Professor Hudspeth once mentioned that he has often taught from notes he made while reading for his quals. I didn't ask what kind of notes he made; I supposed I knew that his comments would resemble the ones I scribble through most everything I own.
Now I wish I'd asked. I wonder what kind of notes people would prefer to teach from. If anyone has a very specific idea what matrix of notes he or she would most like to to prepare classes and curriculae, that might guide us in preparing entries here.
I find I enter a class hoping to teach a very few concepts, but to do so in a way that provokes students to rework methods and assumptions. Could I get away with just naming or describing concepts briefly, I could compress a semester to an hour or two, maybe less.
I've come to believe this is all normal for an English class, probably for the humanities in general.
In practice, what students get they produce themselves, most often quite apart from what I hope to impart. That process seems to involve long stretches of conversationally milling about one or another idea, and which idea will attract such attention seems hard to predict, since it depends on the students.
All of this requires an object or project on which a class may work communally, or with sufficient communality to engage discussion. In a literature class, said object must generally be a text; the projects, traditionally, are essays -- though I have seen blogs, websites, and wikis used. (I found one of the blogs particularly successful; the wiki may have even more potential, but I haven't really explored it.) So, if authors pre-prepare texts and students must prepare their projects, what do teachers prepare?
I'm thinking it amounts to whistle-stop itineraries through each text and through canon.
What's useful for those itineraries?
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
William Apess Notes
A Son of the Forest http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=23008220
Apess, William. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Barry O'Connell, ed. Amherst: UMA, 1992.
Apess published what's likely the first Native American autobiography, A Son of the Forest,
His Pequot grandparents and later, an uncle, raised him as an Indian under white dominion. His alcoholic grandparents beat him regularly until he was taken away by an uncle (4-5). The grandparents' abuse may in part have derived from their difficulties under white dominion. Speaking of the Pequot tribe and of native Americans in general, Apess writes:
"But the violation of their inherent rights, by those to whom they had extended the hand of friendship, was not the only act of injustice which this oppressed and afflicted nation was called to suffer at the hands of their white neighbors -- alas! They were subject to a more intense and heart-corroding affliction, that of having their daughters claimed by the conquerors, and however much subsequent efforts were made to soothe their sorrows, in this particular, they considered the glory of their nation as having departed" (4).
Apess almost casually mentions being "bound out" -- that is, his family sold him into indentured slavery; per the footnote, this was a common fate for unwanted children. He converted to Methodism in 1813 although his owner resisted his preaching.
Apess re-assessed Scripture to justify universal and equal humanity for all humans. Apess throughout manages to remain dispassionate about his own substantial sufferings and generous with his tormentors to the extent allowed by truthfulness. However, some of his arguments seem obscure. Several supporting points seem generated by speculations attempting to unite the abrahamic tribal histories of the Old Testament with the distribution of mankind as it was known to New England at the time.
". . . we are the only people [in the Americas, perhaps] who retain the original complexion of our father Adam" (10).
While I find such statements a bit mysterious, they do seem consistent with ideas around the worship of la Virgin de Guadalupe throughout Latin America, and make a study of how conquered peoples integrate and adopt the ideology of their conquerers en defensa propia.
Apess, William. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot. Barry O'Connell, ed. Amherst: UMA, 1992.
Apess published what's likely the first Native American autobiography, A Son of the Forest,
His Pequot grandparents and later, an uncle, raised him as an Indian under white dominion. His alcoholic grandparents beat him regularly until he was taken away by an uncle (4-5). The grandparents' abuse may in part have derived from their difficulties under white dominion. Speaking of the Pequot tribe and of native Americans in general, Apess writes:
"But the violation of their inherent rights, by those to whom they had extended the hand of friendship, was not the only act of injustice which this oppressed and afflicted nation was called to suffer at the hands of their white neighbors -- alas! They were subject to a more intense and heart-corroding affliction, that of having their daughters claimed by the conquerors, and however much subsequent efforts were made to soothe their sorrows, in this particular, they considered the glory of their nation as having departed" (4).
Apess almost casually mentions being "bound out" -- that is, his family sold him into indentured slavery; per the footnote, this was a common fate for unwanted children. He converted to Methodism in 1813 although his owner resisted his preaching.
Apess re-assessed Scripture to justify universal and equal humanity for all humans. Apess throughout manages to remain dispassionate about his own substantial sufferings and generous with his tormentors to the extent allowed by truthfulness. However, some of his arguments seem obscure. Several supporting points seem generated by speculations attempting to unite the abrahamic tribal histories of the Old Testament with the distribution of mankind as it was known to New England at the time.
". . . we are the only people [in the Americas, perhaps] who retain the original complexion of our father Adam" (10).
While I find such statements a bit mysterious, they do seem consistent with ideas around the worship of la Virgin de Guadalupe throughout Latin America, and make a study of how conquered peoples integrate and adopt the ideology of their conquerers en defensa propia.
Henry Adams Notes
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)
The Education of Henry Adams.
(Both available at Gutenberg.org: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog)
[Since I read etexts, I clipped some paragraphs]
Democracy
Madeliene Lee, attractive and apparently well-heeled, goes to Washington to seduce politicians into revealing the secrets of power in democracy, thereby providing a vehicle for Adams' theorizings.
These begin when Baron Jacobi answers Senator Ratcliffe's refusal to involve himself in reform by stating that yanks are hypocrites and as corrupt as europeans -- obviously the de facto standard for such things.
"My reply," said Ratcliffe, "is that no representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents. Purify society and you purify the government. But try to purify the government artificially and you only aggravate failure."
