Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 126

October 2-3, 2021: September 2021 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

August 30: Fall Semester Previews: First Year Experience Seminar: A semester preview series kicks off with what I’m most excited for with a class I’m teaching for the first time.

August 31: Fall Semester Previews: Honors Lit Seminar: The series continues with two reasons why I keep returning to one of my oldest scholarly and pedagogical subjects, the Gilded Age.

September 1: Fall Semester Previews: English Studies Capstone: Why I’ve added a new reading, Kevin Gannon’s wonderful Radical Hope, to my Capstone course, as the series rolls on.

September 2: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit II Online: Something I’m excited to try for the first time in my newest all-online class.

September 3: Fall Semester Previews: Adult Learning Course on the 1920s: The series concludes with the still-evolving topics of my newest adult learning course.

September 4-5: Fall Semester Previews: Book Plans: But wait, there’s more this Fall—what I’m most excited about with my most recent and next book projects!

September 6: PageantStudying: Miss America’s Origins: For Miss America’s 100thanniversary, a pageant series kicks off with two contexts for that 1921 origin point.

September 7: PageantStudying: Vanessa Williams: The series continues with what’s deeply frustrating about a 1980s scandal, and how its subject has transcended that moment nonetheless.

September 8: PageantStudying: American Pastoral: A seemingly superficial but strikingly symbolic fictional character, as the series rolls on.

September 9: PageantStudying: Trump: Two uncomfortable pageant realities that the Former Occupant helps us confront.

September 10: PageantStudying: Santana Jayde Young Man Afraid of His Horses: The series concludes with a young tribal emissary who embodies the best of 21stcentury pageants and activism.

September 11-12: Tanya Roth’s Guest Post on “The Real Miss America”: My newest Guest Post, an excerpt from Tanya’s just-released book!

September 13: Domestic Terrorism: The KKK: A 9/11 series on domestic terrorism kicks off with two under-remembered stages to our oldest domestic terrorist organization.

September 14: Domestic Terrorism: The Weathermen: The series continues with the difficulty, and importance, of writing about domestic terrorists with whose ideologies we agree.

September 15: Domestic Terrorism: McVeigh and Militias: How to see the Oklahoma City bomber as a “lone wolf” and why it’s important not to, as the series rolls on.

September 16: Domestic Terrorism: Edward Abbey and Environmental Terrorism: Three distinct and contrasting ways to contribute to environmental activism.

September 17: Domestic Terrorism: Cultural Representations: The series concludes with three cultural texts that reflect three different visions of domestic terrorists.

September 18-19: Domestic Terrorism: 9/11 and 1/6: A special weekend post on what distinguishes and what connects the two most prominent 21st century terrorist attacks on the US.

September 20: American Modernists: Antin and Yezierska: For Fitzgerald’s 125thbirthday, a series on American Modernists kicks off with two compelling Jewish American authors and books.

September 21: American Modernists: Nella Larsen: The series continues with the frustratingly brief but potent career of a Harlem Renaissance author.

September 22: American Modernists: The Black Mountain Poets: How context can amplify and enrich our analysis of individual authors and works, as the series writes on.

September 23: American Modernists: Dos Passos and Wright: Two strikingly parallel but importantly divergent 1930s to 50s American Modernist careers and arcs.

September 24: American Modernists: F. Scott Fitzgerald: For his 125thbirthday, the series concludes with a short story that can help us start reading Fitzgerald beyond Gatsby.

September 27: NEASA Guest Posts: Elif Armbruster: Following up the weekend’s NEASA Colloquium, a series on great NEASA Guest Posts (and friends) starts with Elif on gender, food, and fiction.

September 28: NEASA Guest Posts: Akeia Benard: The series continues with Akeia on her role as the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Curator of Social History.

September 29: NEASA Guest Posts: Nancy Caronia: Nancy’s great Guest Post on Italian Americans and Columbus Day, as the series guests on.

September 30: NEASA Guest Posts: Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello: Liz on her inspiring work on and in Salem communities!

