Literature and Culture

constitutive value, its “life force”, its raison d’être, or to ignore it, render it
invisible, and concentrate on the text´s purely “literary or universal values”.
Recent years have seen a strong inclination towards the second, political,
type of literary studies in all its three basic component parts: literary theory,
criticism, and history.
In spite of the complexity of ways cultural studies applies to a literary text
(material conditions of production, sociological issues, gender issues, etc.),
perhaps the most important “American contribution” is multiculturalism, for
a simple reason, i.e. that the USA has originated from, and is made up of,
many different nationalities. This fact governs every aspect of the current
literary process in the USA and, according to the majority of contemporary
critics, should be reflected in the systematic steering away from its traditional
treatments. To illustrate this, I would like to return again to Jay´s idea of
substituting the concept of “American” Literature with “Writing in the United
States”: “Clearly a multicultural reconception of “Writing in the United
States” will lead us to change drastically or eventually abandon the
conventional historical narratives, period designations, and major themes
and authors previously dominating ‘American literature’. ‘Colonial’ American
writing, as I have already suggested, looks quite different from the standpoint
of postcolonial politics and theory today, and that period will be utterly
recast when Hispanic and Native-American and non-Puritan texts are allowed
their just representation. What would be the effect of designating
Columbus´s Journal, the Narrative of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, or the
creation myths of Native peoples as the origins of US literature, rather than
Bradford´s Of Plymouth Plantation? To take another example, the already
shopworn idea of the ‘American renaissance,’ probably the most famous and
persistent of our period myths, ought to be replaced by one that does not
reinforce the idea that all culture – even all Western culture – has its
authorised origins in Greco-Roman civilization” (Jay, 1991, p. 57).
I made use of this (rather long) quotation to illustrate that the efforts to
see American literature through new eyes are all-encompassing, affecting all
aspects and categories of literary studies in the USA. They are happening in
an atmosphere of heightened cultural awareness, which frequently leads to
“culture wars” and conflicts, but nevertheless shapes what is meant by the
concept of “American”, “Americanness”, or even of such historically “stable”
meaning as “the American dream”. As the above quotation shows, this
tendency affects not only contemporary literature, but goes to the
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