Five Periods, One Argument: What American Literature Keeps Asking

The idea

Four centuries of American writing return to one question in different vocabularies: who is authorized to speak for this country, and on what grounds. The Puritans answered from providence, reading a storm or a captivity as a message and writing to examine a soul. The revolutionary generation answered from reason and argued its way out of an empire, while Wheatley, Equiano and Occom wrote from inside the contradiction that the argument left standing. The transcendentalists moved the authority inward, to intuition and nature and the self, and Poe, Hawthorne and Melville immediately tested that confidence against evil and found it thin, while Douglass and Jacobs answered from testimony, which is authority of a different kind and harder to refuse. After the war, realism asked instead who gets described: Twain and Howells and James on ordinary life, the regionalists on particular places and their speech, the naturalists on forces no character can beat. Modernism broke the inherited vocabulary and built techniques in its place, Hemingway by omission, Faulkner by accumulation, Eliot by fragment and allusion, and the Harlem Renaissance by insisting that Black writers set their own terms instead of answering white ones. After nineteen forty-five the question turned inward again and then outward: Lowell and Plath made the private self the material, Ellison and Baldwin named an invisibility that belonged to the viewers, the postmodernists made the telling the subject, and the multicultural writers reopened the whole question of who writes America, which is where the exam's largest band now sits. The exam tests that history in four ways, and the largest of them, thirty-five to forty percent, asks you to read a passage you have never seen and say what it is doing. Everything else in this course exists to make that reading faster.