Native Neglect

Sixty years ago, when most scholars looked on American literature as a collection of crude provincial sentiment, Harvard had one undergraduate course in the subject. Now, after the genius of Poe and Melville, Whitman and Twain and James has finally been recognized, and after Dreiser and Faulkner and Pound have become world-renowned, Harvard has two.

Why is the institution which has produced so many of its nation's writers so negligent in teaching its nation's literature?

English 7 does look at the major American names, and Howard Mumford Jones's course has a comprehensive syllabus. And there are American authors in Brower's modern poetry course, Chapman's 160 and Guerard's Comp. Lit. But the college just does not have solid coverage of the whole field of American literature. Except for Lynn's two conference-group half courses, there are no intensive studies of particular periods of American writing, and there is none at all of the dovetailing-dates historical blanketing of the subject that every British period is treated to.

Is our own literature unworthy of such close examination? Is it so low-grade that a hundred years must be panned to yield enough for one course? Or, more relatively the question is, does the Department of English now think this is so?

Other universities do not. Chicago requires English concentrators to have at least one course in American literary history. And besides courses in specifically American poetry and drama, Chicago has a course devoted to James and a full course in American Literature 1919-1929.

Both Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania offer study of the American short story. An institution founded so late that it has no roots whatever in American literary history, such as the University of California, can offer three times the number of courses that Harvard does. Stanford's American literary catalogue reads this way: three survey courses--beginning to 1850, 1850 to 1900, 1900 to present; Hawthorne and Melville; Emerson and Thoreau; Narrative Prose; Chief American Poets; Rise of Realism in American Fiction; Contemporary American Fiction.

One might say that the reason Harvard seems still to think works of American authors measly and a poor man's literature, is the fact of inertia. That ponderous old Harvard, like a fat man who can't see his feet, hasn't gotten around to local material yet.

Yet, in 1950 the English department offered eight different undergraduate courses in American literature. The courses have evaporated, not from any aversion, but because teachers have departed and no new ones have been hired to replace them. Perry Miller's main concern now, as he regularly informs the English 7 audience, is with his own research and his graduate students; he teaches in the college only fall semester. Lynn comes and goes. Murdock has been drawn into the Gen Ed A program and has relinquished American studies entirely. Matthiesson never was replaced. By all rights the department should have at least two new appointments in the field, just to get the English department back up to its previous anemic strength.

Not every piddling scribbler who happens to be American should rate a course, of course, and the body of American literature is not big enough for a separate department. But certainly if we can lavish a course on "the so-called Scottish Chaucerians, Henry, Dunbar, Douglas and Lindsay," we can afford a course in the exclusive study of contemporary American poetry. Courses like Murdock's old one in the American novel before 1890, and Wilbur's Poe course, should be resurrected. There should be at least one full course in the modern American novel. There could easily be a course in just the American novels written between the two world wars. American short stories and American drama both merit their own courses.

Courses now seminars, such as Miller's Studies in American Romantic Literature, should be brought down into undergraduate range, and reorganized to accommodate a lecture-sized enrollment. So should courses such as Lynn's Mark Twain and the Southwestern Tradition. And to do this the department simply needs more teachers, and needs to employ them in undergraduate American courses. Such action, besides reviving the weak pulse of Warren House, might keep many intelligent people from despairing and deserting into History and Lit, and make the department more of a going concern and less of a last resort.

Just because we have no older classics, no Dante or Moliere, is no reason to leave American literature to the West Coast and the paperback racks.