Kristen Schmid for The chronicle Review
Gordon Hutner, shown in his office at the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, started the journal “American Literary History” almost 25 years ago.
Editors work behind the scenes. They set up the show but rarely get to take the bows. They fill the roles that make writing possible—like a producer, they may put together the financing and build the institutional structures; like a director, they make the choices that shape the show; like an agent, they promote authors; like a script doctor, they improve the text; and like a stagehand, they do the grunt work.
Yet if you look at accounts of contemporary criticism, you rarely find editors’ names. Though scholars have studied “history from below,” those of us in literary studies still tend to see criticism in terms of marquee figures. But a critic is not self-made.
Gordon Hutner has been one of the most influential editors of his generation, founding and editing the journal American Literary History, which has stamped the direction of criticism of American literature since 1989. As the journal approaches its 25th volume, I interviewed Hutner, a professor of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to ask about ALH, as well as about his own scholarship on 20th- and 21st-century American fiction, which recovers the thick layer of literary novels buried beneath the hall-of-fame model of most scholarly histories.
Editing is “the lifeblood of the profession,” Hutner remarked. He emphasized that tasks like putting out new editions, compiling anthologies, and editing journals, among other things, “matter to members of the professoriate as much as, if not more than, writing thesis-length books,” which are otherwise the gold standard in the humanities.
I asked Hutner how he would define in a nutshell the role of the editor. He replied, “a broker, who tries to bring forward and promote what she or he thinks of as the best examples of the most important new scholarship and criticism.” His aim is not to advocate one tendency or standpoint, but to seek essays that “depart from prevailing wisdom.” They might cover “a new area that’s worth tracking or offer a grand crystallization” of an established topic, and they should look outward, opening up a subfield “to readers outside the subfield.”
That particularly applies to American Literary History, which is responsible for a broad field. Under Hutner’s eye, it has provided a forum for the main critical initiatives of the past two decades, such as the New Historicism, which turned from a focus on form to the social and cultural context of American literature, and has pointed to new directions like queer theory and ecocriticism and new lines of investigation, including print culture and globalization. The journal has also captured a wide-angle view of American literature, ranging from the diversity of the Americas in the age of Columbus to 21st-century fiction. (Although only a part-time Americanist, I should say that I have published two essays in ALH.)
One of its strengths is that ALH has drafted several generations of critics, and Hutner takes pride in the number of graduate students and young assistant professors he has ushered into print. “It’s been one of the happier happenstances that so many people who turned out to have pretty darn good careers published either first or early on in ALH,” he said.
Hutner started ALH at an inhospitable time. A great number of literary journals were founded in the 1960s, and a wave of journals focusing on literary theory were established in the 1970s, but by the 1980s funds were scarce and journals plentiful. Still, Hutner, then an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, was convinced that there was a need: The standard-bearer in the field, the Modern Language Association’s American Literature, “was not seizing the opportunities in front of it and was too hidebound,” he told me. “The field seemed to me wide open.”
A new generation was taking the helm, with New Historicists like Walter Benn Michaels reorienting our understanding of the politics of early 20th-century fiction; feminist critics like Jane Tompkins recovering a rich history of “sentimental” women writers; and African-Americanists like Kenneth Warren revising our understanding of realism’s relation to racism. While this generation arose from the ferment of literary theory, American Literature, publishing since 1929, was producing staid articles about “Thoreau’s Moon Mythology,” “Henry James’s Rewriting of Minny Temple’s Letters,” and “Horizontal and Vertical Movement in Robert Frost’s Mountain Interval” (to give three examples from 1986).
A year abroad provided a catalyst. Hutner spent 1985-6 in Belgium on a Fulbright. “When you’re there, you’re responsible for summarizing what’s happening in American literary studies,” he recounted. At the same time, “being away for a year, I was able to look with some detachment at what was going on.” When he came back, he had a plan for a journal that would, “above all, publish things that were fresh.”
At Wisconsin, “I tried to talk my colleagues into forming a collective,” Hutner remembered, “but people were reluctant to give up their own scholarly agendas, though everyone was willing to support me.” Serendipitously, a friend told him that Oxford University Press was looking to acquire journals. The publisher took what Hutner called “a modest financial chance on it,” though he demurred when I asked him the amount: “Let’s just say that I would have been better off teaching summer school if I was looking for remuneration.”
