William J. Harris

Reading Lines Forum

Of the various texts that led to my adopting a cultural studies approach to my field—nineteenth-century American women’s poetry—the two that affected me the most were The Heath Anthology of American Literature, edited by Paul Lauter, and The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, edited by William Truettner. A revolutionary rethinking of the standard college textbook, the Heath (first edition 1990) radically altered the landscape of American literature as taught in classrooms throughout the U. S., since its emphasis on marginalized writers virtually mandated that teachers address the cultural work such literature selections did. Given the uncontested hegemony that the 1991 exhibition organized by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art for which it served as catalog, represented an equally revolutionary intervention into its field. Overflowing with images whose ideological content was as undeniable as was their aesthetic appeal, the exhibit successfully argued the political role that even “great” works of art— landscapes by Thomas Cole and Alfred Bierstadt, for instance—could and did play in nineteenth-century American social life. Since the Heath’s importance to U.S. cultural studies is inarguable, I will focus here on why my reading of The West as America and art books like it, most published in the 1990s, was no less important in making me rethink my field, especially with respect to the relation between the aesthetic and the political in it. During the same decade in which The West as America appeared, academic interest in poetry had reached its nadir. Despite all the evidence to the contrary accruing elsewhere in the culture—not least, the active role poets played in the Reading Lines Forum