"A very statesmanlike reply," said Baron Jacobi, with a formal bow, but his tone had a shade of mockery. Carrington, who had listened with a darkening face, suddenly turned to the baron and asked him what conclusion he drew from the reply.
"Ah!" exclaimed the baron, with his wickedest leer, "what for is my conclusion good? You Americans believe yourselves to be excepted from the operation of general laws. You care not for experience. I have lived seventy-five years, and all that time in the midst of corruption. I am corrupt myself, only I do have courage to proclaim it, and you others have it not. Rome, Paris, Vienna, Petersburg, London, all are corrupt; only Washington is pure! Well, I declare to you that in all my experience I have found no society which has had elements of corruption like the United States. The children in the street are corrupt, and know how to cheat me.
"'The cities are all corrupt, and also the towns and the counties and the States' legislatures and the judges. Everywhere men betray trusts both public and private, steal money, run away with public funds. Only in the Senate men take no money. And you gentlemen in the Senate very well declare that your great United States, which is the head of the civilized world, can never learn anything from the example of corrupt Europe. You are right--quite right! The great United States needs not an example. I do much regret that I have not yet one hundred years to live. If I could then come back to this city, I should find myself very content--much more than now. I am always content where there is much corruption, and ma parole d'honneur!" broke out the old man with fire and gesture, "the United States will then be more corrupt than Rome under Caligula; more corrupt than the Church under Leo X.; more corrupt than France under the Regent!"
Then Adams goes to a local American politician:
"These are matters about which I rarely talk in society; they are like the doctrine of a personal God; of a future life; of revealed religion; subjects which one naturally reserves for private reflection. But since you ask for my political creed, you shall have it. I only condition that it shall be for you alone, never to be repeated or quoted as mine. I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it.
"Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilisation aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."
"And supposing your experiment fails," said Mrs. Lee; "suppose society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and communism."
"I wish, Mrs. Lee, you would visit the Observatory with me some evening, and look at Sirius. Did you ever make the acquaintance of a fixed star? I believe astronomers reckon about twenty millions of them in sight, and an infinite possibility of invisible millions, each one of which is a sun, like ours, and may have satellites like our planet. Suppose you see one of these fixed stars suddenly increase in brightness, and are told that a satellite has fallen into it and is burning up, its career finished, its capacities exhausted? Curious, is it not; but what does it matter? Just as much as the burning up of a moth at your candle."
Madeleine shuddered a little. "I cannot get to the height of your philosophy," said she. "You are wandering among the infinites, and I am finite."
So, Adams assembles or fabricates evidence for a propaganda model something like that of Noam Chomsky in that these empowered people are clearly into worrying about how much control should be ceded to various classes of people and which people to (mis)inform in what ways.
A description of lobbying:
"The fate of that noble party to which they all belonged, and which had a record that could never be forgotten, depended on their letting principle alone. Their principle must be the want of principles. There were indeed individuals who said in reply that Ratcliffe had made promises which never could be carried out, and there were almost superhuman elements of discord in the combination, but as Ratcliffe shrewdly rejoined, he only wanted it to last a week, and he guessed his promises would hold it up for that time."
The Education of Henry Adams
Here's a quote of the "unhealthful" experiences available to boys in HA's Boston:
"Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen were worse than none. Boston at that time offered few healthy resources for boys or men. The bar-room and billiard-room were more familiar than parents knew. As a rule boys could skate and swim and were sent to dancing-school; they played a rudimentary game of baseball, football, and hockey; a few could sail a boat; still fewer had been out with a gun to shoot yellow-legs or a stray wild duck; one or two may have learned something of natural history if they came from the neighborhood of Concord; none could ride across country, or knew what shooting with dogs meant. Sport as a pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after 1850. For horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all pleasures, winter sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out -- Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest -- they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then."
Some factors remain universal among the others that have clearly changed. Note first the assumption that pursuits involving outdoorsmanship would be better and more formative. Adams decides that the needs of education change more from 1850 to 1925 than they had from 0000 to 1850:
"At any other moment in human history, this education, including its political and literary bias, would have been not only good, but quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men so endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased with it, and not ill-pleased with himself. He had all he wanted. He saw no reason for thinking that any one else had more. He finished with school, not very brilliantly, but without finding fault with the sum of his knowledge. Probably he knew more than his father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather had known at sixteen years old. Only on looking back, fifty years later, at his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of the twentieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole the boy of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the year 1. He found himself unable to give a sure answer. The calculation was clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth-century thought, but the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900. The education he had received bore little relation to the education he needed. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at all. He knew not even where or how to begin. (End of Chapter III).
On Harvard:
English attitudes towards Southern secession:
". . . in May, 1861, no one in England -- literally no one -- doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it . . ."
Fairly revealing, and an easy attitude to relate to, sort of like Roosevelt's description of Somoza as "our son of a bitch." One can see the distinction here. Adams has just made reference to England's "anti-slavery principles," much related, one imagines, to current US "democratic principles" - violated routinely for even minor gain.
"Evarts was also an economist of morals, but with him the question was rather how much morality one could afford. "The world can absorb only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill it." One sought education in order to adjust the dose."
Further evidence of the same kind of thing follows the career of Lord Russell, passim in the 1860's. Basically, Russell advices others that Jefferson Davis has assembled a navy as he assembles a navy for Jefferson Davis.
An interesting reflection on publication:
"The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand."