Hutner had a head start because, while he was in graduate school at the University of Virginia during the late 1970s and early 80s, he had worked for six years as an editorial assistant on New Literary History, a pre-eminent theory journal. There he absorbed the lessons of Ralph Cohen, who had founded New Literary History in 1969 and would edit it for 40 years. Cohen was not, in Hutner’s words, “trying to forward a particular agenda” but wanted “people to see what else is going on” and was particularly good at showcasing a wide tableau of methods, like Marxism and feminism or medievalism and Prague semiotics. The experience, Hutner reported, “solidified my temperamental disinclination against monism.”
The key difference between the two journals is probably the position of theory. A major function of the New Literary History (still in publication under a new editor) was to introduce international developments in theory, whereas ALH, appearing after the foment of theory, has provided a forum for the reinvigorated literary history of recent generations. As Hutner averred, “There is a lot of literary history still to write.”
Hutner himself has been rewriting the history of American fiction, notably in his book What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), which covers not only modernists like Faulkner but also a great many other writers, like Joseph Hergesheimer and James Branch Cabell, who were considered among the best writers of the 1920s and 30s but have since been forgotten, largely because they represent middle-class taste, Hutner surmised. “We were writing literary history from an extremely limited, partial shelf, based on very, very few books.” The result, which “looks at five novels spread out over 50 years, seems contrived.”
In some respects, Hutner’s approach aligns with a new critical movement to study the large mass of novels produced. Most notably, Franco Moretti, a founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, has drawn on quantitative and other methods to account for three centuries of novels published around the globe. For What America Read, Hutner adopted a hybrid method, surveying over 50 books per decade but also giving short readings of some of them.
That approach is probably less controversial than difficult to emulate, since it takes a great deal of labor to filter an inventory of several hundred novels. Hutner reported that it took him over a decade to research What America Read, his second book. He noted that wouldn’t be possible for a junior professor doing a first book; first books are typically readings because they demonstrate a basic interpretive skill necessary to criticism. But real innovation often occurs with second books, when one is freed from tenure pressures and can make “a new step or explore a new direction.”
More recently, Hutner has extended his research to “21st-century fiction,” which he proposes be treated as a new period. For What America Read, he combed through magazines and newspapers for reviews; for his new project, because there is a less coherent review culture, he instead looks at a number of literary prizes. He has ascertained a list of 125 novels, like Richard Russo’s Empire Falls (2001) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), that seem to be the main body of works of the period thus far.
His approach again gives us a fuller sense of literary history than the one that we usually purvey in academe. As Hutner quipped, “the novels about which contemporary scholars fall all over themselves didn’t win any major prizes.” We too rarely talk about books, he said, like Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist (1985), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer. In a recent exchange about the contemporary canon in ALH, he argued even more pointedly: “Literary academe failed miserably, almost completely, in the one extramural mission entrusted to it that it might have been able to sustain: the creation of a book-reading, book-buying public. Instead, academe disdained the assignment.”
Still, Hutner hopes that literary scholars will take on a renewed public role: “Scrutinizing the writing of our day, we might even have something to say to the populace—not to mention our students—about the books of their time instead of leaving it to Oprah, for then we would be producing readers, not just consumers.”
It is inevitable that changes in media come up in talking about publishing, and Hutner sees problems and potential. He conjectured when we talked that projects like special issues, around a theme, are becoming less viable: “With the Internet, people don’t read the whole issue—so they don’t see how they build some kind of narrative—but just click on the one [article] that seems most interesting to them.”
On the other hand, he also suggested that new media might revitalize reviewing. In ALH, he has long featured “essay reviews” to cover new and significant directions in the field. But he sees the need for an online magazine that reviews all books.
“The sad truth is that as a profession, we don’t do a good job brokering the new scholarship.”
That brings up a central crux of journal publishing today. The Internet is often advertised as a panacea, remedying all ills—with the click of a key, you just put an issue online! But Hutner, through his career with ALH, shows that good journals require good editors. The Internet can provide instanteous availability, but the technology does not change the intellectual labor involved.
Hutner also demonstrates the service involved. Though he did not say it, it is likely that he put off a good deal of his own writing between his first and second books because he was editing.
Even after almost 25 years, Gordon Hutner is still brokering, seeing “my job to scour conferences and the like looking for people who are doing things that are a little bit different, and keeping the journal supple in that way.”
When I asked how much longer he’d oversee the journal, he acknowledged that “my study of journals suggests that most of them have a trajectory of around 30 years” (with exceptions like New Literary History). He welcomes new journals, saying “it’s time for somebody else to get started and surpass us.” But he added, “We will not go quietly.”
