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American Literary Studies. A Methodological Reader. Ed. by Michael A. Elliott and Claudia Stokes. New York: New York UP. 2003. 349 pages.
There was a period not too long ago when books on literary theory and method were all the rage in the American academy. Since the nineties, however, the genre seems to have gone into decline. One reason may be that American literary criticism has run out of theory imports, but another may be seen in the ultimate sterility of the genre, at least as it was developed in surveys and readers aimed at the college market: the assumption that one can first outline a theory and then apply it like a manual to the interpretation of a particular text. To avoid such sterile schematism, the book under review has come up with a refreshing idea. Instead of surveying familiar theoretical positions one more time, the editors have asked twelve prominent scholars, who represent a cross section of different approaches within the field of American literary studies, to select a (previously published) essay "that they felt employs a thoughtful and instructive method of interdisciplinary American literary study" (11), and to comment, in a brief three- to four-page introduction, on the essay's importance as a model of interpretation. In this way, the editors hope "to sharpen debates about the goals and practice of interdisciplinary literary studies by bringing into the foreground the methods by which such scholarship is produced" (4).
The result is an uneven but nevertheless interesting collection of essays. Not surprisingly, some choices are more convincing than others, a few remain puzzling, and what is perhaps the greatest drawback: there seems to be no coordination whatsoever among these choices. In the first section of the book, "History and Literature in America," Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's well-known feminist essay on early American culture, "Domesticating Virtue: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America" (1988), stands alone against a phalanx of dazzling recent examples of race and gender studies which are, however, rather similar in argument and approach: Laura Romero's essay "Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire, and New Historicism" (1991), Laura Wexler's study of post ante-bellum photography, "seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent Eye" (2000), and Lauren Berlant's essay on diva citizenship, "The Queen of American Goes to Washington...