A theme that appears repeatedly through 1800's discussions of the Civil War is the presumed necessity to remain sufficiently unified and strong to battle off England and France. Lincoln's motivation in crushing Davis would have been less an insistence on the liberty of some sharecropper than the need to remain strong enough to resist Disraeli and eventually some unseen Churchill, who would have eaten the US as casually as he did the muslim states if he could do so.
A strong pattern of instruction might be to show the parallels between HA's observations or even Lincoln's own and the observations of later post-colonial nationalists in what's still loosely called the "Third World."
A possible teaching text: Adams on the power to be unleashed in the 20th Century:
"With science or with society, he had no quarrel and claimed no share of authority. He had never been able to acquire knowledge, still less to impart it; and if he had, at times, felt serious differences with the American of the nineteenth century, he felt none with the American of the twentieth. For this new creation, born since 1900, a historian asked no longer to be teacher or even friend; he asked only to be a pupil, and promised to be docile, for once, even though trodden under foot; for he could see that the new American -- the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined -- must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature. At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth -- equally childlike -- and he would only wonder how both of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have done so much."
Is it all that different?
The Education of Henry Adams.
(Both available at Gutenberg.org: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog)
[Since I read etexts, I clipped some paragraphs]
Democracy
Madeliene Lee, attractive and apparently well-heeled, goes to Washington to seduce politicians into revealing the secrets of power in democracy, thereby providing a vehicle for Adams' theorizings.
These begin when Baron Jacobi answers Senator Ratcliffe's refusal to involve himself in reform by stating that yanks are hypocrites and as corrupt as europeans -- obviously the de facto standard for such things.
"My reply," said Ratcliffe, "is that no representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents. Purify society and you purify the government. But try to purify the government artificially and you only aggravate failure."
"A very statesmanlike reply," said Baron Jacobi, with a formal bow, but his tone had a shade of mockery. Carrington, who had listened with a darkening face, suddenly turned to the baron and asked him what conclusion he drew from the reply.
"Ah!" exclaimed the baron, with his wickedest leer, "what for is my conclusion good? You Americans believe yourselves to be excepted from the operation of general laws. You care not for experience. I have lived seventy-five years, and all that time in the midst of corruption. I am corrupt myself, only I do have courage to proclaim it, and you others have it not. Rome, Paris, Vienna, Petersburg, London, all are corrupt; only Washington is pure! Well, I declare to you that in all my experience I have found no society which has had elements of corruption like the United States. The children in the street are corrupt, and know how to cheat me.
"'The cities are all corrupt, and also the towns and the counties and the States' legislatures and the judges. Everywhere men betray trusts both public and private, steal money, run away with public funds. Only in the Senate men take no money. And you gentlemen in the Senate very well declare that your great United States, which is the head of the civilized world, can never learn anything from the example of corrupt Europe. You are right--quite right! The great United States needs not an example. I do much regret that I have not yet one hundred years to live. If I could then come back to this city, I should find myself very content--much more than now. I am always content where there is much corruption, and ma parole d'honneur!" broke out the old man with fire and gesture, "the United States will then be more corrupt than Rome under Caligula; more corrupt than the Church under Leo X.; more corrupt than France under the Regent!"
Then Adams goes to a local American politician:
"These are matters about which I rarely talk in society; they are like the doctrine of a personal God; of a future life; of revealed religion; subjects which one naturally reserves for private reflection. But since you ask for my political creed, you shall have it. I only condition that it shall be for you alone, never to be repeated or quoted as mine. I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it.
"Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilisation aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."
"And supposing your experiment fails," said Mrs. Lee; "suppose society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and communism."
"I wish, Mrs. Lee, you would visit the Observatory with me some evening, and look at Sirius. Did you ever make the acquaintance of a fixed star? I believe astronomers reckon about twenty millions of them in sight, and an infinite possibility of invisible millions, each one of which is a sun, like ours, and may have satellites like our planet. Suppose you see one of these fixed stars suddenly increase in brightness, and are told that a satellite has fallen into it and is burning up, its career finished, its capacities exhausted? Curious, is it not; but what does it matter? Just as much as the burning up of a moth at your candle."
Madeleine shuddered a little. "I cannot get to the height of your philosophy," said she. "You are wandering among the infinites, and I am finite."
So, Adams assembles or fabricates evidence for a propaganda model something like that of Noam Chomsky in that these empowered people are clearly into worrying about how much control should be ceded to various classes of people and which people to (mis)inform in what ways.
A description of lobbying:
"The fate of that noble party to which they all belonged, and which had a record that could never be forgotten, depended on their letting principle alone. Their principle must be the want of principles. There were indeed individuals who said in reply that Ratcliffe had made promises which never could be carried out, and there were almost superhuman elements of discord in the combination, but as Ratcliffe shrewdly rejoined, he only wanted it to last a week, and he guessed his promises would hold it up for that time."
The Education of Henry Adams
Here's a quote of the "unhealthful" experiences available to boys in HA's Boston:
"Most school experience was bad. Boy associations at fifteen were worse than none. Boston at that time offered few healthy resources for boys or men. The bar-room and billiard-room were more familiar than parents knew. As a rule boys could skate and swim and were sent to dancing-school; they played a rudimentary game of baseball, football, and hockey; a few could sail a boat; still fewer had been out with a gun to shoot yellow-legs or a stray wild duck; one or two may have learned something of natural history if they came from the neighborhood of Concord; none could ride across country, or knew what shooting with dogs meant. Sport as a pursuit was unknown. Boat-racing came after 1850. For horse-racing, only the trotting-course existed. Of all pleasures, winter sleighing was still the gayest and most popular. From none of these amusements could the boy learn anything likely to be of use to him in the world. Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out -- Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest -- they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and " The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then."
