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Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy
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Pau l L au te r
Key words
its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2016. The Heath has helped win the cultural wars in the college
classroom, greatly increasing the number of women writers and writers of color whose works
are now routinely taught. It has helped transform what is taught in American Literature classrooms, in relation to race, gender, and sexuality, but has been less successful in relation to class.
American literature,
canon, Heath
Anthology of
American Literature,
noncanonical, culture
wars
Its now twenty-five years since the Heath Anthology of American Literature was
first published (1990, with a 1989 copyright notice). It was part of the same upheaval in literary and cultural studies that brought us Transformations. And that
upheaval was, in turn, part of a broader movement for racial and gender equality
that had been taking place in the streetsthink sit-ins, freedom rides, Stonewall,
protests at the Miss America pageant, Off Our Backs, and I Have a Dream.
The Heath was both a product of and an encouragement to that movement
and its effort to bring change to America, including to its classrooms. When
Icomposed the Preface to the first edition, I carefully noted the very large
number of writers of color and also women authors we had included in the
books two volumes. There had not been anything like it before, I implied,
and that was true. The anthology was far more inclusive than any of its predecessorsor, for that matter, its successors. So it was a good thing to include
all of Frederick Douglasss autobiographical Narrative; Thomas Wentworth
Higginsons essay on Nat Turner; poetry like Frances Harpers Aunt Chloes
Politics and Claude McKays If We Must Die; Richard Wrights Bright and
Morning Star among lots of other texts, militant, serious, striking. There were
Rebecca Harding Daviss Life in the Iron Mills and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans
The Yellow Wallpaper, not to speak of Mary Wilkins Freemans The Revolt of
Mother. We put in the hands of teachers in a changing profession works that
spoke to a changing Americaeven as George H. W. Bush was president, the
Berlin wall was coming down, and the culture wars were heating up.
We won those wars. What is taught today in literary and cultural classrooms
would have been unrecognizable to the gentlemen with whom I studied sixty
years ago. We won those wars, but we have not won the peace, as the movement
called Black Lives Matter has made clear. To no ones real surprise, transforming literary study has not succeeded in transforming society ... yet. Perhaps I
register my nave optimism with that tiny word. Or perhaps I glimpse a future
freed from the sour breath of Trump and his fading breed.
To move toward that future, however, we need to think about two things
with which the Heath Anthology did not successfully engage: the World Wide
Web, also a product of the 1990s, and class, a product of the whole of American
history, from William Bradford forward. The Internet has transformed publishing in ways we do not fully understand. It is not that books and reading and
writing are disappearing, as some sillier critics have proposed. But we are only
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Works Cited
Coles, Nicholas, and Paul Lauter, A Cambridge History of American Working-Class
Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017. Print.
32
transformations
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A Genealogy of Transformation
Abstr ac t Transformations history can be traced back to documents like Picos Oration
on the Dignity of Man. To follow Picos lead by acknowledging our groundless situation is
to recognize that as human beings, we become only what we have made ourselves, and
that we have the capacity to make ourselves absolutely anything at alldevils or angels,
monsters or gods. Knowing this, we can clearly see that teaching and learning have never
been about goals or standards. If we were endowedas many people believewith a fixed
human nature, then research could indeed quantify educational outcomes in ways that are
measurably measurable, as the statisticians say. But measurement cant assess an artifact
of measurement itself: our measurements create what they claim to find. Transformation is
our telos and our fate.
Ku rt
Sp e l l m e y e r
Key words
history, telos,
Renaissance, teaching,
humanities
Transformations is this journals name, but what does that word mean? What
exactly gets transformed?
The genealogy of transformation we can trace back to the Renaissance
philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. As a preamble to a longer work,
he composed a speech in 1486 he never actually delivered, the Oration on the
Dignity of Man, which was unlike anything the West had seen before. Even
more remarkable than Picos willingness to cite the work of non-Christians
was his definition of the human being, a definition that directly contradicts
the understanding of humanism that has become conventional today. After
God had fashioned the world, Pico says, he began to entertain the possibility
of creating man, but He had no archetype from which to fashion this new
form of life. And so He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent
nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him Adam, we give
you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that
is yours alone. We have no fundamental nature, Pico wrote. Instead, we can be
defined only by our capacity for transformation. What we call the humanities
begins with this claim. So too does democracy, another project without any
fixed goal whose subject, the citizen, is indefinable as well.
The links between the humanities, democracy, and transformation are far
from arcane or unimportant. Recently, the New York Times featured an article,
ARising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding
(Cohen). Among the opinion-makers profiled there was Kentucky Governor
Matt Bevin, who has proposed withholding state funds from college students
majoring in French. The report also noted that Marco Rubio, the US senator from
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