Contemporary Period: 1945 to the Present
Orthodoxy and Resistance: Cold War Culture and Its Discontents
New Communities, New Identities, New Energies
Postmodernity and Difference: Promises and Threats
In Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man, the unnamed narrator explains
the method behind his circular narrative by declaring that "the end
is in the beginning," and in a way the three sections on contemporary
literature bring us back to issues raised by the texts about the origins
of America that open
The Heath Anthology. The introduction to the
sections "Native American Oral Literatures" and "Cultures
in Contact" suggest that the class consider the "creation stories"
that students bring with them in order to come to some sense of that cultural
construct we call "America." Such a discussion questions how
such stories are produced, by what groups of people, and for what purposes.
Throughout the section introductions, this approach is described as an
analysis of "cultural rhetoric"--the consideration of texts not
as static artifacts with self-contained meanings but as strategic examples
of what Jane Tompkins calls "cultural work"--the products of
dynamic processes of cultural confrontation, negotiation, assimilation,
and transformation. These processes include the printing and dispersal
of these texts in
The Heath Anthology, the assignment of these texts
in college classes, and the particular reading experiences of the students
in the class taken as both individuals and as members of various communities.
Such an approach demonstrates as well that since the study of the past
involves the active creation of knowledge on the part of students and teachers,
history becomes an active part of the present.
The study of contemporary culture reverses this equation as a part of
the same pedagogical approach by regarding the present as part of history.
The historical debates over the so-called "canon" of American
literature can be illustrated for students by having them define a contemporary
canon by themselves. To do this, the class will have to consider what is
meant by contemporary culture, how we define what is central, what is marginal,
why we might want to undertake such definitions, and what the consequences
of different definitions might be. The anthology itself (as well as the
class syllabus) can then be regarded as just one such example of canon-building,
complete with explanations and justifications of the choices made.
In regard to the section on contemporary literature in particular, discussion
can center on the classification system used to organize these texts. If
copies of the first and/or second editions of
The Heath Anthology
are handy, the class can compare how categories have been revised from
one edition to the next and why. For example, both the second and the third
editions can be seen as grouping contemporary texts by decades--the fifties,
the sixties (and the extension of the sixties into the seventies), and
the eighties/nineties--under rubrics that highlight a particular historical
interpretation of each decade: "Orthodoxy and Resistance: Cold
War Culture and Its Discontents" (a subtle but significant revision
of "The Cold War: Orthodoxy and Resistance" from the
second edition); "New Communities, New Identities, New Energies";
"Postmodernity and Difference: Promises and Threats." From another
perspective, however, these titles are contemporaneous, not chronological--Joyce
Carol Oates and Lee Smith from the first section are primarily writers
of the last two decades; Hisaye Yamamoto and Saul Bellow, while included
in section two, are writers of the forties and fifties as well, a point
underscored by other changes from the second to third editions, where writers
like Bellow and Ralph Ellison switch categories, while Raymond Carver moves
all the way from section one to section three. All of the above suggests
the complexity of cultural forces at work in contemporary society: the
tension and sometimes dialectic between culture and counterculture ("Orthodoxy
and Resistance"); the (re)emergence of multicultural literature following
the liberation movements of the sixties ("New Communities, New Identities,
New Energies"); the self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of contemporary
literature, including contemporary multicultural and countercultural literature
("Postmodernity and Difference: Promises and Threats"). The complexity
of these issues also foregrounds the fact that all anthologies of literature,
including
The Heath Anthology, are not just chronicles of cultural
change but active participants in that change.
Such an analysis of the textbook naturally suggests inviting the class
to construct their own textbook--their own canons--and to engage in the
same operation of historicizing the present and near-present past by examining
the associations students have in conjunction with terms like "the
fifties," "the sixties," "the seventies," and
"the eighties." Where do these associations come from? How are
they perpetuated through the mass media and the popular culture and for
what ends? Political? Commercial? What other categories and groupings could
we use to organize, read, and interpret the texts in this section? "Women
Writers"? "The African-American Tradition"? "Poetic
Experimentation"? This kind of pedagogical approach emphasizes multiculturalism
as an activity, not an inert state of being, an activity that reads texts--all
texts, not just texts by "ethnic" writers (as if it were possible
for there to be "nonethnic" writers)--as complex, hybrid forms
of discourse.
In a similar way, Gloria Anzaldúa developed the concept of "mestiza
consciousness" primarily as a way of describing how her own complex
identity as a multilingual, multinational lesbian Chicana writer taught
her to "cope by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance
for ambiguity" by learning how to "juggle cultures." She
also implies, however, that such an experience is typical rather than exceptional,
and that we are all to a more or less extent juggling cultures as well,
the difference being not between the pure and the mixed in terms of cultural
identity, but between the conscious recognition of the complicated interrelationship
of diverse cultural backgrounds and a kind of willful innocence/ignorance
of this diversity.
The struggle is inner: Chicano, indo, American Indian, Mojado,
mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo,
Black, Asian--our psyches resemble the borderlands and are populated by
the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out
in the outer terrains. Awareness of our situation must come before inner
changes, which in turn come before changes in society. Nothing happens
in the "real" world unless it first happens in the images in
our heads. (87)
Anzaldúa's reference to the outer terrains--the rhetorical space
where these internal issues of cultural definition, resistance, and transformation
are played out--serves well as a pedagogical coda to this instructor's
guide, reminding us that the point of cultural contestation or consensus,
the site of struggle and mastery, doesn't lie between the covers of any
particular anthology, but takes place in what Louise Rosenblatt called
the transaction between reader and text, a transaction that includes both
the immediate historical context of the reader as well as that of the text.
Whatever the particular selections made for any given class syllabus, the
real focus of the class is that transaction--the "images in our heads"
that constitute the internal terrain of American literature.
