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April 17, 2018: NeMLA Recaps: West of Sunset and Historical Fiction

[This past weekend was the 2018 Northeast MLA convention in Pittsburgh. It was a great time as usual, and this week I’ll highlight some standout moments and conversations. Leading up to a weekend post on how you can get involved in this great organization!]On two takeaways from our inspiring opening night creative event.As illustrated by Monique Truong’s opening night reading at my 2016 Hartford convention, NeMLA has featured an impressive opening night creative writer and event for many years. But beginning with this year’s convention and going forward we’re trying something different: “NeMLA Reads Together,” where all attendees are asked to read a particular creative work (for the 2019 Conventionin Washington, DC it’ll be Imbolu Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, of which we handed out free copies at Sunday’s membership brunch!) and then we invite the author for that opening night event. Our first text was Stewart O’Nan’s wonderful historical novel West of Sunset (2015), an account of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s challenging and compelling final years of life working as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and for Thursday night’s opening event our NeMLA Board member Christina Milletti masterfully interviewed O’Nan about his book and many other topics. O’Nan’s as talented and engaging of a storyteller as you would expect if you’ve read any of his books, and the entire event was both fun and thought-provoking. But I would highlight two particular takeaways about historical fiction as a genre and what it can help us see and understand. Anyone who’s read this blog (or my latest book) knows that I’m a big historical fiction fan, and especially that I believe it can help us engage with the past at least as fully and meaningfully as any non-fictional genre or educational setting can. In describing his own historical subjects, O’Nan very clearly laid out one of the main reasons for that possibility: that historical fiction can investigate and portray histories and stories for which there simply aren’t enough documentary evidence for other genres to engage. In his final Hollywood years, Fitzgerald was living in the same apartment complex as both Dorothy Parker (with whom he had had a previous romantic affair) and Humphrey Bogart, but relatively little is known for certain about their interactions during this time period. That might limit historians or biographers, but it offers instead an opportunity for O’Nan, and he takes advantage of it to craft portrayals of Parker and Bogart (among many others) that to my mind are both true to the details of these figures and help us consider their identities in historical, cultural, and contemporary contexts.I would also argue that the O’Nan event offers a potent lesson for those (like me) working to produce public scholarship that engages American readers and contributes to our collective conversations. O’Nan’s wonderful skill as a storyteller doesn’t just reflect his fictional talents or make for good listening during a conference event (although yes on both counts); it also and crucially draws us in to nuanced biographical, cultural, and historical topics and questions. In the course of the interview O’Nan discussed such difficult and thorny topics as Fitzgerald’s alcoholism, his wife Zelda’s bipolar disorder, and gender images and limitations in early 20thcentury Hollywood and America. His emphasis on storytelling didn’t in any way minimize or make light of these challenging topics; quite the opposite, it allowed him to draw us into their details and specifics, a vital first step in any sustained engagement with any such topics or their broader contexts and meanings. For too long, scholarly writing was generally seen as antithetical to (or at least entirely distinct from) narrative or storytelling; I believe that those attitudes are shifting, that we’re collectively beginning to recognize the vital role that story plays in connecting to and engaging audiences, and that had certainly better be the case. As O’Nan proved, stories are a crucial part of connecting audiences to any and all histories.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. NeMLA responses or thoughts? Other organizations or conferences you’d highlight?

April 16, 2018: NeMLA Recaps: Back to the Board

[This past weekend was the 2018 Northeast MLA convention in Pittsburgh. It was a great time as usual, and this week I’ll highlight some standout moments and conversations. Leading up to a weekend post on how you can get involved in this great organization!]On two categories of reasons why I’ve rejoined the NeMLA Board.As longtime readers of this blog know, much of my last half-dozen years has been spent as part of the NeMLA Executive Board, leading up to my year as President presiding over the 2016 convention in Hartford. That service ended with the 2017 convention in Baltimore, the conclusion of my year as the organization’s Past President. While I knew that I’d want to stay connected to this organization that has meant so much to me, not only for these recent years but for well more than a decade of conferences and experiences, I was quite sure my time as part of the NeMLA leadership had ended. Yet this fall I found myself running for the position of American Literature Director (to succeed my friend and colleague John Casey, who has done exceptional work with this position and area since 2015), and a couple months ago I was fortunate enough to win that election and as of this past weekend am now the next NeMLA American Lit Director.Despite my passive voice “found myself” construction above, this was of course a choice of mine, and not one I made lightly given my general schedule craziness. If I’m being honest, the constellation of motivations at the top of the list are relatively selfish ones: NeMLA and the NeMLA Board are two of my all-time favorite academic communities, and I was genuinely sad to be leaving them and jumped at the chance to rejoin. As I wrote in this goodbye post (which now reads like a statement from one of those musicians who “retire” from touring only to be back out on the road a year later, but so it goes!), it’s rare to find such a professional community, and I would encourage everyone who does so to work hard to remain connected to it. To that end, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that whatever the time and schedule commitments and obligations, keeping that connection with the NeMLA Board going would offer me far more benefits than challenges. That’s my number one question about any schedule additions, now and going forward, and when I find ones that definitively contribute more than they take, I’m very likely to choose to pursue them.There’s another big category of motivations behind this choice, though, and I’d classify them generally as “unfinished business.” During my years on the Board, I worked hard to bring a number of issues more fully into NeMLA’s conventions and conversations: adjunct faculty and issues of labor in higher ed; public scholarship and what organizations like NeMLA can and should do in our society; connections between academic conversations and public education; and relationships of academic conferences to local communities, among others. While the American Literature Director position has a number of specific responsibilities that will be my primary focus for each year’s convention—overseeing the selection of panels and roundtables within this area; finding Special Events speakers; connecting to historic and cultural sites in our host cities—I fully intend to find ways to continue those earlier efforts through this new role. I don’t wish I knew how to quit NeMLA (no more than Jake really wanted to quit Heath), and I’m very excited to see where this next chapter in the connection takes me.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. NeMLA responses or thoughts? Other organizations or conferences you’d highlight?

