The most cited American literature book on Google Scholar and JSTOR is Toni Morrison ‘ s Beloved. And that’s not an exception. Five out of ten most studied and quoted American books in these databases are by African American writers. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck et al bite the dust when confronted with Ellison, Walker, Wright, Morrison, and Hurston.
6 responses to “What American Literary Critics Like to Study”
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Do you have any explanation for this?
Can the waning interest in novels like “Martin Eden” and “An American Tragedy” be explained by the disappointment in (ideas of) socialism? Has simply everything been already written about them and writers like Forster? Surely, at this point much has been written about “Beloved” too.
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English literature studies are a lot more in thrall to ideological weirdness than my field. 🙂 They are still terrorized by the specter of “dead white males”, poor sods.
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\ They are still terrorized by the specter of “dead white males”, poor sods.
Haven’t understood English.
Did you mean they are terrorized to be seen studying novels of “dead white males,” thus gravitate to more ideologically pure /PC minority lit?
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Exactly. It’s a very strange field that is hugely dominated by the privilege discourse and all that kind of silliness.
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Maybe American literary critics feel that in this point in time they have more angles to cover on those works than Steinbeck et al?
I mean, if you really wanted to, you could come up with dissections of privilege in The Great Gatsby or Of Mice and Men or Old Yeller .
Terrible freshman paper excerpt:
“In Old Yeller, the poor boy exercised his speciest privilege over poor Old Yeller, who had contracted rabies through no fault of his own. Through the murder of his “friend” he reproduces the relationship white people had with emancipated family servants in the post antebellum South, where “family” is a fungible term that expands when convenient and contracts when it is not. This dynamic continues through American history to the present where the language of “family” is appropriated by folksy corporations to sell products and services and to quell labor disputes. To examine the meaning of family is to turn the normative assumptions of “family” on its head to expose the dysfunctional underbelly.”LikeLike
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At job interviews people are asked about the writers they can teach. The list should look appropriately “diverse”. The actual details of the research is not that interesting to anybody.
It’s not like that in my field but English lit is different.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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