Some factors remain universal among the others that have clearly changed. Note first the assumption that pursuits involving outdoorsmanship would be better and more formative. Adams decides that the needs of education change more from 1850 to 1925 than they had from 0000 to 1850:
"At any other moment in human history, this education, including its political and literary bias, would have been not only good, but quite the best. Society had always welcomed and flattered men so endowed. Henry Adams had every reason to be well pleased with it, and not ill-pleased with himself. He had all he wanted. He saw no reason for thinking that any one else had more. He finished with school, not very brilliantly, but without finding fault with the sum of his knowledge. Probably he knew more than his father, or his grandfather, or his great-grandfather had known at sixteen years old. Only on looking back, fifty years later, at his own figure in 1854, and pondering on the needs of the twentieth century, he wondered whether, on the whole the boy of 1854 stood nearer to the thought of 1904, or to that of the year 1. He found himself unable to give a sure answer. The calculation was clouded by the undetermined values of twentieth-century thought, but the story will show his reasons for thinking that, in essentials like religion, ethics, philosophy; in history, literature, art; in the concepts of all science, except perhaps mathematics, the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900. The education he had received bore little relation to the education he needed. Speaking as an American of 1900, he had as yet no education at all. He knew not even where or how to begin. (End of Chapter III).
On Harvard:
- The entire work of the four years could have been easily put into the work of any four months in after life.
- "As yet he knew nothing Education had not begun" (end of Chapter IV).
- All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
- By extension, what would corporately funded education support?
English attitudes towards Southern secession:
". . . in May, 1861, no one in England -- literally no one -- doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it . . ."
Fairly revealing, and an easy attitude to relate to, sort of like Roosevelt's description of Somoza as "our son of a bitch." One can see the distinction here. Adams has just made reference to England's "anti-slavery principles," much related, one imagines, to current US "democratic principles" - violated routinely for even minor gain.
"Evarts was also an economist of morals, but with him the question was rather how much morality one could afford. "The world can absorb only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill it." One sought education in order to adjust the dose."
Further evidence of the same kind of thing follows the career of Lord Russell, passim in the 1860's. Basically, Russell advices others that Jefferson Davis has assembled a navy as he assembles a navy for Jefferson Davis.
An interesting reflection on publication:
"The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand."
A theme that appears repeatedly through 1800's discussions of the Civil War is the presumed necessity to remain sufficiently unified and strong to battle off England and France. Lincoln's motivation in crushing Davis would have been less an insistence on the liberty of some sharecropper than the need to remain strong enough to resist Disraeli and eventually some unseen Churchill, who would have eaten the US as casually as he did the muslim states if he could do so.
A strong pattern of instruction might be to show the parallels between HA's observations or even Lincoln's own and the observations of later post-colonial nationalists in what's still loosely called the "Third World."
A possible teaching text: Adams on the power to be unleashed in the 20th Century:
"With science or with society, he had no quarrel and claimed no share of authority. He had never been able to acquire knowledge, still less to impart it; and if he had, at times, felt serious differences with the American of the nineteenth century, he felt none with the American of the twentieth. For this new creation, born since 1900, a historian asked no longer to be teacher or even friend; he asked only to be a pupil, and promised to be docile, for once, even though trodden under foot; for he could see that the new American -- the child of incalculable coal-power, chemical power, electric power, and radiating energy, as well as of new forces yet undetermined -- must be a sort of God compared with any former creation of nature. At the rate of progress since 1800, every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power. He would think in complexities unimaginable to an earlier mind. He would deal with problems altogether beyond the range of earlier society. To him the nineteenth century would stand on the same plane with the fourth -- equally childlike -- and he would only wonder how both of them, knowing so little, and so weak in force, should have done so much."
Is it all that different?
Albee
Edward Albee
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, "The Zoo Story"
Some links:
Interview
Whistling in the Dark (Interview).
Longhouse(clips)
Albee's fun. "Zoo Story" is probably a half-hour read, in case anyone is pressed for time finishing these readings. His best work lances assumptions around family. My own favorites are "The American Dream," which I'd match against Brecht, and the recent Sylvia, or The Goat. But "Zoo Story" is a nice, tight little piece that manages to get most of the sturm und drang of confessional literature without much of the sop.
Burton and Taylor starred in a high-end production of Woolf in the 70's. Albee got public attention, but disliked the production and performances intensely.
I heard Albee speak at Chapman a few years back. A colleague asked him something broadly like "How far ahead do you know what you will write when you write?" I took no notes that day, but my memory of his response goes something like this:
"When I write? Do you mean a letter? A play? I'm tempted to say 'Not at all.'
"It really depends on what you mean. I know my characters before I start. I have spent some time with them; I have some idea what each has experienced, so I can predict how each might react in a given situation the way you might know how one of your friends might react in a new situation even though you don't know just what that person will say. And I have some idea what events I will make them confront; there's an idea, a basic crisis or conflict for the play. But if you're asking how far ahead I know just what someone will say, what words a character will use, I should say -- oh, I know maybe four or five words ahead of where I write."
Winesberg, Etext, Austin and Jewett
One imagines that a nest of little stories like Winesberg, Ohio could make a hypertext -- that is, that one could read them in various sequences and gain something by their re-ordering.
The book makes deft turns towards passion; some events are plenty extreme. But it's written as though it were trivial, from a POV very exclusively outside the character. I find it far more understated than Hemingway. After all, tightlipped machismo is a gesture of emotional extremis, not of detachment.