April 14-15, 2018: Great American Novel Studying: Recent Contenders

[On April 10th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Gatsby and other contenders for the elusive Great American Novel crown, leading up to this special weekend post on some recent contenders!]Five recent novels that stake their claim to the title of Great American Novel.1)      Behold the Dreamers (2016): Imbolo Mbue’s stunning debut novel is a historical novel about the 2008 financial crisis and recession, a multi-generational immigrant saga of a young family from Cameroon, a novel of manners about class and inequality in contemporary New York, a bittersweet romance, and a moving depiction of the promise and limits of the American Dream. Among other things!2)      Lovecraft Country (2016): It might be enough just to note that Jordan Peele’s first project after his Oscar-winning Get Out will be to produce an adaptation of Matt Ruff’s supernatural historical novel for HBO. But if I need to say more, I’ll note that Ruff’s gripping page-turner combines John Bellairs and Ralph Ellison, among many other influences (including of course the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft and his peers), to produce something entirely new. Some critics might argue that genre fiction can’t also compete for the Great American Novel crown; those critics would be wrong, as Ruff illustrates perfectly.3)      Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017): I’m not gonna lie, I haven’t yet had a chance to read Jesmyn Ward’s acclaimed new novel. So I won’t pretend otherwise or say too much here, other than that anything Ward writes is to my mind an automatic contender for any and all accolades, and that from everything I’ve read Sing takes her talents to one more level still. You’ll be the first to hear when I do get to check it out, dear readers!4)      The Sympathizer (2015): As Philip Caputo (one of our foremost authorities on the Vietnam War) argues in that hyperlinked NYT review, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel offers a strikingly new lens through which to read Vietnam (in relationship to the United States and the world, and on its own complex terms). That’d be enough all by itself to make this a crucial and great American novel. But Nguyen’s book is also funny and moving, engaging and challenging, and utterly unique from start to finish.5)      What is the What (2006): I know I’m stretching the meaning of “recent” a bit with this one, but I don’t believe Dave Eggers’s novel has gotten the attention it deserves. Perhaps that’s because of its unsettling genre ambiguity: Eggers’s book is defined as a novel, but is written in the first-person voice of a real person, former Lost Boy of Sudan Valentino Achak Deng (just to add to the ambiguities, the book’s subtitle is The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng). I get the potential landmines of those choices, but to this reader the blurrings of genre and voice are part and parcel of this book’s unique identity and greatness, and its engagement with some of the most pressing 21stcentury issues (refugees and international crises, cross-cultural identities, war and violence, history and hope). Like all these contenders, at the very least What deserves to be read and responded to by as many American readers as possible!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other nominees for the GAN, recent or otherwise?

