The short answer is because it was jejune. Franzen’s mistake in inadvertently exposing his pretensions was compounded by the fact that he appeared to be offering his self-regard as justification for looking down his nose at hundreds of thousands of potential readers of his book. For Ozick, however, the episode is representative of a shift in understanding that has occurred during her lifetime. (The essay’s recurring phrase is ‘fifty years ago’.) She suggests that Franzen’s comment violated what has become a contemporary taboo. By proposing that serious literature is incompatible with the populism of daytime television, he appealed to a hierarchy of cultural value. Though Ozick’s attitude toward Franzen is more or less openly condescending, she goes on to mount a backhanded defence, declaring her allegiance to the presumed hierarchy he tried to use so unsuccessfully to establish his probity. The essay’s climax is a remarkable incantatory paragraph that is so impassioned yet illogical, so typical of the reactive stance that tends to characterise such arguments, so representative of the kind of principled defence that literature would be better off without, that it is worth quoting in full:

Writers shouldn’t be mistaken for priests, it goes without saying; but neither should movie-script manufacturers be mistaken for writers. Readers are not the same as audiences, and the structure of a novel is not the same as the structure of a lingerie advertisement. Hierarchy, to be sure, is an off-putting notion, invoking high and low; and high smacks of snobbery and anti-egalitarianism. But hierarchy also points to the recognition of distinctions, and – incontrovertibly – the life of the intellect is perforce hierarchical: it insists that one thing is not the same as another thing. A novel concerned with English country-house romances is not the same as a tract on slavery in Antigua. A department of English is not the same as a Marxist tutorial. A rap CD is not the same as academic scholarship. A suicide bomber who blows up a pizzeria crowded with baby carriages is not the same as a nation-builder.

There is something slightly unhinged about this. Roland Barthes wrote an essay in which he analysed a pasta advertisement, noting how the arrangement of certain objects (tomatoes, onions, string bag) was being used to suggest authentic Italianness; but has anyone ever argued that the structure of a novel is the same as a lingerie advertisement? Who disagrees with the proposition that ‘one thing is not the same as another thing’?

It would take more than the available space to unravel the knot of allusions, anxieties and agendas in the cited paragraph, which contains specific jibes directed at Cornel West, who is a professor at Princeton University, and the late Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) are seminal works of postcolonial criticism. What is revealing about Ozick’s swingeing rhetoric is that its litany of truisms is offered in support of an assertion that is patently false. Making a distinction does not necessitate a hierarchy at all. It would be an oddly obsessive mind that, having learned to distinguish between, say, a sonnet and a villanelle, believes this recognition of difference demands a ranking system. Ozick wants to make the point that the realignment of cultural values over the past fifty years has marginalised the intellectual and aesthetic ideals represented by literature, in the exclusive sense of the word. She claims to accept that ‘high and low are inextricably intermingled’, but insists that ‘nothing gives us license, even in the face of this enlivening cultural mishmash, to fall into meltdown: to think that a comic-strip balloon is as legitimate a “text” as Paradise Lost’. Yet in resorting to far-flung contrasts and to the scoffing either/or rhetoric of a culture warrior, she exposes what is jejune about her own position. Her indignant defence of the ‘perforce hierarchical’ life of the mind eschews rational argument in favour of an appeal to self-evidence that betrays her irritation that such value judgements cannot be taken for granted. Her claims ultimately come to rest, rather feebly, on the vague and unstable notion of legitimacy. While aesthetic complexity and intellectual reflection are ideals worth defending, there is something fundamentally unsatisfactory about a stance that validates snobbery and anti-egalitarianism.

A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Harvard University Press/Inbooks, $95 hb, 1122 pp, 978064035942), could have been designed to affront Ozick. It not only snubs her (and Franzen, for that matter), it interprets the vexed term ‘literary’ in the broadest possible way. It turns its attention to texts of all kinds: not just poems, plays and novels, but speeches, memoirs, screenplays, political pamphlets, song lyrics and, yes, comic books. In more than two hundred essays by nearly as many contributors, it considers most of the major writers and landmark works one would expect to find in such a volume, but it also finds room to discuss populist art, such as films (Citizen Kane, Some Like It Hot, Psycho) and musical theatre (Porgy and Bess). At times, it reaches beyond the most etymologically basic definition of ‘literary’ (i.e. having something to do with letters) to consider art that would seem to be decisively non-literary: even the most liberal interpreter might baulk at using the word to describe Jackson Pollock’s action paintings or the music of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. It is a volume that mentions Jimi Hendrix three times but Bernard Malamud only once, and Donald Bartheleme not at all. There are chapters on Mickey Mouse and Grant Wood’s American Gothic, on hip hop and country music, on the invention of moving pictures and the telephone, on the Vietnam memorial wall and Hurricane Katrina. The final essay consists of a series of artworks responding to the election of Barack Obama.

