Being trained as a literature specialist and receiving a Ph.D. in English Literature forces one to make geographical decisions about specialization (Comparative Literature folks have more geographical and linguistic flexibility). For me, that choice was wrenching to make and I still try to work around these divisions, rather than within them. In general, one chooses to specialize as an Americanist or British literature scholar. Sub-specialties give one the flexibility to move a bit beyond the borders of the Big Two--which are already multiple, really. Nowadays more exciting Americanist scholars work on The Americas--North (including Canada, of course, that land of many great writers--Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry just to name a few), South, and Central America. British scholars also work on more than English Literature; British can mean that one works on Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and what used to be called Commonwealth Literatures--the literature written in English from former colonial territories. Postcolonial is used now, but that, too, is one of those troubling and unfeasible, but current terms.

Both of these more recent, trans-regional approaches have been historically and ideologically influenced; looking at the larger Americas, enables one to look at the political, historical, and ideological currents that have underwritten the story of The Americas: for example, Manifest Destiny and they ways in which that myth unfolds (a too gentle term), differently, upon the continents peoples; Pax Americana (national 'peace' built upon commercial expansionism and military might) borrowed from British models of expansionism (Pax Brittanica), and its continuing relevance even in George Bush's America. The ways in which literatures are studied and taught changes with the times and I think that we will see the Big Two model--British and American--continue to mutate, as will our ideas about who and what makes and American writer or a British one. But more and more writers will have mixed affiliations and national and cultural inheritances--that seems a 21st century certainty.

At the recent International Joyce conference here in Austin, the poet Paul Muldoon gave a fabulous reading and during the Q & A, an audience member asked Muldoon who he thought the upcoming Irish writers of note were. Muldoon mentioned some names, but the answer that interested me most was his saying that he looked forward to seeing what kind of poetry and novels the young Polish Dubliners were going to write--or something to that effect (there is at least one Polish daily newspaper in Dublin, as I learned this summer; the community there is large enough to sustain its own daily--now that is a remarkable thing).

Some sub-specialties make more sense out of a national/continental framework, like Modernism or postmodernism. When you look at the modernist generation, you see a fascinating mélange of wanderers (Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein) and Homies (Woolf, Fitzgerald, Faulkner) and Wanderer-Homies (Joyce, again, who wandered, but wrote about Ireland, about Dublin for the rest of his life; Forster, who wandered and wrote most fascinatingly about his love with and perceived betrayal by India). E. M. Forster is a really interesting case, in terms of the 20th century novel; his great Homie novel, Howard's End continues to inspire--it is updated and re-envisioned by Zadie Smith in On Beauty, for example. And A Passage to India, his final novel contains, contradictorily, his Orientalist infatuation with India and Indians (Indian men, in general, Syed Ross Masood, in particular) and grave disappointment with the passions of Indian nationalism and anti-imperialism. The novel was started in 1912, returned to in 1921 and published in 1924. Indian nationalism stunned the Humanist-idealist Forster, who never quite got over the rapidity with which the world, "his world' was changing--and I think Forster had some unexamined English assumptions about both European nations and cultural traditions, despite his being open-minded and deeply thoughtful in other ways. Forster famously abandoned the novel--noting that he believed that the rapid changes in society and in modern science, psychology, and philosophy could not be sustained or contained, any longer, by the novel genre; he became an essayist, statesman and public spokesman, who did his BBC best to raise Britons hopes during World War II. A Passage was his most interesting and final novel--his farewell to the novel and its possibilities.

Novelists and readers both have these Wanderer, Homie, Wanderer-Homie inclinations, I think. Some writers just have the gift to make their home the world; Faulkner was a particular genius in this way, as was Virginia Woolf. She never left the European continent, and was provincial in ways that made her sometimes personally unappealing, but also made her ever expanding, experimental novels quite fantastic and amazing. Some readers seem to me to find their comfort zones and remain there, further enriching their sense of place or enjoyment of a novelistic subgenre--the detective/espionage novel, historical novels, or science fiction. There are some who love the familiar comforts of narrative form, and this can be true of someone who loves and settles in with realist novels and someone who loves and settles in with dense, high modernist ones. And some readers just read and wander naturally, voraciously, and excitedly. At the beginning of each semester, I survey my students about their favorite books and authors; I am always impressed by these freshmen that have these crazy combos--some love Stein and Nabokov and are simultaneously insane about graphic novels and Mark Danielewski. I think that readerly teenagers have the best "I want it all" inclinations (I remember here that teenage Joyce taught himself Dano-Norwegian so that he could read Henrik Ibsen in his original language. That scandalized his Jesuit teachers, as much as his defense of Byron did his schoolmates--his brother Stanislaus Joyce reports in My Brother's Keeper that the beating that Joyce's Stephen Dedalus takes in A Portrait for defending Byron was based upon fact; his brother's actual battering was more brutal and vicious. And so Joyce wandered...

It makes sense to teach some literatures in their artistic-historic moment, rather than in a national frame; this is certainly true of the Modernists, since Modernism was international and multidisciplinary (literature--biography, fiction, poetry, visual and plastic arts, dance, architecture, musical composition). I learned and understood more about modernist literature when I studied modern painting, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Post-modern writers seem to me to share a distinct "nothing is sacred," post-war (World War II), post-national (a place the term makes sense to me) sense of irreverence, post Cold War distrust of authority, and aggressive questioning, parodying of values: it makes sense to teach Rushdie alongside Gunter Grass and Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthleme and Italo Calvino and Julio Cortázar and Rosario Ferré and Isabel Allende and Manuel Puig. What a way to think about the world, history, politics, power, and change. Serious literature (I do so want to say "good literature" here--though I know I will be chastened for it) makes one think about the world, existential matters, and shared fates whether it is set in Faulkner's real and imagined Mississippi Yoknapatawpha County or a wandering guy like Joe O'Neill's New York City.