October 1: NEASA Guest Posts: Jonathan Silverman: And the series concludes with Jonathan’s prescient 2016 Guest Post on how to be the American President.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

October 1, 2021: NEASA Guest Posts: Jonathan Silverman

[This past weekend was the 10th annual New England American Studies Association Colloquium, an event I founded a decade ago to share the voices and work of my awesome NEASA colleagues. I’ve also been able to do that in this space, so this week I’ll link to five great Guest Posts by folks I’ve met through NEASA!]

Jonathan Silverman is the only other brave soul who has served two terms as NEASA President, which would be more than enough to make me a fan. But he also wrote the best book out there on Johnny Cash, is an all-around awesome dude, and contributed this funny and wise August 2016 Guest Post on how to be the American President.

September Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. Colleagues or voices you’d share?

September 30, 2021: NEASA Guest Posts: Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello

[This past weekend was the 10th annual New England American Studies Association Colloquium, an event I founded a decade ago to share the voices and work of my awesome NEASA colleagues. I’ve also been able to do that in this space, so this week I’ll link to five great Guest Posts by folks I’ve met through NEASA!]

I initially met Liz Duclos-Orsello while planning the 2012 NEASA Colloquium at Salem’s House of the Seven Gables, a site which (like everything in Salem) has benefitted immensely from Liz’s perspective and work. She’s honestly one of the most exemplary AmericanStudiers I’ve ever met, and I was honored to share this February 2014 Guest Post on Salem, community, and more.

Last Guest Post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Colleagues or voices you’d share?

September 29, 2021: NEASA Guest Posts: Nancy Caronia

[This past weekend was the 10th annual New England American Studies Association Colloquium, an event I founded a decade ago to share the voices and work of my awesome NEASA colleagues. I’ve also been able to do that in this space, so this week I’ll link to five great Guest Posts by folks I’ve met through NEASA!]

I first met Nancy Caronia through NEASA, but we’ve gone on to work together in multiple settings, from NeMLA conferences to the URI Diversity week. She’s one of the best teachers and people I know, and her October 2017 Guest Post on Columbus Day and Italian Americans remains one of my favorites.

Next Guest Post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Colleagues or voices you’d share?

September 28, 2021: NEASA Guest Posts: Akeia Benard

[This past weekend was the 10th annual New England American Studies Association Colloquium, an event I founded a decade ago to share the voices and work of my awesome NEASA colleagues. I’ve also been able to do that in this space, so this week I’ll link to five great Guest Posts by folks I’ve met through NEASA!]

Like yesterday’s subject Elif Armbruster, Akeia Benard was one of the folks who followed me as NEASA President and helped keep the organization moving forward so successfully. She’s since moved on to a wonderful new job as the Curator of Social History for the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the role in which she wrote this October 2018 Guest Post.

Next Guest Post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Colleagues or voices you’d share?

September 27, 2021: NEASA Guest Posts: Elif Armbruster

[This past weekend was the 10th annual New England American Studies Association Colloquium, an event I founded a decade ago to share the voices and work of my awesome NEASA colleagues. I’ve also been able to do that in this space, so this week I’ll link to five great Guest Posts by folks I’ve met through NEASA!]

Elif Armbruster was one of the first connections I made through NEASA, and more than a decade later I’m proud to say she’s still a friend as well as an AmericanStudying colleague. Her January 2013 Guest Post was entitled “From Laura Esquivel to Suzan Colon: Food and Female Identity in Fact and Fiction.”

Next Guest Post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Colleagues or voices you’d share?

September 24, 2021: American Modernists: F. Scott Fitzgerald

[September 24this F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On a short story that can help us revisit and revise our overly familiar narratives of a famous Modernist author.

