Reading American Novels and Multicultural Aesthetics

Lou Freitas Caton is Assistant Professor of English atWestfield State College.

• Samuel Coleridge and European Romanticism: An Interpretive Strategy for America’s Literary Canon * Dialectical and Transcultural Contexts: Otherness, Subjectivity, and Coleridge’s Vision * Historical and Ideological Contexts: The Burden of F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance * Multicultural and Postcolonial Contexts: Philosophy’s Self and Other * Poststructual Contexts: Paul de Man’s Uncertainty Anxiety and the Allegory of Division * A South Western Laguna Native American Perspective: Western Eyes and Indian Visions in Leslie Marmon Silkos’s Ceremony * A Korean American Perspective: Tolerating Truth and Knowledge in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker * A South Los Angeles Mexican American Perspective: Empty Hope and Full Sensuality in Luis Rodriguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A * An Antigua Caribbean American Perspective: The Quest for Empowerment in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John * A White European American Perspective: Imagining Family and Community in Don DeLillo’sWhite Noise * Feeling Romantic, Thinking Postmodern: Last Words on Form in a Multicultural Age

"Compelling and sometimes startling." - American Literary History"In our globalizing era, when migrant communities, refugees, and exiles increase ethnic diversity, the concept of a distinctively American literary identity is critically weakened; authors can no longer be said to constitute a national canon. Caton responds to this challenge to American literary studies with a bold polemic that revives the universalist themes of Romantic philosophy. A formidable and highly original contribution to ethnocritical scholarship. Caton explains, with cogent argument and canny insight, how Romantic theory can overcome the impasse between critics advocating multicultural diversity and those who wish to preserve the sense of a unifying literary aesthetics." - Paul Maltby, West Chester University, Author of Dissident Postmodernists"Caton promotes a 'multiculturalism of exchange and communication' that seems to promise an end to the 'either/or' debate between Formalism's aesthetics or New Historicism's social investigations. Caton's template follows the romantic writings of Samuel Coleridge and Immanuel Kant which propose a 'first cause' approach to human knowledge-the acknowledgement of a 'shared, universal acceptance of 'not knowing,'' and a true acquiescence to the 'finite limitations of human knowledge.' Caton's promise of a 'dialectic occur[ing] in and through different cultures' by way of their shared awareness in the human state of 'not knowing' opens up the 'possibility for both an ideal commonality and a respectful recognition of another's alterity.'" - Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside