A Reply to Paul Lauter

There is nothing faddish about concern for our racial, ethnic, and gender differences, as my essay takes pains to emphasize. But this legitimate concern often leads some of the Heath editors to treat art and politics as "utterly distinct realms," to use Lauter's phrase. I imagine that most of us, when addressing a response that seems a distortion of our words, initially think that what is called for is simply a more careful reading of our prose, but in what follows I will try to address briefly one or two of the more serious misunderstandings that have shaped Professor Lauter's remarks. Interested readers may well want to review the materials that have prompted this exchange. In his desire to restate his sociocultural views and associate his textbook with the forces of light, Lauter neglects to mention the fundamental questions I raise in examining his anthology's often unstated assumptions. It must be tempting to attribute any reservations whatsoever to the rigid mind-set of the unwashed right; I have seen some of the rabid attacks he mentions, and I can understand his dismay and even the likelihood that any demurral whatsoever must carry for him glimmers of opposition campfires. But in choosing to enumerate yet again the familiar issues of current debate rather than address the analysis I actually undertake, he perhaps inadvertently associates me with both their opinions and their agenda. I took the appearance of the Heath textbook as a literary event of interest to readers of ALH and set its ample editorial comment in the context of the history of American literary history. I did not question the editors' values-indeed they closely resemble my own. But I did remark on the historical and aesthetic sophistication of their extensive contextual framework; one of these editorial essays prompted me to remark that "[w]hile we can all celebrate [the editors'] supplementing the ideologically narrowed canon of our predecessors, we can wonder at taste that pays more attention to Joseph Heller than Thomas Pynchon, that finds space for Upton Sinclair but none for Vladimir Nabokov" (354). There is nothing faddish about concern for our racial, ethnic, and gender differences, as my essay takes pains to emphasize. But this legitimate concern often leads some of the Heath editors to treat art and politics as "utterly distinct realms," to use Lauter's phrase. I merely agree with him that to do so is "hopelessly naive." With the exceptions I note at some length, few of his editors help our students "discover how literary art is created" by anyone whatsoever or ask what in fact it is, surely