I wonder about relations between Winesberg, Hem, and Jewett's Pointed Firs. Firs seems structurally similar to Winesberg in that aspects of plot and quest diminish as the narrator-focalizer-protagonist diminish. Some critics discussing Jewett see this as related to gender-specific ideas of what does (or perhaps does not) constitute quest, crisis, identity and so forth.
The book makes deft turns towards passion; some events are plenty extreme. But it's written as though it were trivial, from a POV very exclusively outside the character. I find it far more understated than Hemingway. After all, tightlipped machismo is a gesture of emotional extremis, not of detachment.
I wonder about relations between Winesberg, Hem, and Jewett's Pointed Firs. Firs seems structurally similar to Winesberg in that aspects of plot and quest diminish as the narrator-focalizer-protagonist diminish. Some critics discussing Jewett see this as related to gender-specific ideas of what does (or perhaps does not) constitute quest, crisis, identity and so forth.
Elizabeth Ashbridge Notes
Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713-1755).
Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, who died in Truth's service at the house of Robert Lecky at Kilnock in the County of Carlow Ireland; the 16th of 5th mo. 1755.
Elizabeth Ashbridge, narrating the course of her conversion to Quakerism, displays the sharpness of religious prejudice both in her own harsh judgments and in the mistreatments to which people repeatedly subject her:
1. She elopes for love, but her first husband dies after 5 months. This she calls punishment from God for having disobeyed her parents, considering that they had the right to dispose of her as they might.
2. Her father disowns her for disobedience, which she presents almost without comment.
3. She works in Ireland and is well treated there by the Catholics with whom she stays, but the Catholic Church requires political affiliation among other things, and she does not agree because, raised an anglican, she's a royalist. She dutifully learns gaelic while she's there.
4. Deciding to return to the colonies, she betrays an Irish slave rebellion onship.
5. The ship's captain threatens Ashbridge, sells her into indentured servitude.
6. Her owner abuses her in ways suggestive of sexual sadism, denying her clothing and having her whipped naked in public.
7. She purchases her freedom a year early.
8. She marries a schoolmaster who likes her dancing.
9. She gets some notion that she shouldn't dance because that's against God's will. She makes no mention of a change in attitude towards sex, but nowhere is there any mention of pregnancy or household or anything of the sort. She seems contrite that her dancing misled her husband, but whether it misled him to marry for a hope of sensual satisfaction that is false because it's antispiritual or because she's unwilling to follow through with it remains unclear.
10. She goes to see some Quaker relatives.
11. She converts to quakerism.
12. Her husband subjects her to much cruelty hoping to dissuade her from her new sect. The language he gives him seems to indicate that he sees this as a way of returning her to the apparent good humours that she had when he married her (at various points she descrbes what would probably be considered treatable depression anywhere in the US today.) Given the dynamic around her dancing, one wonders the extent to which her husband's concern with her mood amounts to concern over sexual willingness.
13. Her husband finally gives up on her, and one day he gets drunk and signs up to go do battle in Cuba.
14. She concludes her narrative expressing sorrow for his death before conversion to true faith.
The woman seems educated and in some ways perceptive, but it's difficult to know how much. The narrative shows severe flattened effect and extreme confusion. She continues to seek from God what people deny her. She has apparent talent as a performer; she has physical passion at least twice, and may downplay that in her account. Yet she denies these, denies those around her, and wonders at their mistreatment of her.
On the other hand, that mistreatment does seem extreme, let alone undeserved. Her parents convince her that they own her. She must recognize that for falsehood at some point in her youth, but the insight seems buried in grief by the time she writes this narrative. Dancing accompanies the love of a man once again when she marries once again. Dancing accompanies any experience of passion that she does relate, yet she dismisses such things as inadequate reasons for matrimony.
Most unfortunate and ill-treated woman, altogether.
Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge, who died in Truth's service at the house of Robert Lecky at Kilnock in the County of Carlow Ireland; the 16th of 5th mo. 1755.
Elizabeth Ashbridge, narrating the course of her conversion to Quakerism, displays the sharpness of religious prejudice both in her own harsh judgments and in the mistreatments to which people repeatedly subject her:
1. She elopes for love, but her first husband dies after 5 months. This she calls punishment from God for having disobeyed her parents, considering that they had the right to dispose of her as they might.
2. Her father disowns her for disobedience, which she presents almost without comment.
3. She works in Ireland and is well treated there by the Catholics with whom she stays, but the Catholic Church requires political affiliation among other things, and she does not agree because, raised an anglican, she's a royalist. She dutifully learns gaelic while she's there.
4. Deciding to return to the colonies, she betrays an Irish slave rebellion onship.
5. The ship's captain threatens Ashbridge, sells her into indentured servitude.
6. Her owner abuses her in ways suggestive of sexual sadism, denying her clothing and having her whipped naked in public.
7. She purchases her freedom a year early.
8. She marries a schoolmaster who likes her dancing.
9. She gets some notion that she shouldn't dance because that's against God's will. She makes no mention of a change in attitude towards sex, but nowhere is there any mention of pregnancy or household or anything of the sort. She seems contrite that her dancing misled her husband, but whether it misled him to marry for a hope of sensual satisfaction that is false because it's antispiritual or because she's unwilling to follow through with it remains unclear.
10. She goes to see some Quaker relatives.
11. She converts to quakerism.
12. Her husband subjects her to much cruelty hoping to dissuade her from her new sect. The language he gives him seems to indicate that he sees this as a way of returning her to the apparent good humours that she had when he married her (at various points she descrbes what would probably be considered treatable depression anywhere in the US today.) Given the dynamic around her dancing, one wonders the extent to which her husband's concern with her mood amounts to concern over sexual willingness.