This enlivening cultural mishmash would seem to invite one of two responses: either to be celebrated for its radical inclusiveness or denounced for its modish incontinence. One American reviewer has already labelled it ‘wacky’. But to understand the book within this framework is to underestimate its ambition. Flawed though it may be, it is certainly not wacky. While some inclusions are questionable and the quality of individual essays is variable, the volume is perhaps best understood as an attempt to move beyond the polarising argument, begun roughly half a century ago, that pits a reactionary literary conservatism against the shallow iconoclasm of cultural studies. It seeks to reinvent and, in a sense, reclaim the concept of the ‘literary’.

The book is, its editors insist, a literary history of America and not a history of American literature. They have not set out to be comprehensive. Instead, they explain, ‘the search has been for points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable. The goal of the book is not to smash a canon or create a new one, but to set many forms of American speech in motion, so that different forms, and people speaking at different times in sometimes radically different ways, can be heard speaking to each other.’

This ambition has several implications. Deliberately or not, it echoes Philip Roth’s description of the novelist’s imagination, which, he claims, ‘puts everything in motion’. In adapting this idea into their definition of a literary history – a title they claim to have preferred ahead of the encompassing notion of a cultural history – Marcus and Sollors reject the untenable idea that the term ‘literary’ can be sensibly applied only to an élite class of written works, or that it can be understood as a set of formal or generic qualities. It becomes, instead, something akin to the modern agora. This understanding points to the volume’s underlying thesis. By a presumptuous if familiar synecdoche, ‘America’ comes to refer to the United States, and the decision to approach the nation’s history from the perspective of its various forms of creative self-expression is an attempt to convey something of the essence of its modernity.

One of the earliest essays considers a speech by John Winthrop, delivered in 1630, in which he used the image of a ‘city on a hill’ to impress upon his Puritan audience the awareness that they were founding a new kind of society and that the world would be watching and judging them; another discusses the origins of the distinctive form of denunciatory sermon known as a ‘jeremiad’. Both concepts reverberate through American political discourse; both express the nation’s sense of itself as exceptional. Yet both also contain a note of caution: having been founded on certain ideals, the United States has taken on the responsibility for upholding those ideals. As a quintessentially modern nation, it has, in a sense, been invented ex nihilo; its essence, its defining myth, is the possibility of self-creation.

The volume’s open-ended definition of the literary as a kind of conceptual public space is, in effect, conflated with the ongoing drama of this self-invention. In locating the most telling examples of this process at transformative moments, it seeks to emphasise the creative ahead of the symptomatic. It resists the decontextualising tendencies of an ahistorical aestheticism that insists upon the transcendent greatness of certain works, but also resists materialistic interpretations that would fall back upon sociological or historically determined readings that deny the disruptive effects of creative genius. As Marcus has written elsewhere, ‘sociology can explain Mississippi Delta blues, but it cannot explain Robert Johnson’. In short, the volume takes creativity seriously. It stakes its claim on the idea that specific articulations can make things happen, that particular interventions in the public sphere can become significant focal points – points where many different strands of meaning intersect and influence each other; points from which it is possible to move outward to understand broader social, political and artistic currents.

It counters Ozick’s argument that such wide-ranging inclusiveness effaces the difference between high and low by emphasising the complementary rather than the antagonistic nature of the opposition. Far from denying the significance of the distinction, it finds much of the creative dynamic of modern American literature in the fruitful tension between the competing tendencies of the populist and the avantgarde.

This complex dialectic is reflected in the editors’ contrasting backgrounds and in the range of contributors, which positions the volume as a conversation between the academic and public realms. Sollors is a professor of English Literature and African American Studies at Harvard University; Marcus is a former Rolling Stone journalist and the author of critical studies on, among others, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and the Sex Pistols. Though most of the contributors hold academic positions, among them are artists, journalists, screenwriters and several accomplished novelists, including Jonathan Lethem, Walter Mosley and Richard Powers.

