Women's Rights

[Rev. Rye]

Another thing this reminded me of: the very first college course I ever took opened with the question "What is American Literature?" It turned out to be an extremely tricky question.

• Is it works with American themes? All right, what are American themes? Stuff like freedom? George Orwell and Friedrich Schiller wrote plenty about freedom without ever setting foot on American soil.
  
• Works that take place in America? So, I guess that leaves out most of Hemingway's oeuvre. Including the story we're about to read.
  
• Works written in America? So, I guess that makes this American.
  
  
  What? Wodehouse wrote the novel it was based on in Long Island (and after he pretty much burned his bridges with his homeland after some... questionable broadcasts.)
  
• Works written by Americans? That may be better. But that just leads to its own questions. For instance, does Raymond Chandler count as American literature? I mean, I've got his (largely) complete works from the Library of America, and he did commit some of the best descriptions of LA to paper in his time, but the damnedest thing: for most of his career (and I mean from decades before he became a writer to shortly before he died), he was actually a British subject. After he finally got his American citizenship back, the only things he wrote are an adaptation of an unproduced screenplay and four chapters of a new novel.
  

15 years later, I still don't have the sort of confident, succinct definition of "American Literature" that Huggy Bear seems to have of "woman."

American literature is Mark Twain.

Follow me for more Solomon-like pronouncements.

Boru

Ironically, the course focused more on writers that were post-Twain.