I recall that when I entered graduate school during the formalist
era, specifically during the transition from New Criticism to
phenomenology, American literature classes still taught Mark
Twain, because he was a "major author" after all, but most of the
scholars didn't know what to do with him.  He was a major author
that not that many graduate students wanted to work on.

A friend of mine did a dissertation on Twain, and I remember him
concluding after a while that, well, Huck Finn was great despite being
pretty bad as "literature"; everything else he wrote was just a
mess.  (Read, lacking in form.)

So then the sociologically oriented critics came blowing in, and suddenly
there were ways to talk a lot about Twain.  And gradually we
started getting all kinds of really interesting discussions of things
like Private History of a Campaign that Failed, and Innocents Abroad,
and Connecticut Yankee.

So now, over the past decade we've started hearing over and over again how
we ought to study "just literature."  What on earth does that mean?
As Twain folks, we ought to recognize that "just literature" is the
last thing Mark Twain is, and thanks for that.

As for political agendas, of course they're there.  I feel pretty
strongly in my own teaching that the agendas I'm concerned with are
Mark Twain's, not my own, but I have learned a lot from people who
aren't so fastidious, so I'm not going to attack them. Besides, I'm
intelligent enough to understand what's going on, and so are my students.
And if they aren't, I'll try to help them develop the skills.  Surely
that's in the spirit of Mark Twain.  "Just literature" isn't.

Glen Johnson