13. Her husband finally gives up on her, and one day he gets drunk and signs up to go do battle in Cuba.
14. She concludes her narrative expressing sorrow for his death before conversion to true faith.
The woman seems educated and in some ways perceptive, but it's difficult to know how much. The narrative shows severe flattened effect and extreme confusion. She continues to seek from God what people deny her. She has apparent talent as a performer; she has physical passion at least twice, and may downplay that in her account. Yet she denies these, denies those around her, and wonders at their mistreatment of her.
On the other hand, that mistreatment does seem extreme, let alone undeserved. Her parents convince her that they own her. She must recognize that for falsehood at some point in her youth, but the insight seems buried in grief by the time she writes this narrative. Dancing accompanies the love of a man once again when she marries once again. Dancing accompanies any experience of passion that she does relate, yet she dismisses such things as inadequate reasons for matrimony.
Most unfortunate and ill-treated woman, altogether.
Mary Austin Notes
The Land of Little Rain (1903) http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Literature/Austin/LandOfLittleRain/
Lost Borders 1909
Austin Resources. http://www.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/amlit/austin.htm
Mary Austin was born in the midwest but seemed to find Home in eastern California. She writes stylistically interesting pieces about the desert and semiarid regions either side of the Sierra Nevada -- the best description I know of.
For some reason, Robert Hass in his Introduction considers her sentences strange -- he makes no qualification or explanation. I don't find them so. She's terse. And she's clearly internalized an idea of her material surroundings that incorporates some conception of what's called spirituality: in other words, her coyote has perceptions and a soul; her rabbit has perceptions and a soul, and so forth.
The Land of Little Rain is quite well written for a locality-type book. Since her greater impressions derive from the physical descriptions, she thereby approaches an elemental description of Life. It's not trivial, though she accepts restricted means. I wonder about reading this against Jewett and Winesberg Ohio.
Lost Borders 1909
Austin Resources. http://www.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/amlit/austin.htm
Mary Austin was born in the midwest but seemed to find Home in eastern California. She writes stylistically interesting pieces about the desert and semiarid regions either side of the Sierra Nevada -- the best description I know of.
For some reason, Robert Hass in his Introduction considers her sentences strange -- he makes no qualification or explanation. I don't find them so. She's terse. And she's clearly internalized an idea of her material surroundings that incorporates some conception of what's called spirituality: in other words, her coyote has perceptions and a soul; her rabbit has perceptions and a soul, and so forth.
The Land of Little Rain is quite well written for a locality-type book. Since her greater impressions derive from the physical descriptions, she thereby approaches an elemental description of Life. It's not trivial, though she accepts restricted means. I wonder about reading this against Jewett and Winesberg Ohio.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Winesburg Ohio & Uncle Tom's Cabin
I'm going to start reading Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg Ohio next. I spoke to Greg Stone and he's halfway through reading Uncle Tom's Cabin which I've read recently and would be glad to discuss with him on the blog as soon as he is finished. I'll put up a post on Winesburg Ohio as soon as I finish it.
Monday, March 19, 2007
BC's Goals & Specializations
Trying to understand what happens to literature online moves me to things that have unusual form and physicality - poetry, particularly visually active poetry; spoken and performed word; artist's books, illuminated manuscripts, and concrete poetry;
I'm majoring in 19th Century American Lit, minoring in 20th Century American Lit and in Literary Theory.
I'm majoring in 19th Century American Lit, minoring in 20th Century American Lit and in Literary Theory.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Book in 19th Century
I'm curious what you-all think of changes in printing and in literary forms in the 19th Century, both in the US and in Western Europe.
Jerome McGann's Black Riders and Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America has too, but I still find myself swimming a bit.
I'm curious too about the role of female authors and readers in this. Davidson makes a lot out of this, as do Baym and some of the other femcrits. Some familiar (old fashioned?) constructions describe a 19th Century a progress towards mutually verifiable perceptions and prosaic, plotted narrative -- things held to go together. These people respond with people like Jewett, whose Firs, while temporally sequential, does not seem dependent on a tight sense of causal relations between episodes. Yet these authors seem to accept the dicta of mutually verifiable reality more thoroughly than those who propound the theory.
Jerome McGann's Black Riders and Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America has too, but I still find myself swimming a bit.
I'm curious too about the role of female authors and readers in this. Davidson makes a lot out of this, as do Baym and some of the other femcrits. Some familiar (old fashioned?) constructions describe a 19th Century a progress towards mutually verifiable perceptions and prosaic, plotted narrative -- things held to go together. These people respond with people like Jewett, whose Firs, while temporally sequential, does not seem dependent on a tight sense of causal relations between episodes. Yet these authors seem to accept the dicta of mutually verifiable reality more thoroughly than those who propound the theory.
Lapham, Family, Novels
What did you think of Lapham?
The social context around it interests me more than anything. Howells seems to consistently work skew to an idea of novels as fluff for young ladies. He assumes readers know the idea well enough that he may pass over explanation. Yet this was published in the 1880's, no? And the so-called "linear" plot (as in, very roughly, Aristotle's treatment of tragedy, Poe's ideas about narrative, 19th century realism, and How-to-Write-a-Filmscript books) comes under radical question by the 1920's, just 40-odd years later.
