I was recently accepted to a PhD program I applied to at the end of last year, and as part of my acceptance, I’ve been awarded a teaching fellowship. At first I will be given only freshman composition courses, but as I gain more experience I will have the opportunity in subsequent years to oversee literature courses. In explaining this to me the director of graduate studies told me I could teach either American or British literature, depending on what I was more familiar with. I’m more familiar with British literature, which made me realize for the first time my peculiar situation: I’m an American writer who’s spent the majority of my study on texts that were not produced by other Americans. Yes, on my own time I’ve read almost as many books by American authors as foreign, but if I had to quantify the breakdown of my academic focus, I would estimate that 75% of the novels I’ve studied were by foreign authors.
What conclusion can be drawn from this fact?
There are some obvious reasons for the disparity: Shakespeare and James Joyce (the two authors who have had more written about them by critics than any other) are on the British side [Addendum: I know Joyce is Irish, but in every English department I’ve studied in he’s included among the cannon of British Literature], and High Modernism, which pushed the novel as a form to the pinnacle of art, is (with apologies to Proust, etc.) primarily a British movement. Post-Modernism, on the other hand, is more of an American movement, but I’d rather study Beowulf than Pynchon.
The question of which type of literature I would like to teach has also caused me to wonder why American and British literature are not taught side by side? I know for literary critics asking this question is the same as asking why American football and English football cannot be played together, but from a writer’s perspective the insertion of boundaries between American, British, Russian, European, and then what is often referred to as World Literature (meaning everything that doesn’t fit in the first four categories) seem arbitrary and obfuscating. Like many writers, I draw my inspiration from a range of works, which don’t reflect a consistent pattern of origin, style, subject matter, etc. Ha Jin, for example, has written in his last two books about the experience of Chinese immigrants to the United States, and the course he teaches at Boston University focusing on Immigrant Literature includes texts from The United States, Japan, Germany, and so on. Likewise, the stories I write would be classified as American literature, but my primary influences are English, French, and Russian.
One English novel that has had a structural influence on my work—and one which I recently reread—is Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I bring it up in this context because the book offers an interesting angle on a discussion about British and American literature; Ford, an Englishman, writes the novel from the first person perspective of an American narrator living in Europe. I suspect that Ford used the American narrator as a device in order to deliver commentary on British society, relying on the outsider perspective as a means of examining aspects of English culture that an ordinary citizen takes for granted, for his account of the behavior of his countrymen is a scathing tragic comedy of manners. This approach, combined with Ford’s stunningly Modern style, also reminded me of why I’ve spent so many more hours studying British literature: at the time Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris were lowering their style to gritty, visceral realism, Ford, Joyce, et al. were elevating their writing towards an intellectual realism that far surpassed their American contemporaries. The Good Soldier seeks to replicate the indecisive, forgetful, irrational way in which people recall events and people from their past, resulting in the creation of a narration that is as complicated and multifaceted as the common Man. It is also one of the novels I hope to be able to teach when the time comes.
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