The Library of Congress recently published a list of 88 books which, according to the librarian who compiled the list, shaped America. There has been a discussion in the Huffington Post, and I took part in it.
88 Books That Shaped America, According To Library Of Congress http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/books-that-shaped-america/
On Friday, the Library of Congress released its list of the "books that shaped America." There are 88 books on the list, and there will be an exhibit in Washington that opens Monday. According to the AP, Librarian of Congress James Billington said that these books are not meant to be the "best" books. Rather, the library hopes to ignite conversation around the books that influenced the nation. The Library Of Cong...
via The Huffington Post
Me: Library of Congress is weird: It is quite bizarre that no European writer shaped America or any American needs to know, not even Dante or Shakespeare; as for Americans, there is no even Bradford's "of Plymouth Plantation" or John Winthrop, Emerson or Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience", no Poe, no Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Robert Pen Warren's "All the King's Men," no Gertrude Stein or any other modernist, like Pound, cummings, and T. S. Eliot, no Charles Olson and Black Mountain Poets, no Updike, Saul Bellow or any other Jewish American writer; instead there is a Cookbook book and Boston Women... By the way, did European literature, say Dante, Shakespeare, John Milton or Cervantes in any way shaped America?
The reply was: "I think it's a question of books that have helped shape or describe something that we'll call "Americanism," for lack of a better term--characteristics that are define us as a separate culture from the Old World, as opposed to the Western characters that we might share with it."
Me: First, there is no separate culture: best American writers, like Whitman, Dickinson, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, and many others —have long become part of World Culture. “Literature is news that stays news,” said Ezra Pound who longed for the American Renaissance and tirelessly fought against the American provincialism, as he called this type of separatism. Therefore, I think that “A Guide to Idaho” and a selection of cookbooks and other extravagant choices are ridiculous. Second, we should also think historically and consider what literature shaped the minds of those who shaped America, including those included in the list, like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, or Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Many of them insisted on classical education and like Longfellow (who is not in the list either) translated from ancient and modern languages. Emily Dickinson, for instance, was influenced by Keats, the Bronte sisters, Elisabeth and Robert Browning as well as by Emerson’s “Representative Man,” “The Poet,” and “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s “The American Scholar” was called “Our intellectual Declaration of Independence”.
The reply was:I agree that America belongs within the canon of Western civilization, so those predecessors are relevant. The point here, however, is to focus on works that crystallized an essentially American voice or worldview. Saying there are no separate cultures essentially negates the meaning of the word "culture." (I'm using the anthropological sense of the word.)
Me: Provincialism IS part of America, because we are essentially an island nation, with our two oceans and reasonably secure borders. A Guide to Idaho was an outgrowth of the New Deal project (an American experience), which collected our folk culture and history. There's a reason why there are so many books dealing with the African American experience; it has had a unique influence on our national character. Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman speak to, among other things, the New England Transcendentalism movement. Pragmatism as a formal philosophy originated in America. Our near religious focus on individualism and Darwinian meritocracy is reflected in the list. The unique American literary voice is also heard. Hemingway, Faulkner, Wilder, O'Neil, Williams, Fitzgerald--they capture the American character of their times. I can't visualize a European writing "Howl" or "On the Road." That experience of wandering across a sprawling urban and natural landscape is an outgrowth of our geography and transience. Hemingway and Hammett, with their sparse and efficient syntax, literally sound different than European writers.
America is a new thing in the world and shouldn't be seen as just "more of the same."
Me: Provincialism, according to Pound, is a mental state (narrow-mindedness), not physical. It is being content with the state of things. It is the end of any development. Regional and provincial are different notions. Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” (missing in this selection) is not a provincial book. Neither is “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The writers you enumerated expressed national, not provincial spirit, and as such, just by the intensity, expressiveness and scope of their work, matched the heights of European (Old World) culture. Moreover, there are at least eight novels by Dostoyevsky and several novels by Leo Tolstoy in Faulkner’s library with his notes almost on every page; Chekhov influenced both Anderson mentioned above and Hemingway. Young Henry James (also missing in this selection) sent his first novels to Tolstoy, and then to another Russian writer, Turgenev, and was seeking advice of the latter as well as of Flaubert. On the other hand, Thoreau had a great impact on Tolstoy and, as you probably know, on Gandhi. Whitman had a great impact on the Russian futurist poets. This is what I call “world” culture. No genuine writer or poet, whether of the New World or of the Old World, repeats or imitates what has been done before. “Literature is news that stays news.” As for African American writers, I did not notice Alice Walker in the list. As for the cookbooks or Dr. Zeus, and many other books, they have at best a relative historical value, neither cultural nor by any means literary. Finally, I would not call American Transcendentalists “Eastern pragmatics”: first, they are not pragmatics but idealists; second they acknowledged themselves, beginning with Emerson himself, the influence of Immanuel Kant; third, they opposed materialism and empiricism — how one call them pragmatics? Finally, they added their own, truly American spirit to it, starting with “Self-Reliance” and finishing with Abolitionism, opposing Mexican war, and “Resisting Civil Government.”
