Interview with Lawrence Buell 1

Has “classic” to be redefined as well?
Perhaps so, but this is a term I try to use sparingly and in quotation
marks as it were. The connotation of antiquity seems almost irrelevant
to the American case. There is something oxymoronic--a kind of spe-
cial pleading (or irony, as in DH Lawrence)--about claiming authors
like Hawthorne and Melville as American “classics.” Insofar as “classic”
equates to “masterwork that promises to endure across vast stretches of
time and culture,” U. S. literary history seems too young for any work to
qualify. Perhaps no Anglophone author except Shakespeare meets that
test. If however we scale back “classic” to mean something like “civiliz-
ation-defining work,” then most GANs whose reputation as such out-
lasted their heydays could qualify at least as borderline cases.

How much contemporary criticism has influenced your concep-
tion of GAN?
The quick answer is “a great deal,” since I am a voracious reader but
also by the same token that it’s hard to single out particular figures. Per-
haps three kinds of criticism were most influential for me. First, nation/
narration theory of the 80s and 90s, especially Benedict Anderson’s
Imagined Communities; the critical collection Nation and Narration
edited by Homi Bhabha; and Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions:
The National Romances of Latin America. Second, the growing number
of important Americanist literary studies that modeled one or another
kind of transnational approach-by such scholars as Anna Brickhouse,
Wai Chee Dimock, Paul Giles, Kristin Silva Gruesz, Henry Louis Gates
Jr., Robert Levine & Caroline Levander (Where in the World Is Amer-
ican Literature?), and Ramon Saldívar. A third group of inspirational
literary studies were books on specific critical institutions, such as John
Guillory’s Cultural Capital, James English’s The Economy of Prestige;
and Marc McGurl’s The Program Era, to mention just three important
works with very different foci.

How do you explain the criticism of American society by GANs?
The relationship between sociology and literature?
If you restrict me to one and only one sociohistorical hypothesis bear-
ing on novelists as a species of Americans, perhaps it would be the
strength of what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the
anti-intellectual tradition in American life,” which has historically put
American writers and artists on the defensive, and therefore more dis-
posed to be critical of mainstream culture as usual. But in my book, and
I think for good reason, I put greater emphasis—and I think for good
reason—on the self-dividedness of national ideology itself, on the long
history of the U. S. as a utopian project forever under construction—as
founded on the promise of liberty and equality for all on which actual
American society has yet to make good. Most if not all GANs starting
with the first nominee, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, situate themselves
squarely in that gap between the is and the ought. What could be a more
promising space for fictional imagination to occupy?

Has any new candidate for GAN appeared since the publication of
the book?
Perhaps so, but even though I have tried to keep close watch I’m not
confident that any U. S. novel published since the summer of 2013 (when
I made my very final revisions) can measure up to the score of “possible
suspects” I discuss at length in the book. But then again, it’s notoriously
hard to judge the staying power of very recent texts. In any case, even
if no national novel of the last two or three years ever wins anything
like GAN acclaim, I suspect that it is only a matter of time before one,
and very likely many, appear. Unquestionably there are many superb-
ly talented young and mid-career fiction writers at work today in the
U. S.; “the American experience” remains a subject of seemingly in-
exhaustible fascination; and the four scripts I have defined—and there
may be others, as I suggest in my Epilogue—remain very much alive.
As does the novel as a genre. The more consequential question to my
mind, looking ahead through the 21st century and beyond, is whether
U. S. national experience will come to seem less luminous and import-
ant intrinsically as the country’s power and prominence on the world
stage recedes in relation to (say) China, India, or others, as sooner or
later it certainly will.