An emergent literature is therefore the literary expression of a cultural group that defines itself either as an alternative to or in direct opposition to a dominant mainstream. What makes the literature emergent is the fact that it portrays beliefs and practices that are taken to be “new” by the dominant culture, though in some cases they may in fact be thousands of years old. At the same time, it is crucial to emphasize that an emergent literature is the expression of a cultural identity: avant-garde literatures are also literatures that identify themselves with the “new,” but an avant-garde literature that is not the expression of a cultural identity, that orients itself, for example, around a set of formal practices or a philosophical stance, is not what I am describing as an “emergent literature.” Indeed, as we will see, at various moments in their histories, many U.S. emergent literatures have adopted formally conservative modes of expression.
The strategies that emergent writers adopt depend on the kind of relationship that they wish their writing to have with regard to what the reader-response theorist Hans Robert Jauss calls the “horizon of expectations.” This horizon is created both by social practice—what Jauss describes as “the milieu, views and ideology of [the] audience”—and by literary tradition. Jauss argues that
A literary work, even when it appears to be new, does not present itself as something absolutely new in an informational vacuum, but predisposes its audience to a very specific kind of reception by announcements, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics, or implicit allusions. It awakens memories of that which was already read, brings the reader to a specific emotional attitude, and with its beginning arouses expectations for the “middle and end,” which can then be maintained intact or altered, reoriented, or even fulfilled ironically in the course of the reading according to specific rules of the genre or type of text…. The new text evokes for the reader (listener) the horizon of expectations and rules familiar from earlier texts, which are then varied, corrected, altered, or even just reproduced.8
This model suggests that the meaning of a literary text is a function not only of its author’s intention in writing it but also of the milieu into which it is received, which includes its reader’s social, cultural, historical, aesthetic, and personal contexts. Meaning, in other words, is a negotiation between writer and reader through the medium of the text.
When Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick was published in 1851, readers couldn’t really make heads or tails of it. It wasn’t what they expected a novel to be. In fact, at the turn of the century, it was classified in many prominent libraries as a treatise on cetology.9 Moby-Dick challenged the familiar rules, but American readers were not yet equipped to understand or appreciate that challenge. Simplifying greatly, we might say that despite the radicalism of Moby-Dick, the horizon of expectations of its potential audience remained unchanged.
On the other hand, the disparity between the horizon of expectations and the new work that questions it can result in a “change of horizons,” according to Jauss, by “[negating] familiar experiences or by raising newly articulated experiences to the level of consciousness.”10 In the case of Moby-Dick, this change of horizons came about in the mid-twentieth century, when a group of scholars led by F. O. Mathiessen proclaimed the existence of a mid-nineteenth century tradition called the American Renaissance and set Moby-Dick at its center.11 Critics and readers were ready to appreciate the white whale: it was literary real estate just waiting to be developed. Now many people think of Moby-Dick as the Great American Novel. It has become a “classic,” which Mark Twain once described as “a book which people praise and don’t read.”12 The changing status of Moby-Dick over time is an example of “a second kind of horizonal change” that can occur when a literary text is deemed to be a classic and thus becomes incorporated into a new horizon of expectations that conceals what was once regarded as its subversiveness. What was once a challenge to a literary tradition becomes the exemplar of that literary tradition. In other words, we tend to think of a classic as a text that is embedded in traditions and conventions, and we forget that many texts now considered classics were written in order to question and challenge the traditions and conventions of their times.
Another example of these shifting horizons can be found in the history of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel about American slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published at roughly the same time as Moby-Dick. Stowe’s novel was once thought to be radical, even to be a text that may actually have started a war. Unlike Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not challenge the prevailing horizon of expectations for a novel in formal terms. Knowing that she was dramatizing a subject—anti-slavery—that was often considered unpalatable by the audience she wished to reach, Stowe sugar-coated her subject through the use of sentimental and Christian doctrine. As one Stowe scholar puts it, “Sometimes critics have assumed that it was the subject of antislavery which made Uncle Tom’s Cabin a powerful novel. It is perhaps more exactly true to say the opposite—that because Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a powerful novel, antislavery became a powerful cause.”13 By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was generally regarded, at best, as just another piece of sentimental fiction, at worst as an example of American racist logic. By the 1970s, it had become something else: a touchstone of American feminist criticism.14 It becomes the job of the student of literature to regain the original horizon of questioning and subversiveness once again.
Sometimes, however, the second round of questioning occurs as the result of the emergence of a new text that refers back to the classic and recasts it in a different light. For example, the works of certain postmodern writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, or Milan Kundera have enabled us to see works like Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–1615), Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), or Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste (1796) with fresh eyes. In the early part of the twentieth century, emergent ethnic writers frequently adopted strategies akin to Stowe’s, choosing familiar literary styles such as a realism that could enable readers to concentrate on what they were writing rather than how they were writing it. Readers came to assume that ethnic writing was about realistic representation rather than formal experimentation. By the late twentieth century, however, emergent writers like N. Scott Momaday or Maxine Hong Kingston could make use of more adventurous narrative strategies because, in the aftermath of modernism, mainstream audiences had become accustomed to formal experimentation in literary novels. Emergent writers weren’t the only ones to benefit from the canonization of modernist practice: Moby-Dick finally found an audience in the mid-twentieth century because it was seen to be a modernist novel avant la lettre.
As a category, the emergent is useful to the literary historian because it offers a dynamic model of the interactions of literary cultures, a model that focuses our attention on the fact that literatures are not simply sets of texts but rather institutions of culture with normative practices that evolve over time. Thus, the negotiations that take place between marginalized U.S. literatures and whatever canon of literature occupies the center always involve not only questions of literary influence among writers, but also other factors that previous literary historians might have considered to be extrinsic to literary studies. Such factors include the design of school curricula, the creation of departments and programs in colleges and universities, the practices of publishers, the editing of anthologies, and the awarding of literary prizes.15 These factors help to shape the horizon of expectations