolution of Mailer's oppositional discourse during t he sixties is his much-debated 1957 essay «T he White Negro», in which he formulated his concept of the «hipster»; one of the texts discussed is Armies of the Night ( 1968), M ailer's postmodern rewriting of the Pentagon March. In her second contribution in the collection, M.° Eugenia Díaz offers in «The Ontological Power of Language: William Ga ss in the Tunnel of the Word» a thoughtful metlitation on postmodern U. S. literature of the l 960s, centering on one of its foremost spokesmen. Díaz convincingly traces the philosophical leaning of Gass' texts, a writer who sharcd Nabokov's belief that th e word is an autonomous ent ity dissociated from the so-called «real world»; she draws intertextual connections with Wittgenstein antl Valery. with French experimental groups like Te! Quel or the Noveau Roman. or with Barthes and Foucault's theories of the author. Chuck Grey's «"Se parat e Mysteries": Stalinism, the Fragmentation of the Marxist Meta-Narrative, and the Postmodernity in E. L. Doctorow's The B ook of Daniel» offers a lucid neo-historicist reading of one of the major political novels in contemporary U. S. literature, a text from 1971 which illustrates the complexities and contradictions of the New Lcft and its ambivalent relation with the Oltl Left. Grey demonstrates that Do c torow's young protagonist resists the dogmas of Marxist rhctoric his fat h er ha<l blindly followed: from his skeptical postmodern stan ce Daniel deconstructs the logic that in the l 9 30's legitimized the Nazi-Soviet Pact or the Stalinist purges, episodes that shattere<l the Communist Paity and paved the way for the anticommunist hysteria of the postwar years. Depa1ting from the prevailing literary tone of the collection, in «Comedy, Jazz, anti Dissent: The Case of Len ny Bruce» Will Kaufrnan discusses one of the most controversia! and rebellious aitists of the decade. From a Cultural Studies appr oach Kaufman links Bruc e's improvis in g techoiques with the jazz aesthetic, especially bebop. Adhering to the goals of the book, this essay scrutinizes both anarchy antl the log ic of dissent. since the oppositional discourse of Lenny Bruce's vitriolic monologues aliena te d him increasiogly not only from his audiences, but also from the authorities, which curtailcd his freedom of expression until his career was ended. As Kaufman aptly notes, Bruce's strong self-destructive impulse was partly responsible for his fa ll. In a more straightforward ve in. in «Richard Brautigan: el mundo mágico de Trout Fisliing in America» Daniel Pastor rescues from oblivion one of th e writers who bcst symholized the mood the l 960s with no veis likc A Cm!f ederate General from Bi~ Book Reviews 12 5 Sur (1964) or Trout Fishing in America (1967). Pastor suggests that Brautigan was forgotten as soon as the decade ended probably because both in his public image and in his texts he was the ultimate encarnation of the hippie stereotype. Thus, a text as fragmentar-y and transgressive as Trout Fishing in Ame rica becomes a joumey into the heart of darkness of a country that has betrayed its very dreams and ideals. The two final essays both deal with another central figure of the countercultural movement, the novelist Ken Kesey. Even more i nscribed in a Cultural Studies framework than Kaufman's study, Matthew Roberts' «Ali-American Acid Avant- Garde: Masculinity, Whiteness and Technological Ecstasy in the Sixties Psychcdelic Movement» offers a long and dense interpretation of a signifying practice hardly studied so far: the drug experiments that Kesey's group of the Merry Pranksters undertook in California in the mid-sixties. Roberts challenges the logic of dissent of the 196 0s when he contends that «the Kesey group were straightforwardly nationalistic and quite seriously devoted to consumer technology; the y were also ... whi te supremacist and crypto -fascistic in their attitudc» ( 198); from a much-needed dcmythologizing perspective, Roberts proves that the ideolo gy of the Merry Pranksters was neveras subversive as believed, especially concerning their racial views. Quite different is David R. Williams' approach in «Madness and Death: Two Ways Out of the Cage: Ken Kesey's Liberation American Sty le», an analysis of Kesey·s most ce lebrated work . One Flew Over tlze Cuckoo ·s Nest ( 19 62). a paradigmatic text of t he 1960s. According to Williams, the hospital and the chief nurse are metaphors to decry the control exercised by the State over the individual in modern society. whereas the protagonist is a (post)modem reincarnation of Emerson 's concept of "self-reliance." While the notion that the death of the protagonist links him with icons of the J 960s like John and Robert Kennedy. Mar1in Luther King. Malcolm X, Janis Joplin, or Jimmi Hcndrix is convincing, less satisfying is Williarns' religious reading of the novel, according to which the central character is a Christ-like figure who sacrifices h is life for others. The publication of critica! studies like Anarchy and Diss ent. American Literature in the Sixties is an event to be celebrated both nationally and intcrnationally. since its different contributions provide a thoughtful rereading of the culture of one of the most fascinating periods in U. S. history. Undoubtedly, a stronger ernphasis on genres like poetry or drama or on literature produced by groups who rcclaimed their voice precisely in the 1960s -namely wornen and ethnic minoritieswould have enhanced even more the merit of this collection. JUAN IGNACIO GUIJARRO ÜONZÁ LE Z Universidad de Sevilla