By Victor Greto
Whose literature is it, anyway?
If you’re talking about American literature, the answer may be both intensely personal and inevitably diverse.
In South Florida colleges, American literature teachers are broadening their selection of books, dissecting the works of African-American and Hispanic writers whom many people older than 40 may never have heard of, let alone read.
“What’s weird about American literature,” said Don Adams, 36, professor of English at Florida Atlantic University in Davie, “is that all the time it talks about what it means to be American. It’s such a dominant theme it makes you want to be inclusive.”
Inclusive still means the old standbys, from William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But it also means Zora Neale Hurston, Cristina Garcia, James Purdy and Nella Larsen.
“While at one point we were fixated on how there weren’t enough women or minorities in the canon because we were focused on the big names in literature, I think now our focus has shifted to what we mean by American,” said Suzanne Ferriss, 38, a liberal arts professor at Nova Southeastern University in Davie.
“Now we’re more concerned with having the texts reflect the diversity of our population,” she said.
“It started in South Florida, in New York and in California, where we might feel more pressure in a state where diversity is more prevalent.”
Predictable change
The inclusion of multicultural works in American literature courses seems as inevitable as America’s demographic changes.
“It broadens your horizons,” said Shannon Lance, 20, one of Ferriss’ students.
“Just look around at us, at how different we all are,” said Tianna Mulchan, 24, another student. “It opens your eyes to different worlds.”
The debate now is not over what should be included in the literary canon — that universal list of books that teachers figuratively waved before students when they entered college — but how both students and teachers decide what to include in their classes.
“I think a canon serves a purpose when it’s democratic enough,” said David Goldstein-Shirley, 38, a professor from the University of Washington who emphasizes African-American literature in his survey courses.
“Americans tell themselves who they are through their literature. A canon does something productive, but when it’s limited and we’re not self-conscious about it, it becomes counter-productive.”
For Andrew Furman, 32, who teaches at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, it’s not about political correctness. It’s about quality.
“When I teach a 20th century course, I generally teach it through the aesthetic tradition,” he said, “and concentrate mostly on modernist writers, Faulkner, Hemingway, [Willa] Cather. The whole time I try to balance the aesthetics with multicultural consciousness, as well, so I teach writers from the Harlem Renaissance, including Hurston, [Langston] Hughes, and [Ralph] Ellison and [Toni] Morrison.
“The canon is becoming increasingly multicultural,” Furman said, “but I don’t bracket these away from the aesthetic traditions. If you had to compromise I wouldn’t do it.”
Committed to quality
Agreement on the validity of teaching multicultural works cuts across different generations of teachers, and often with the same caveat: If the books are not good, they won’t teach them.
Howard Pierce, 69, who also teaches at FAU in Boca Raton, said, “The one thing I’m still committed to is teaching literature as literature, not politics or sociology.”
Pierce said the ongoing revision of the American literary canon “is culturally important and good so long as we don’t lose our sight of what literature is. The reason we kept reading the old guys is because [they’re] good.”
Richard Schwartz, 50, an English professor at Florida International University in Miami, said literary quality is the most important criteria to him.
“But also I realize when you get into teaching American literature you get into questions of whose literature it is,” he said. “That’s a good thing. You want a lot of different voices.”
Learning obstacles
Though professors say they must like the book before they teach it, their choices are at times tempered by what many see as their students’ generally poor reading skills.
For example, Furman said that even his English majors “have not developed enough literary sensitivity” to understand such basic literary devices as irony.
“The Florida high school system is not particularly strong,” he said, echoing other professors’ remarks.
“The hardest thing is to get them to basically understand it,” said FAU’s professor Adams, “to read it carefully enough to know what happens in the book.”
“You’re also talking about a population that doesn’t read much,” said Ferriss. “They grow up on television and movies. I can’t assume anything anymore.”
So, she said, what she’s ultimately teaching students is to read critically.
A guiding force
Ann Ruggles Gere, a professor of literature at the University of Michigan, was involved with the National Endowment for the Arts’ “Making American Literatures” program. One of the program’s stated goals was to examine the forces that go into the making of the American literary canon.
As an example of an “invisible” force that once shaped the canon, Gere cited the use of Harvard’s “uniform list” of novels, created in the late 19th century, which students were required to read before entering college.
“Ever wonder why everyone in our generation had to read [George Eliot’s] Silas Marner?” Gere, 56, asked. Not to mention Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, or Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar?
They were on the list.
“This is the kind of force entirely invisible to most students that had enormous impact,” Gere said.
Both Gere and Ferriss said they use traditionally canonical texts as foils or contrasts to more recently recognized texts.
“What I try to do in my classes is to keep books I think would be more traditional, canonical texts and to illuminate them by looking at them next to something less familiar, but raises some of the same issues,” Gere said.
For example, Gere said she teaches two novels from the 1920s, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, whose main character tries to pass for “old money,” with Nella Larsen’s Passing, which deals with a character who tries to pass for white.
“It’s easy not to think about the cultural implications of passing,” Gere said, and to underestimate either Larsen’s or Fitzgerald’s theme without seeing it through the prism of the other.
Studying a wider variety of literature thus may entail honing new critical skills.
“A lot of students come to the university with a pretty monolithic sense of what American literature is,” Gere said.
“To begin to complicate and enrich that is part of what it’s all about.”