I tried in this post to make the case for why, to my mind, The Great Gatsby is overrated—not bad by any means, but not anywhere close to the Great American Novel either. That might seem like a funny present with which to begin a happy 125th birthday post, but I would actually argue the opposite: that it’s to Fitzgerald’s disadvantage that he’s become so closely associated with this one novel and character. I mean, not in every way; obviously no author would pass up having a book ranked as the 2ndgreatest novel of the 20th century, for example. But beyond the ways in which such close associations of an author with one work always limit our narratives and images of that author (and they really always do), in this particular case I think the problem is exacerbated by the not insignificant fact that Gatsby is the superficial asshole, obsessed with another superficial asshole, about whom I wrote in that hyperlinked post. Fitzgerald and his novelist-narrator Nick do an excellent job beautifying that dude and that obsession, to be sure, but at the end of the day I’m really not convinced that Gatsby was worth the whole damn bunch of them together—and I’m definitely convinced that linking F. Scott Fitzgerald too fully to this one novel does him no favors.

Luckily, there’s a very easy answer to that problem, which is to read one (or ideally all, but one’s a good start) of the many other complicated and compelling books and stories that Fitzgerald wrote across his 15-year publishing career. My personal favorite is probably the short story that I highlighted briefly in this post, “Babylon Revisited” (1931). For one thing, the six years between Gatsby and “Babylon” are so important to the depth and success of the latter story—not just because it’s written and set during the Great Depression, and so can flashback self-reflectively and thoughtfully to the Roaring ‘20s rather than being so consumed by the superficial excesses of that moment (as at times Gatsby certainly is, such as the multi-paragraph descriptions of Gatsby’s utterly meaningless parties); but also because for this reader at least Fitzgerald’s style had grown and deepened substantially over those six years, with the result being that “Babylon” complements the unquestionable beauty of Gatsby’s prose with many more layers of complex human identity than Nick can give his focal characters in that novel. (Another reason why the association of Fitzgerald with Gatsby is problematic—it was a pretty early text! Give the man space to grow!)

Perhaps the most telling such human layer to “Babylon” and its protagonist Charlie Wales is an emotion that is undoubtedly a factor of that time shift but also seems largely absent from most of Gatsby’s characters: regret. Toward the end of the novel Nick critiques Tom and Daisy Buchanan as people who cause messes and then leave others to deal with the consequences, but I’d say the same for pretty much all of the novel’s characters—I’m not sure any of the main characters spare a second thought for example for Myrtle Wilson, the most direct casualty (among a few!) of Gatsby’s and Daisy’s and Tom’s (and Nick’s) actions. Charlie, on the other hand, is consumed by regret, forced to deal day in and day out with the consequences of his actions during that decade of Roaring 20s excesses and errors—consequences that have most fully affected and limited his relationship to his daughter (which we might compare for example to Daisy and her young daughter, whom we see and hear about precisely once in the entirety of Gatsby). That emotion, those struggles, that relationship are all more profound and more powerfully human than any of the superficial games played by the novel’s characters, and they remind us of just what this Modernist author was capable of. For his 125th, let’s agree to start reading him beyond that most famous book, okay?

Crowd-sourced post this weekend,

Ben

PS. So one more time: what do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for the weekend post?

September 23, 2021: American Modernists: Dos Passos and Wright

[September 24this F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two strikingly parallel yet also importantly distinct 1930s to ‘50s Modernist arcs.

Despite our longstanding collective national antagonism toward communism, one that precedes the Cold War but of course was greatly amplified during that half-century of global conflict, there have nonetheless been both moments and communities in which the political philosophy has had substantially broader and deeper appeal. In the 1930s, two such factors came together to help produce a sizeable and vocal cohort of Modernist American writers and intellectuals who embraced communism: the Depression’s heightening of wealth inequalities and social stratification seemed to highlight the limitations and even destructive capabilities of unchecked capitalism; and those economic woes, coupled with the continued destructive forces of segregation, lynching, and other communal ills and threats, led many African Americans similarly to seek an alternative to the dominant American systems.

