The bottom-line reason for studying American literature in 11th grade at St. John’s is that there is currently no other choice. So, perhaps the better question to ask then is why there should be no choice. But that is, as they say, a question for another day.
In considering the phrase “American literature,” its two components seem to ask us to consider in turn,
- what does it mean to be American?
- what is literature?
The first of these has two distinct, but the idealist would hope, overlapping answers:
- You’re an American citizen if you are born on American soil; you’re an American citizen if you’re born of American parents, regardless of your place of birth.
- You’re American if you live in the US and you buy into what a Colonial might have called “the American Dream.” Given the contemporary economic implications of that phrase, I will choose to talk about “the American Idea,” which at least in principle replaces the much more common basis for a nation, state, or government that can be summed up in the German “Volk.”