New Textbook Expands the Canon of American Literature; Maybe Not Yet, But it Comes Close

I usually don't talk about textbooks, but this one caught my attention. I remember when I had a meeting with my McGraw-Hill college representative two weeks ago, she said she was sending a book that would impress me, and this one has. It's Literature: Craft and Voice by Nicholas Delbanco (University of Michigan) and Alan Cheuse (National Public Radio), who are prolific creators of literature themselves. Perhaps classroom anthologies prepared by writers have a certain depth to them? Maybe not? But this one makes a powerful statement about the American literary canon, one which is consistent with the present state of literary production in the country.

Chapter 9, which deals with "Theme", features Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian-born writer who is the current McAthur fellow for literature. The case study for the chapter is her story "Cell One", which is included in her recent short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. Students will get to read a story featuring other students, and the cool thing is that the students they will be reading about are at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. This then becomes a cultural expedition, one which forces them to explore the themes (yes, not one, not two, but many themes) in this story.

I can just picture myself having fun teaching the chapter, luxuriating in the Igbo cultural references, the food, the clothes. But what I would help students see, as Adichie hopes (she states this in a interview) would be the way everything boils down to this being about a boy who gets arrested and her sister learns new truths about family life. The young man, first a spoiled middle class teenager, learns about suffering through observining the torture of a helpless old man who has been arrested on behalf of his son, a thief whom the police are after. "Cell One", well-crafted, multi-themed, captivating, a real cultural initiation for students.

In the same chapter we have Stephen Crane, D.H. Lawrence and Jhumpa Lahiri. I am a Lahiri reader, and teaching "Interpreter of Maladies" alongside Crane's "The Open Boat" is more like overindulgence, but that's really a sign of the times, an indication that, contrary to what Harold Bloom would want, we are making progress.

The book's table of contents is impressive, showing its editors's attention to diversity. Artistic diversity, an honest objective to expose students to the different literatures of multi-faceted American society. We have classics mixed with contemporary work in the same chapters, showing a collage of connected talent, a progress where students can see how some classical authors have influenced the contemporary.

The first chapter features John Updike, who passed away recently. Although he did not win the Nobel, Updike spent a lifetime of continuous writing, showing that he cared about the nature of mundane American life. At the beginning of the chapter there are excerpts from an Updike interview, in which he says, "Your job as a writer of fiction is not to present an ideal world but to try to present the world that you see and hear around you"(4). The same chapter features the ubiquitous Kate Chopin and Alice Munro, to exemplify what elements each story offers that attests to its author's skills.

One impressive feature of this textbook is that it offers interviews of the featured authors for each chapter and connects students to an interactive web-based functionality. The interview, excerpts of which are at the beginning of each chapter, can be viewed in full online. This visual aid will help students understand an author's concepts better. They are a way of bringing the work to life, forget about that idea of the author being dead and only the text being alive.

In this world of Facebook, Twitter and other lively forums, the idea of dead letters on a page may not be appealing to the new generations of students in our colleges. In fact, literature tends to bore many non-majors because of how strange it seems at first, but throw in a video there, you will awaken many students. And watching Adichie, T.C. Boyle, Updike and others is really an awakening experience, bringing their stories to life.

The other names that grace pages of this book are Franz Kafka (if you include this author you get my attention), Amy Tan, Anton Chekhov, Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt), Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia), Ha Jin, ZZ Packer and others. The range of stories cuts across geographic and cultural boundaries, reflecting the healthy dish of literature students should enjoy. More books like this would change the landscape of the literature that's often taught in English classes,and for once, students could be walking out of those classes with a readiness to explore more of what the world literature has to offer.

A wonderful book for students, teachers, writers, and anyone who cares about the literatures of the world, prepared for the American classroom by Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Cheuse.