Those responses happened within multiple communities, but they can be succinctly illustrated by two individuals, Modernist writers whose most significant novels bookend the 1930s in American literature and culture. John Dos Passos had been publishing fiction since the mid-1920s, but it was the trilogy that came to be collected as U.S.A. (1938)—The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)—that exemplified both his stylistic experimentation and his socialistic philosophies. Richard Wright launched his career with the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) but truly entered the literary stratosphere two years later with Native Son (1940), a novel that features both one of American literature’s most eloquent defenders of communism (in the lawyer Max) and a character (protagonist Bigger Thomas) whose tragic and brutal arc makes numerous, ineloquent but compelling arguments for the philosophy.

In the 1940s to 50s, both writers famously broke with those philosophies and with the Communist Party: Wright in one pivotal moment, the essay “I Tried to Be a Communist” (1944); and Dos Passos more gradually, in a series of public statements and positions that culminated in his qualified support for Joseph McCarthy (among other turning points). Yet I would also argue that their shifts represent two quite distinct personal and national narratives in the post-Modernist era: Dos Passos genuinely seemed, in response to World War II, the Cold War, and other factors, to change in his political and social perspectives; whereas to my mind Wright’s perspectives remained largely unchanged, and he came instead to see, as does for example Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the Communist Party as an imperfect and indeed failed vehicle through which to seek such political and social change. Such a distinction would of course become even more important in the 1960s, when a new generation of African American activists found anew a compelling alternative in American socialism.

Fitzgerald post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for the weekend post?

September 22, 2021: American Modernists: The Black Mountain Poets

[September 24this F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On how context can amplify and enrich our analysis of individual authors and works.

I had a high school English teacher who really liked Robert Creeley, so we read a fair amount of his work as part of a poetry unit; I then read a good bit more Creeley as part of a college poetry course with the great Helen Vendler; and I returned to Creeley one more time as a supplemental author for a grad school paper I was writing on Robert Penn Warren’s poetry. I was of course a very different person and reader at each of those stages, but one thing remained the same: Creeley’s poetry did very little for me. I appreciated his potent, imagistic use of language, which reminded me a bit of William Carlos Williams; but for whatever reason, the depths that I have consistently found and appreciated in Williams’ poems eluded me when I read Creeley’s at each of those different moments.

My perspective on Creeley and his poetry has significantly evolved, however, and it has done so in large part through a better understanding of his principal literary and cultural communities: the Black Mountain Poets, and Asheville, NC’s Black Mountain College where they were located. It generally helps to have a sense of what goals and concepts infuse a poet’s work, for example, and reading Charles Olson’s seminal essay “Projective Verse” (1950), widely considered a manifesto for the Black Mountain Poets, gave me a much clearer sense of the use to which Creeley and his colleagues hoped to put their striking images. Olson writes of “Objectism, … a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it.” A distinctly Appalachian as well as Modernist analogy to be sure, and one borne out by the careful shaping of Creeley and his peers.

Yet Black Mountain Collegewas more than just home to this group of avant-garde poets; over its 23 years of existence (1933-1956), the experimental educational institution featured instruction from (among many others!) Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Duncan, and Olson and Creeley, as well as guest lectures by William Carlos Williams and a certain physicist by the name of Albert Einstein. The College’s influence on Modernist and Postmodernist American culture, as well as on society more broadly, was profound and lasting, and the Black Mountain Poets represent only one part of those widespread effects. But they were a part of it, and it a part of them--and the more we can see Creeley and his fellow poets as operating within that experimental, artistic but also social and educational, southern Appalachian space, the more we (no, I’ll speak for myself, the more I) can appreciate their Modernist and important works.

Next Modernists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for the weekend post?

September 21, 2021: American Modernists: Nella Larsen

[September 24this F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 125th birthday! So in honor of that quintessential Modernist author, this week I’ll AmericanStudy him and a handful of other exemplary such writers. Share your thoughts on any of them, and any other Modernist authors and texts you’d highlight, for an experimental crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On the brief but potent and important career of a Harlem Renaissance writer.