What do you think of the relationships of this "novel" form with the reach towards science and positivisms in the 19th Century? How does this relate to film, radio, the various relativisms, the disillusionment with the machine as a purveyor of human fulfillment from, I suppose WWI into the mid 20th? How about to expanding print possibilities in the 19th (Cathy Davidson is interesting on this, but I could use something that continues a little later).
As I get farther into my 19th-century reading, I'm increasingly impressed by the vitality of invention and the speed of the changes in that time.
Another point - I don't know Howells' bio, but his concerns here sound tres uppercrust and upper-bourgeois. May my ruination be so chummy.
I wonder about reading this against Capital or Booker T. Washington .
The social context around it interests me more than anything. Howells seems to consistently work skew to an idea of novels as fluff for young ladies. He assumes readers know the idea well enough that he may pass over explanation. Yet this was published in the 1880's, no? And the so-called "linear" plot (as in, very roughly, Aristotle's treatment of tragedy, Poe's ideas about narrative, 19th century realism, and How-to-Write-a-Filmscript books) comes under radical question by the 1920's, just 40-odd years later.
What do you think of the relationships of this "novel" form with the reach towards science and positivisms in the 19th Century? How does this relate to film, radio, the various relativisms, the disillusionment with the machine as a purveyor of human fulfillment from, I suppose WWI into the mid 20th? How about to expanding print possibilities in the 19th (Cathy Davidson is interesting on this, but I could use something that continues a little later).
As I get farther into my 19th-century reading, I'm increasingly impressed by the vitality of invention and the speed of the changes in that time.
Another point - I don't know Howells' bio, but his concerns here sound tres uppercrust and upper-bourgeois. May my ruination be so chummy.
I wonder about reading this against Capital or Booker T. Washington .
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Cacciato
I enjoyed Cacciato. O'Brien's got a good ear for dialog.
Seems to me that falling (more or less) into Laos has a lot of parallels in that war -- when the troops did go out of Vietnam, many of them did go into Cambodia, against whom we were officially not fighting. I vividly recall an LA Times story headed something like "TROOPS OUT OF VIETNAM," with the little Cambodia detail buried back on page 16 or so.
The Lewis Carroll reference is pretty resonant for the time. There's the obvious recall of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," which would be almost exactly contemporary with Paul's entry into the military (maybe as much as a year off; I'd have to check) But more importantly, the whole mirrors game issue of logic was something a lot of people were going through. As of the mid-60's, Americans were more convinced that our leaders had good intention than we have been since, and possibly more than we had been at any time before Pearl Harbor.
Paul considers loyalties and contingencies. Save Cacciato? Arrest him? Join him? Are we trying to catch him or trying not to? Who deserts whom? Insofar as he does decide, he does so in a swelter of dreams. We have every reason to suppose he originally allowed himself to be drafted in a similar swelter.
I find the ending supposition that his loyalty is to the people immediately around him, not to a political idea or whatever, realistic enough, but otherwise unconvincing. Paul's fantasy of the Vietnamese officer in his rabbit hole and the hippie chick from UCSD that Paul's buddies rob in Greece or wherever it was seem among the least articulated of Paul's fantasies. The asian girl who serves for romantic interest en route to Paris seems appropriately dreamlike, very realistic as a dream, but not otherwise. Paul doesn't understand them; perhaps O'Brien doesn't either, but I'd hate to speculate.
The placement of this theory that one maintains loyalty to one's confreres gains a lot of strength -- too much, it seems to me -- from its placement right near the end of Paul's fantasies, as it is, right as he starts to come back down. Clearly it is at the very least the basis for Paul's decision, if not O'Brien's. It bothers me. O'Brien has clearly shown the separations of fate internal to the group by the natural fragging of the stubborn lieutenant, for example. Arithmetically, he has to be eliminated; it's a number of lives thing. On the other hand, he has clearly shown sympathy outside the group. If O'Brien has anything against the Cong, he doesn't show it here. He doesn't seem to understand them as a political unit, but perhaps that's because he's writing out of a POV strongly tied to Paul Berlin.
Still, Paul's neutral treatment of unmotivated wholesale murder rankles, and his "We weren't duped" sort of reflections smack suspiciously of an authorial summation, and a sour one at that, as though O'Brien may find himself reluctant to acknowledge that he himself sacrificed for a political manoevre involving massive murder and vandalism that was motivated by something very different than loyalty to his small group of friends.
But I suppose it's Cacciato himself that poses such questions, though mutely. Perhaps O'Brien makes some judgment on the larger political motivations like ideology, greed, and powerlust by so resolutely ignoring them. But I can't help but feel that O'Brien or someone might have woven one other level of sense into all this, as engaging as it is already.
Seems to me that falling (more or less) into Laos has a lot of parallels in that war -- when the troops did go out of Vietnam, many of them did go into Cambodia, against whom we were officially not fighting. I vividly recall an LA Times story headed something like "TROOPS OUT OF VIETNAM," with the little Cambodia detail buried back on page 16 or so.
The Lewis Carroll reference is pretty resonant for the time. There's the obvious recall of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," which would be almost exactly contemporary with Paul's entry into the military (maybe as much as a year off; I'd have to check) But more importantly, the whole mirrors game issue of logic was something a lot of people were going through. As of the mid-60's, Americans were more convinced that our leaders had good intention than we have been since, and possibly more than we had been at any time before Pearl Harbor.
Paul considers loyalties and contingencies. Save Cacciato? Arrest him? Join him? Are we trying to catch him or trying not to? Who deserts whom? Insofar as he does decide, he does so in a swelter of dreams. We have every reason to suppose he originally allowed himself to be drafted in a similar swelter.
