literaryamericaI spent part of my snow days working through A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. (Okay, I also read Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star again, but I’ve already made my Bolaño bromance loud and clear.) All I can say about the Literary History is: what an odd book! Who is the target audience for this bizarre hodgepodge of a book? It’s almost 1,100 pages long, and seems to contain three types of essays:

1. Quick overviews of mildly interesting historical or literary subjects. (Of course the person who would check out this beast is probably already intellectually well-rounded and won’t find much new here.)

2. Pretentious hyperspecific explorations by graduate students of  ideas that might be interesting but aren’t as profound as they seem to think. (Again, the target audience appears to be educated enough to laugh at these attempts at bamboozlement.)

3. A handful of in-depth mini-essays on intriguing possibilities that make you want to know more (like the “Yankee Doodle” vs. “The Star-Spangled Banner” essay).

So I guess it’s useful in that it gets you to think about big ideas, even if it doesn’t teach you much new. It felt like ten essays in a row dealt with the Founding Fathers’ battles over pure democracy vs. representative government.  Interesting subject, got me constantly switching sides between Adams and Jefferson, made me balance today’s political impasse with the 20th-century’s slow glide of progress, etc. However, I’m not sure that’s a satisfactory payoff for 140 pages of reading, so I doubt I’ll make it to page 1,095.

Update: Since they just canceled school again, change of plans. Maybe I’ll jump ahead to the 21st-century and see what it holds.