There are lots of different kinds of undeservedly forgotten or obscure writers—from those who published for decades without ever quite achieving the success that they deserved, as did personal favorite Charles Chesnutt; to those who were tremendously influential in their own era but should be better remembered and read in our own, as I argued in this post about Theodore Dreiser (and specifically Sister Carrie)—but to my mind the most mysterious and compelling are those with very short yet very successful careers, the writers who publish one or two great books and then vanish. Part of what makes those cases especially interesting are the aspects of their authors’ identities that contributed to their meteoric rise and fall, aspects that often appear in their fictional texts as well; and part is simply the opportunity that they present for focused attention, the way in which all that they had to say (or got to say, anyway) is to be found in an impressive work or two. And that’s definitely the case with the meteoric, mysterious, and compelling literary career of African American nurse, activist, and Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen.

Larsen was born in 1891 and died in 1964, which means that her life began at what has been called the nadir of African American existence, just before the height of the lynching epidemic and the Supreme Court’s endorsement of Jim Crow segregation, spanned the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance (and Larsen herself moved to New York City in 1914 to attend nursing school and lived there for much of her life), and ended with the Civil Rights movement in full swing. She also attended historically black Fisk University for two years, worked for a time at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, and married Elmer Imes, the second African American to receive a PhD in Physics. Yet alongside that roster of links between Larsen and the broader African American community must be put some other, far from simple facts of her identity: that her mother was a Danish immigrant and her father an African Caribbean immigrant from St. Croix who abandoned her (and her mother) at a young age; that she took the surname Larsen from her mother’s Scandinavian second husband; and that she spent a few of her formative years in Denmark with maternal relatives. Since Larsen lived in almost total obscurity for more than 65 of her 72 years, it is nearly impossible to know with any certainty what any of these experiences and heritages meant for her perspective and identity (although biographers have worked hardto ascertain what can be known); what we do have instead are the two unique and profoundly American (in every sense) Modernist novels, Quicksand(1928) and Passing(1929), that constitute her literary identity and legacy very fully and successfully.

I teach both novels in my second-half American literature survey (they’re both very short, really novellas), and their differences make for an interesting and productive pairing. Quicksand is extremely autobiographical, focusing very intimately on the identity and perspective of its protagonist Helga Crane, a half-Danish half-West Indian young woman who moves between the South, New York, and Denmark in search of home, community, romantic connection, and self. Passing is a multi-character study of that titular and very complex racial topic, focusing in particular on two light-skinned African American women and childhood friends (Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry) who have made drastically different life choices (Clare has passed and married a racist white businessman who does not know her racial heritage, Irene has not passed and married a race-obsessed black doctor) and yet whose lives and trajectories intersect fully and tragically in the novella’s events. While both thus likely reveal different aspects of Larsen’s own identity and perspective, the elements that they share are just as significant: a lyrical and powerful style; an extremely impressive ability to create and communicate the perspectives through which the stories are told (Helga and Irene, respectively); and an effortless but crucial concurrent skill at constructing the communities (from a Southern black school to a Harlem party, a whites-only Chicago rooftop restaurant to a fundamentalist black church, and many others) through which these and many other rich and three-dimensional characters move. There are plenty of complex issues to keep literary critics (and survey class students) busy, including central focuses on gender and sexuality, but both books are also and just as importantly readable and engaging stories.

Larsen was (falsely, it seems) accused of plagiarism in regard to the short story, “Sanctuary” (1930), with which she followed Passing, and those accusations along with the failure of her marriage seem to have combined to drive her both to Europe for a time and away from writing (and back to nursing) for the remainder of her life. Reading these two novels is thus, again, partly a way into a long and complex American life, one that connects to a great many historical and cultural issues and changes and to which we would otherwise have precious little access. But it’s also a chance to discover a Modernist writer who can speak to questions of identity and community, of the searches for self and home, that cut across any culture or period and cut to the heart of what defines all of our American lives. For all those reasons, Larsen has been passed by for long enough. Next Modernists tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Thoughts on these authors and texts, or any other Modernist ones, for the weekend post?