With all those concessions and adjustments I would have accepted everything that you added except I will never understand how 2 novels by Horation Alger, Zane Grey’s “Riders of the Purple Sage,” “Tarzan of the Apes,” “Family Limitation,” “Little Women,” Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos,” “The Feminine Mystique,” “A Stranger in a Strange Land,” “Family Limitation,” and Chavez in addition to cookbooks and other books I briefly mentioned (all of them are vivid examples of what I call provincialism in the worst sense) express the unique American experience more than Emerson, the authors that I have already mentioned, such as Poe, Henry James, Vonnegut, Albee, Pynchon, Isaac Asimov, Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Robert Pen Warren's "All the King's Men," Gertrude Stein or any other modernist, like Pound, cummings, and T. S. Eliot, Charles Olson and Black Mountain Poets, Harte Crane, Updike, Cheever, Saul Bellow or any other Jewish American writer. Even some editions of the books selected are bizarre; for instance, the standard edition of Emily Dickinson’s Poems was done by Thomas Johnson, all the others are perverted; I cannot understand why they have chosen Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” instead of “The Sketch Book” and I would say that his “History of New York” express the American Spirit as well as any book in the list. I am not a great fan of Flannery O’Connor but in comparison with any book mentioned above she definitely deserves to be represented. Please note that I never argued about “Howl” or any other work of the Beat Generation (underrepresented as well). In short, the list of the Library of Congress does more harm than good to the image of the American culture. It is a narrow-minded, provincial approach, and the great writers that we discussed and who are presented in the list somehow balance that choice.
88 Books That Shaped America, According To Library Of Congress http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/books-that-shaped-america/
On Friday, the Library of Congress released its list of the "books that shaped America." There are 88 books on the list, and there will be an exhibit in Washington that opens Monday. According to the AP, Librarian of Congress James Billington said that these books are not meant to be the "best" books. Rather, the library hopes to ignite conversation around the books that influenced the nation. The Library Of Cong...
via The Huffington Post
Me: Library of Congress is weird: It is quite bizarre that no European writer shaped America or any American needs to know, not even Dante or Shakespeare; as for Americans, there is no even Bradford's "of Plymouth Plantation" or John Winthrop, Emerson or Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience", no Poe, no Vonnegut, Isaac Asimov, Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Robert Pen Warren's "All the King's Men," no Gertrude Stein or any other modernist, like Pound, cummings, and T. S. Eliot, no Charles Olson and Black Mountain Poets, no Updike, Saul Bellow or any other Jewish American writer; instead there is a Cookbook book and Boston Women... By the way, did European literature, say Dante, Shakespeare, John Milton or Cervantes in any way shaped America?
The reply was: "I think it's a question of books that have helped shape or describe something that we'll call "Americanism," for lack of a better term--characteristics that are define us as a separate culture from the Old World, as opposed to the Western characters that we might share with it."
Me: First, there is no separate culture: best American writers, like Whitman, Dickinson, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger, and many others —have long become part of World Culture. “Literature is news that stays news,” said Ezra Pound who longed for the American Renaissance and tirelessly fought against the American provincialism, as he called this type of separatism. Therefore, I think that “A Guide to Idaho” and a selection of cookbooks and other extravagant choices are ridiculous. Second, we should also think historically and consider what literature shaped the minds of those who shaped America, including those included in the list, like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, or Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Many of them insisted on classical education and like Longfellow (who is not in the list either) translated from ancient and modern languages. Emily Dickinson, for instance, was influenced by Keats, the Bronte sisters, Elisabeth and Robert Browning as well as by Emerson’s “Representative Man,” “The Poet,” and “Self-Reliance.” Emerson’s “The American Scholar” was called “Our intellectual Declaration of Independence”.
