Going Native

When American literature became good enough for

Americans, what happened to the literary canon?



By Morris Dickstein



For the longest time American writers got little respect from condescending arbiters of taste abroad or even from literary scholars at home. Professors of English were in thrall to the mother country, with its awesome cultural traditions. Snobs at heart, they saw American literature as little more than a provincial offshoot, decorously genteel but with a handful of talents (Melville, Poe, Whitman) who were almost freakishly original. In Memoirs of Hecate County, Edmund Wilson recalled how his teachers at Princeton, just before the First World War, either ignored or patronized American writers. “In those days the English department stopped short with the Victorian age and did not admit the importance of any American writers at all.” This began changing soon afterward, but the celebration of our native literary genius has accelerated tremendously in recent decades. Since 1975, when I first started teaching graduate students, I’ve seen their interests shift dramatically from earlier writers to modern and contemporary ones, from poetry to prose, and from English to American literature. These changes have been reflected in reading patterns outside the university, and they helped set off a genuine upheaval in the literary canon.