“LIKE BUT UNALIKE”: ERIC SUNDQUIST AND LITERARY HISTORICISM

Abstract

Eric Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)

As measured by that deadly but inescapable phrase “quantity and quality,” Eric Sundquist is perhaps the most productive American literature scholar of his generation. Since 1979, when he was still in his twenties, he has authored half a dozen books while editing another half-dozen. All have made an impact and many of these have been highly influential—his first book, Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, was among the very first to read canonical American works through the lens of contemporary literary and psychoanalytic theory; his edited collection American Realism: New Essays (1982) proved pivotal in reviving the critical energy in a major but long-dormant literary and historical period. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993) was by implicit design and to powerful effect nothing less than a rewriting of the foundational work of American literary history and criticism—F. O. Matthiessen's monumental American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). I will spend some time describing To Wake the Nations not only because of the book's exceptional importance but because its eloquent introduction provides the closest thing to a critical credo that Sundquist has written. His description there of his critical ideals—particularly of “justice,” boundary-crossing and “verification”—will help orient our approach to Strangers in the Land, which remains loyal to these ideals as it extends his interest in race and ethnicity, black and white, to the tormented subject of blacks and Jews, united by a “bond of alienation.” (52).