The reply was:I agree that America belongs within the canon of Western civilization, so those predecessors are relevant. The point here, however, is to focus on works that crystallized an essentially American voice or worldview. Saying there are no separate cultures essentially negates the meaning of the word "culture." (I'm using the anthropological sense of the word.)
Me: Provincialism IS part of America, because we are essentially an island nation, with our two oceans and reasonably secure borders. A Guide to Idaho was an outgrowth of the New Deal project (an American experience), which collected our folk culture and history. There's a reason why there are so many books dealing with the African American experience; it has had a unique influence on our national character. Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman speak to, among other things, the New England Transcendentalism movement. Pragmatism as a formal philosophy originated in America. Our near religious focus on individualism and Darwinian meritocracy is reflected in the list. The unique American literary voice is also heard. Hemingway, Faulkner, Wilder, O'Neil, Williams, Fitzgerald--they capture the American character of their times. I can't visualize a European writing "Howl" or "On the Road." That experience of wandering across a sprawling urban and natural landscape is an outgrowth of our geography and transience. Hemingway and Hammett, with their sparse and efficient syntax, literally sound different than European writers.
America is a new thing in the world and shouldn't be seen as just "more of the same."
Me: Provincialism, according to Pound, is a mental state (narrow-mindedness), not physical. It is being content with the state of things. It is the end of any development. Regional and provincial are different notions. Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” (missing in this selection) is not a provincial book. Neither is “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The writers you enumerated expressed national, not provincial spirit, and as such, just by the intensity, expressiveness and scope of their work, matched the heights of European (Old World) culture. Moreover, there are at least eight novels by Dostoyevsky and several novels by Leo Tolstoy in Faulkner’s library with his notes almost on every page; Chekhov influenced both Anderson mentioned above and Hemingway. Young Henry James (also missing in this selection) sent his first novels to Tolstoy, and then to another Russian writer, Turgenev, and was seeking advice of the latter as well as of Flaubert. On the other hand, Thoreau had a great impact on Tolstoy and, as you probably know, on Gandhi. Whitman had a great impact on the Russian futurist poets. This is what I call “world” culture. No genuine writer or poet, whether of the New World or of the Old World, repeats or imitates what has been done before. “Literature is news that stays news.” As for African American writers, I did not notice Alice Walker in the list. As for the cookbooks or Dr. Zeus, and many other books, they have at best a relative historical value, neither cultural nor by any means literary. Finally, I would not call American Transcendentalists “Eastern pragmatics”: first, they are not pragmatics but idealists; second they acknowledged themselves, beginning with Emerson himself, the influence of Immanuel Kant; third, they opposed materialism and empiricism — how one call them pragmatics? Finally, they added their own, truly American spirit to it, starting with “Self-Reliance” and finishing with Abolitionism, opposing Mexican war, and “Resisting Civil Government.”
With all those concessions and adjustments I would have accepted everything that you added except I will never understand how 2 novels by Horation Alger, Zane Grey’s “Riders of the Purple Sage,” “Tarzan of the Apes,” “Family Limitation,” “Little Women,” Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos,” “The Feminine Mystique,” “A Stranger in a Strange Land,” “Family Limitation,” and Chavez in addition to cookbooks and other books I briefly mentioned (all of them are vivid examples of what I call provincialism in the worst sense) express the unique American experience more than Emerson, the authors that I have already mentioned, such as Poe, Henry James, Vonnegut, Albee, Pynchon, Isaac Asimov, Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Robert Pen Warren's "All the King's Men," Gertrude Stein or any other modernist, like Pound, cummings, and T. S. Eliot, Charles Olson and Black Mountain Poets, Harte Crane, Updike, Cheever, Saul Bellow or any other Jewish American writer. Even some editions of the books selected are bizarre; for instance, the standard edition of Emily Dickinson’s Poems was done by Thomas Johnson, all the others are perverted; I cannot understand why they have chosen Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” instead of “The Sketch Book” and I would say that his “History of New York” express the American Spirit as well as any book in the list. I am not a great fan of Flannery O’Connor but in comparison with any book mentioned above she definitely deserves to be represented. Please note that I never argued about “Howl” or any other work of the Beat Generation (underrepresented as well). In short, the list of the Library of Congress does more harm than good to the image of the American culture. It is a narrow-minded, provincial approach, and the great writers that we discussed and who are presented in the list somehow balance that choice.
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