The essays are arranged chronologically by subject. Each begins with a date, an event and a headline; each concludes with a brief list of sources. In between, the contributors would appear to have been given free rein to interpret their subject in any way they please. The result is sometimes dramatic differences in tone, ranging from Mr Casaubon to Groovy High School Teacher. Some contributors have written clear, authoritative, scholarly accounts. Many of these – including those on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘Divinity School Address’ on Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and on Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail – are exemplary. Others have embraced the freedom to take their subjects in unexpected directions (playing two contrasting works against each other is a popular tactic) or to adopt a less conventional approach. These more idiosyncratic essays are not always perfectly realised, but they do yield some interesting results, as in Mary Gaitskill’s attempt to make sense of her conflicting personal responses to the riot of ego and wrongheadedness that is Norman Mailer.

This determinedly unregulated quality limits the book’s usefulness as a reference work, but it does succeed in realising its stated aim of putting many different forms of American speech in motion. If it has a failing, it is that the aim of having these voices speak to each other is rather more fitfully realised. There are, of course, recurring themes around which the volume coheres. Race, in particular, remains a defining tension, as it inevitably will in a nation founded on principles of freedom and equality, yet built on slavery; a nation in which, as recently as fifty years ago, interracial marriage was illegal in twenty-two states. But the volume seems to have been assembled on the assumption that lines of connection will appear of their own accord. They sometimes do, but this is not always the case. One essay, for example, takes as its starting point the fact that two of the architects of the American republic, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, not only died on the same day, but on Independence Day, 1826, exactly fifty years after the nation’s founding. On the same day, the songwriter Stephen Foster – whose most popular works include ‘Oh! Susanna’ and ‘Swannee River’ – was born. This is a neat but not especially meaningful coincidence.

Some individual essays do not rise to their subject. Marcus labours mightily to read Moby-Dick (1851) as the all-encompassing American novel, only to have the great white whale elude him. Writing on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Ishmael Reed manages to settle some scores and accuse Saul Bellow of misogyny, but doesn’t bother to notice any similarities between Augie March’s ‘freestyle’ narration and Huck’s artfully mangled syntax. More often, however, considering the volume as a whole, there is a sense of connections missed. Michael Tonkin contributes an excellent essay on Alcoholics Anonymous, in which he notes the similarity between the testimonials recorded in the organisation’s Big Book (1939) and the language of hardboiled fiction; but how much richer his essay might have been if it had branched out to consider the role drinking plays in the work of Raymond Carver, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee; or if he had noticed that one of the great American novels of the late-twentieth century, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), not only anatomises AA’s recovery program at considerable length, but explores how the overwhelming materialism of American society wrenches individuals between the extremes of self-destruction and spiritual submissiveness.

The sense that a greater degree of editorial direction might have drawn out some of these latent connections is felt in its treatment of various musical genres. Luc Sante contributes a fine essay on the birth of the blues, which can be read fruitfully in tandem with two later essays on jazz. In these two distinctive musical styles, both invented by the descendants of freed slaves at around the beginning of the twentieth century, both uniquely American, are the conflicting tendencies of modern art: the blues became the foundation of almost all popular music; jazz embraced experimentation and sophistication, transforming itself into a ‘high’ cultural form. Both can be understood as the sound of African American artists claiming a stake in American individualism – claiming their humanity. The later essay on hip hop, however, does not acknowledge its roots in these earlier styles in any depth and, in neglecting its historical origins, neglects its originality. It does not consider the importance of hip hop’s valuing of verbal wit, or the significance of boasting and self-assertiveness, or its political consciousness. As such, the essay does not make the potential connections with political or poetic traditions, either distinctively African American (think of Muddy Waters growling ‘I’m a man …’) or more broadly with the yawps of American individualism. It treats hip hop as a sociological event rather than an expressive or creative mode, which is to say, it considers it, if one might be permitted to make such a distinction, as a cultural phenomenon rather than a literary one.

The lament in Ozick’s blues is that the public space for serious critical discussion about literature is shrinking; that it is being squeezed out by unworthy distractions. It is true enough that inclusiveness creates its own set of problems. On this point, it is worth emphasising that, not only are most of the contributions excellent, the great weight of essays are concerned with writers, from Emily Dickinson and Henry James to Elizabeth Bishop and Toni Morrison, who are recognisably literary in the sense that Ozick intends when she specifies that Franzen is a ‘literary’ novelist. These writers are the backbone of a volume that does not deny the centrality of the written word. What the book acknowledges is the fact that the context in which such works must be understood has changed. Literature, Barthes once said, is ‘what gets taught’. A New Literary History of America, for all its quirks and flaws, performs the great service of declaring, ‘Oh no it isn’t’.