Lauter, Paul and Ann Fitzgerald, eds. 2001: Literature, Class, and Culture: An Anthology.(Resena de libro)

Publication: Atlantis, revista de la Asociación Espanola de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

Publication Date: 01-JUN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN)

Lauter, Paul and Ann Fitzgerald, eds. 2001: Literature, Class, and Culture: An Anthology. New York: Longman. 746 pp.

Lauter, Paul and Ann Fitzgerald, eds. 2001: Instructor's Manual. Prepared by Paul Lauter and Ann Fitzgerald to accompany Literature, Class, and Culture: An Anthology. New York: Longman. 225 pp.

As Paul Lauter points out in "American Proletarianism", his chapter in Emory Elliott's The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991), Proletarianism "has, in the cultural discourse of the United States, come to be associated with a 'foreign' way of speaking, historically that of the Soviet or Soviet-identified leftists.... In its more barbarous manifestations, this set of connections has led to the view that 'proletarian' and 'American' are mutually contradictory terms" (1991a: 331). The absence of class differences is, we may recall, at the heart of Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, when he maps a space of equality in the new land: "Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe" (1998: 854). The absences and omissions which underlie Crevecoeur's optimism are also the subtext of more contemporary formulations of Americanness such as John Kowenhoven's article "What's 'American' About America", where he explains the gridiron pattern which characterizes American cities as "a blueprint for a future society in which men would live each in his own domain, free and equal, each man's domain clearly divided from his neighbor's" (1954: 18). It is clear that, as Lauter has pointed out, "The United States in its origins specifically rejected the idea of privilege rooted in birth, race (and national origin), gender, and class" (1991b: 49). Hence the difficulty of editing an anthology of literature and culture with class, such an "old-world" concept, as the major axis of the project. Most Americans, as Paul Lauter and Ann Fitzgerald write in their clarifying introduction to Literature, Class, and Culture, "have been taught to disbelieve in class" (2001: 1). As the editors explain, out of the famous trio, gender, race, and class, the latter has been the least...

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