Modern language association of America

The American Literature Group was formed in 1921, after the Modern Language Association (MLA) reluctantly acknowledged a growing scholarly interest in the writing of the United States. At the time such literature was studied primarily in secondary schools, and most colleges and universities had no courses on the topic. Those that did, usually offered only a single survey course. The idea that American literature could stand on its own as a discipline was viewed with skepticism, it being understood at the time as a branch of the literature of England - a branch almost wholly lacking the greatness of its parent.

The members of the new group felt that in order to prove their subject reputable, they must bring it into line with the model of disciplines that had come into being in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This model was based on the empiricism of the sciences, which had been modified in English as philology, author biography, textual history, and in its furthest speculative reach, influence study. Interpretive criticism was viewed as insufficiently scholarly, the domain of the "amateurs" who had dominated writing about American literature up to this point. Similarly, some in the Group thought that it should organize a way to better train secondary school teachers in the area, but this was rejected as insufficiently academic.

...