I find the ending supposition that his loyalty is to the people immediately around him, not to a political idea or whatever, realistic enough, but otherwise unconvincing. Paul's fantasy of the Vietnamese officer in his rabbit hole and the hippie chick from UCSD that Paul's buddies rob in Greece or wherever it was seem among the least articulated of Paul's fantasies. The asian girl who serves for romantic interest en route to Paris seems appropriately dreamlike, very realistic as a dream, but not otherwise. Paul doesn't understand them; perhaps O'Brien doesn't either, but I'd hate to speculate.
The placement of this theory that one maintains loyalty to one's confreres gains a lot of strength -- too much, it seems to me -- from its placement right near the end of Paul's fantasies, as it is, right as he starts to come back down. Clearly it is at the very least the basis for Paul's decision, if not O'Brien's. It bothers me. O'Brien has clearly shown the separations of fate internal to the group by the natural fragging of the stubborn lieutenant, for example. Arithmetically, he has to be eliminated; it's a number of lives thing. On the other hand, he has clearly shown sympathy outside the group. If O'Brien has anything against the Cong, he doesn't show it here. He doesn't seem to understand them as a political unit, but perhaps that's because he's writing out of a POV strongly tied to Paul Berlin.
Still, Paul's neutral treatment of unmotivated wholesale murder rankles, and his "We weren't duped" sort of reflections smack suspiciously of an authorial summation, and a sour one at that, as though O'Brien may find himself reluctant to acknowledge that he himself sacrificed for a political manoevre involving massive murder and vandalism that was motivated by something very different than loyalty to his small group of friends.
But I suppose it's Cacciato himself that poses such questions, though mutely. Perhaps O'Brien makes some judgment on the larger political motivations like ideology, greed, and powerlust by so resolutely ignoring them. But I can't help but feel that O'Brien or someone might have woven one other level of sense into all this, as engaging as it is already.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Post Labels
We should probably take advantage of the post labelling feature at the bottom right of the text-field in which one enters new posts (where it says "Labels for this post:"). This would eventually give us an indexed set of posts -- possibly a useful feature in a few months, if the posts build up.
Tom's Goals & Recent Readings
Howdy,
I'm planning on taking my PhD qualification exams in August. I have my three lists approved. My major is 19th Century American and I have minors in 20th Century American and Film Studies.
I'm in pretty good shape with my 19th list but I need to read quite a bit in the 20th list. I try to mix it up a bit and read from different lists each week. I'm putting off my film list, though, because, frankly, the dissertation committee probably won't grill me very hard on it (they aren't film scholars) and I already have a very good foundation in film with my Master's degree.
I just finished Tim O'Brien's Going After Caccciato today. It's considered one of the best books about the Vietnam War. Think of it as sort of a very perverse version of Saving Private Ryan. "Cacciato" is Italian for "chase" and after Private Cacciato goes AWOL his platoon is sent after him. They soon realize that Cacciato's destination is Paris, France, and after they follow him into Laos, the question haunts them the rest of the trip as to whether or not they are deserters as well.
Strong allusion to Lewis Carrol with the platoon falling down the rabbit hole and then back out of it. Strong allusions to Herman Melville's Moby Dick (Cacciato serving as the whale).
The protagonist is another young man, Paul Berlin, an Iowa farm boy who almost completed college (studies in History & English) but dropped out just in time to get drafted. Paul sometimes thinks back to a moment when he was in Indian Guides and got lost in the woods...parallel to being "lost" in his present role as soldier.
<<>>>
...it turns out that the entire adventure is playing out in Berlin's mind as he is doing guard duty...
<<>>
If anyone wants to discuss Cacciato, I'm up for it. Otherwise, I'm moving on to read William Dean Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham.
~ Tom
I'm planning on taking my PhD qualification exams in August. I have my three lists approved. My major is 19th Century American and I have minors in 20th Century American and Film Studies.
I'm in pretty good shape with my 19th list but I need to read quite a bit in the 20th list. I try to mix it up a bit and read from different lists each week. I'm putting off my film list, though, because, frankly, the dissertation committee probably won't grill me very hard on it (they aren't film scholars) and I already have a very good foundation in film with my Master's degree.
I just finished Tim O'Brien's Going After Caccciato today. It's considered one of the best books about the Vietnam War. Think of it as sort of a very perverse version of Saving Private Ryan. "Cacciato" is Italian for "chase" and after Private Cacciato goes AWOL his platoon is sent after him. They soon realize that Cacciato's destination is Paris, France, and after they follow him into Laos, the question haunts them the rest of the trip as to whether or not they are deserters as well.
Strong allusion to Lewis Carrol with the platoon falling down the rabbit hole and then back out of it. Strong allusions to Herman Melville's Moby Dick (Cacciato serving as the whale).
The protagonist is another young man, Paul Berlin, an Iowa farm boy who almost completed college (studies in History & English) but dropped out just in time to get drafted. Paul sometimes thinks back to a moment when he was in Indian Guides and got lost in the woods...parallel to being "lost" in his present role as soldier.
<<
...it turns out that the entire adventure is playing out in Berlin's mind as he is doing guard duty...
<<
If anyone wants to discuss Cacciato, I'm up for it. Otherwise, I'm moving on to read William Dean Howell's The Rise of Silas Lapham.
~ Tom
Sunday, March 11, 2007
(For all) Intents and Purposes
I hope to introduce a bit community into my readings by opening this as a forum for virtual discussion. The readings for PhD candidates at CGU will determine my own reading agenda until about January of '08, but other literatures remain of interest.
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