bombs in bottles
Today's addition to the encycloReadia project was my take on the World Book's entry for "American literature":
In it, I note that World Book got one thing more right than my four years of undergrad did: it acknowledges that "literary movements" aren't monolithic, easily-defined things. Labeling any author or work a "Transcendentalist" or a "Romantic" or a "Modernist" is, at best, simplistic. This is even true of writers who intentionally and aggressively stuck to a single movement or set of ideas as it developed - like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Bronson Alcott.
Rather, every writer at every point in history is in conversation - with their own work, with other writers, with current events, with history itself. Those conversations interweave and interact.
Also, some "movements" are either so aggressively American or so well-adapted to commentary on the American experiment that they never really die. I mean Realism in the former case and Modernism in the latter. I'd even go so far as to argue that were it not for the influence of the CIA, "post-modernism" would not exist.
How the CIA helped shape American creative writing
Dividing any body of national literature into "movements" is fine and all, but like any lens, it has its limits. The greatest strength in American literature has always been its astonishing diversity. Nowhere else in the world was one going to get this kind of literature, from the interactions of this many cultures and types of people and ideas. It's still true. The US's greatest literary strength is in its diversity, full stop.
Which is why I view the current regime's "anti-DEI" nonsense with cold contempt. Look: I order all the major award winners for our school library every year. The Newberry (and Honors), the Coretta Scott King, the Walter Dean Myers, the YALSA, the National Book Award (and most or all of the shortlist), the Pulitzer, occasionally the Nobel if I think the kids will dig it. This year I even ordered one of the Caldecott Honor books, despite running a high school library: AIN'T BURNED ALL THE BRIGHT, by Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin.
These books come from an extraordinarily diverse cast of authors. And I mean diverse in every way: race, ethnicity, nationality, immigrant/refugee status, sex, gender, religion, culture and upbringing, economic strata, dis/ability.
It is in no way my fault, or any librarian's fault, that the best literature coming out of the United States BY FAR right now is by such a diverse, equitable, and inclusive group of people.
AIN'T BURNED ALL THE BRIGHT is not a book. It is a revelation.
Cishet white men, if you want to win literary awards, STEP UP YOUR GAME. It's that simple. Until then, fuck alllll the way off with your bullshit. It is not my fault that you can't even aspire to mediocrity, and I will not make your D+ efforts my students' problem. There are too many outstanding works of American literature to read for any of us to have time for your flabby self-importance.
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