This summer I have another chance to teach a literature class rather than my usual course in freshman composition. This time around I’ll be teaching (in four short weeks) the second half of the American literature survey, which covers everything since 1900. Initially, I planned on assigning a number of novellas rather than an anthology, but my mind changed when I decided to focus the class on how the canon has been opened up over the past one hundred years to allow writers from a variety of backgrounds to participate in this thing we call “American Literature.” I’ll be calling the class “The Fiction (and Poetry) of E Pluribus Unum“ because I intend to focus on the way the canon has and has not embraced the beautiful and elusive American paradox of a unified community comprised of many–often discordant–voices. Plus, we’re going to be reading fiction and poetry. So there’s some wordplay there.
The text I plan to use is the second volume of the shorter eighth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. The Norton anthology, in many ways, , making it an ideal text to use with my class. I haven’t selected reading assignments yet, but I expect that I’ll include some of my undergraduate favorites–Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”–as well as others that I’m unfamiliar with, but sound interesting–Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Lullaby,” Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Sexy,” Junot DÃaz’s “Drown.” I’m also interested in other texts, like John Steinbeck’s “The Leader of the People,” which seems (tellingly) to have taken the place of “The Chrysanthemums” in the academic canon. I imagine these texts and the others will help us have some interesting discussions about the meaning of the E Pluribus Unum ideal. I especially hope to get them thinking about how and why we construct and reconstruct (a) canon(s). I also want to them to think about the voices that are still outside the canon.
For this reason, I’m planning on assigning three Mormon short stories and a few poems. Mormons, that is, will be our case study of a community of American writers who have not yet been given a place in today’s multi-cultural canon–even though their numbers are comparable to other communities–the Jewish and LGBTQ communities, for example–that are reasonably well-represented in the Norton anthology. My hope is that the Mormon works I bring in will spur a discussion not only about the ongoing “fiction” of E Pluribus Unum–the never-ending (and ultimately impossible?) task of bringing more voices to the table and truly being one from many–but also the limitations and ethics of the canon model itself. Should we even have a canon, after all, if its overriding structure demands that we value one voice over another?
Canon debates are always fun, and I wouldn’t be opposed to having one here on AMV, but before we do so, I want to solicit your help. As I said, I’m planning on using three Mormon short stories and several poems. Which do you recommend? My only stipulation is that they much be accessible free to students via online archives like those of Dialogue and Sunstone. I don’t want to make them purchase any more books than they have to. The Norton anthology is expensive enough.
In asking this question, of course, I am also asking us to create a kind of Mormon canon of short stories and poems–which means I’m asking you to include some works at the expense of others. Feel free to justify and defend your choices.
A Motley Vision 
Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Todd Robert Petersen.
To put in a plug for my own website, Segullah has many wonderful poems available online:
http://journal.segullah.org/category/poetry/
Some of my favorites:
http://journal.segullah.org/poetry/blood-and-milk/
http://journal.segullah.org/poetry/tabernacles-to-temples/
http://journal.segullah.org/poetry/angels-of-mercy/
http://journal.segullah.org/poetry/song-for-a-stork/
And I second the recommendation of that Todd Robert Peterson story–it’s excellent
Calling and Election by Jack Harrell.
My personal opinion is that an inclusionary canon is something of an oxymoron; if Mormon works aren’t well-known enough or influential enough to make it into Norton’s, I’m not sure they belong there. But I digress…
Nominating works for a Mormon canon is always fun, though. 🙂 Adding the “free online” stipulation makes this go-round a bit challenging. Here are a couple of mine:
Michael R. Collings’ Taliesin poems are available online:
http://www.starshineandshadows.com/essays/2009-11-20.html
Thayer’s short story “Opening Day” would be a solid choice:
http://signaturebookslibrary.org/?p=471
Lee, dude, I hate using this forum to communicate, but I gotta know: Did you get my emails?
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When it comes to poetry you should, of course, talk to Tyler. In the meantime, his http://fireinthepasture.org is a great source.
Naturally, I should take this opportunity to self-promote, so consider the free plain-and-precious-parts version of The Fob Bible (also available as an ebook, natch). Poems, my top choice for Decidedly Mormon would be “Moses und Aron.” For fiction, I’ve taught “Abraham’s Purgatory” with great success to college students, but “Blood-Red Fruit” or “Faith of the Ocean” are probably more Mormony.
So. Enough about Peculiar Pages. Buy our books. That is all.
I’m also a big fan of “Calling and Election”; DThayer and LPeterson both have a lot of stories online. Including women is a good idea and stories from Angela Hallstrom and Karen Rosenbaum are available. Plus plenty of other women of course.
Sunstone’s archives are where I would send them. They have the most stuff free online. But looking for things can be a hassle.
I could point you tons of places where you can find really great, accessible (as in online and understandable) poetry by Mormon poets. In fact, many of the poems I chose to include in Fire in the Pasture were originally published online. But I suppose a good place for me to begin any defense of my choices for a course reading list would be with the twenty poems I picked for inclusion in a sampler from Fire. What I was after with the anthology and with the sampler was to collect a range of poems that represent the diversity of Mormon poetry—or rather, of Mormon poetries. Of course, my choices necessarily left other poets and poems unchosen, but I like to consider my continued work with Mormon poetry (here and here, for starters) as an attempt to show how the field—and the canon of Mormon poetries—is continually expanding and to call attention to new and established voices whose work flows out of and connects with the Mormon lyric tradition(s).
So that sampler is my first recommendation for your reading list.
My other recommendations include poetry by what I might consider the “major” contemporary Mormon poets—those whose work has been recognized by the broader American poetry community via national prizes and fellowships and publication in well-known journals, anthologies, and websites. These poets include: May Swenson (who presents an interesting test case in canonization herself, as I touched upon here), Kimberly Johnson, Lance Larsen, Susan Elizabeth Howe, Timothy Liu, Neil Aitken, and Philip White. If pressed, I could probably come up with more poets who have been vetted in some way by the American poetry community. I could also go on about Mormon poets whose work deserves wider recognition, but I’ll leave that for another time.