April 13, 2018: Great American Novel Studying: Endings

[On April 10th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Gatsby and other contenders for the elusive Great American Novel crown, leading up to a special weekend post on some recent contenders!]On endings, happy, sad, and perfect.For purposes of syllabus structure and helping us move through 150 years of texts and their contexts, I break my American Novel to 1950 class up into three sections: Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. Such categorizations are, as always, at least somewhat forced and inexact: for example, my first Romantic text, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), pretty clearly fits (Hawthorne identifies his novel as a Romance in his famous Preface); while my second, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), is a lot trickier to connect to that genre or movement and certainly relates just as closely to realism and its various sub-genres such as local color/regionalism. But the categories help the students think about that very question (how we categorize and define novels and their genres)—and, as I was reminded when I taught the course in the Fall 2014 semester, they also can help me come to new ideas about these works I’ve read and taught many times.The new idea that struck me most forcefully during that semester has to do with the novels’ endings (long a subject of literary critical investigation). Despite their many differences, both of those Romantic novels come to strikingly and (to this reader, and to many students as well) frustratingly happy endings, too-neat resolutions that tie up virtually all their historical, social, and thematic conflicts and send their protagonists off into a feel-good future. Similarly, despite their own significant differences, both of our Realistic novels (Chopin’s The Awakening and Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky) end on far more negative and even tragic notes, their protagonists feeling hopelessly pessimistic about not only their futures but their very identities (the last book of Cahan’s novel is titled “Episodes of a Lonely Life,” which could describe Chopin’s culmating section as well). And it seems to me that these respective kinds of endings are at least somewhat necessary for these two genres, and thus that one way to make sense of Twain’s notoriously controversial ending is to see it as a retreat into the more Romantic aspects of a novel that has featured plenty of realistic elements as well.Perhaps it’s because I had been thinking about these questions of endings throughout our first two units; but in any case, when we got to our fifth novel and first Modernist text, Cather’s My Antonia (1918), I was even more affected by its ending, which I have long found to be among the most beautiful in American literature. On the one hand, the ending’s lyrical description of her novel’s Nebraska setting echoes multiple moments from throughout the text, especially those located at or near the end of its structuring Books (including Book II’s famous plough and sun description). But on another, the ending’s true power depends on where we, along with our narrator Jim Burden and his lifelong friend Antonia Shimerda, have arrived; it’s a moment defined equally for me, as is Jim’s appreciation of the Nebraska landscape, by a Romantic temperament and a Realistic subject, by the intimate details of Antonia’s life as an immigrant on the frontier and by the sweeping lens of Jim’s love and admiration for her. Perhaps this ending’s perfection, that is, is due to its combination of categories—a combination that, like Antonia’s story, feels particularly American.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other nominees for the GAN?

April 12, 2018: Great American Novel Studying: Ceremony

[On April 10th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Gatsby and other contenders for the elusive Great American Novel crown, leading up to a special weekend post on some recent contenders!][FYI: this post will be spoiling the heck out of the climax to its focal text, Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977). If you haven’t read it, well, go do so ASAP and then meet me back here!]On the climactic decision and its aftermath that together exemplify everything I love about America and American literature.There are lots of reasons why we read fiction: to see aspects of our identities reflected yet also to connect to experiences and lives different from our own; to learn about dark and painful realities yet also to be inspired by what can be; to be entertained and comforted yet also to be challenged and forced to grow; to remember and to imagine; and so many more. When I think about the American novels that I’d put at the top of my list—an ever-changing category, but certainly including The Marrow of Tradition ; The Awakening ; My Ántonia ; Absalom, Absalom !; and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao —what tends to link them is that they achieve many of these goals and effects. And I’m not sure any American novel comes closer to achieving all of them than Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), a work both specific to its worlds and contexts (Laguna Pueblo Native American culture, World War II veteran experiences, the Southwest United States) and universally relevant, both traditional and postmodern, both historical and supernatural, both tragic and inspiring.Every element and moment of Silko’s novel contributes to those aspects and effects, but I’d say they all coalesce in one climactic and amazing three-page section. As I wrote in this post, the section begins with the protagonist, Tayo, making a utopian choice: faced with a situation in which it’s practically impossible for him not to respond with violence (particularly since he has done so in an parallel yet not as extreme earlier moment), Tayo instead courageously resists that impulse, and the forces of evil, prejudice, and destruction (within his community, nationally, and spiritually) that lie behind it. Having done so, he comes over the next two pages to a series of powerful and crucial epiphanies and revelations: about history and heritage, his family and his identity, the reservation and the nation, his long-lost mother and his own life and future, about, in short, every central character, setting, and theme in the novel. I’ve taught Silko’s novel at least ten separate times now, and I’ll freely admit to getting choked up each and every time I read this section. It’s a beautiful and powerful moment on many levels, but I suppose if I had to boil it down, I would do so through a quote from another inspiring American scene in a work I love: President Andrew Shepherd’s climactic speech in The American President (1995). The speech is full of great lines, but I’m thinking specifically of this one: “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ‘cause it’s gonna put up a fight.” To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest that Tayo, or any Native American, has to “earn” his or her American citizenship any more fully than any of the rest of us. Quite the opposite, I’d say that Tayo here exemplifies a concept both Shepherd and I would apply to all Americans: that if we hope to reach our ideals, our best selves—as individuals, as communities, and as a nation—well, to quote my favorite line from this section in Silko’s novel, “The only thing is: it has never been easy.” It’s far easier to give in to the worst of what we have been or can be, whether that means meeting violence and hate with the same, getting cynical and pessimistic about the future, settling for far less than we can be, or any other understandable but limiting and ultimately destructive choice. But as Tayo and Silko demonstrate in this amazing section, the hard way is the better, and the American, way.Last novels tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other nominees for the GAN?

April 11, 2018: Great American Novel Studying: The Marrow of Tradition

[On April 10th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Gatsby and other contenders for the elusive Great American Novel crown, leading up to a special weekend post on some recent contenders!]On a character whose presence and absence both reflect a novel’s greatness.I’ve written a great deal in this space about my favorite American novel, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition(1901). I mean it, a great deal. Like, a ton. Seriously. All of those posts help make the case for Marrow’s greatness, so I’ll cut this paragraph short in honor of all the reading I’m already asking you to do here!Welcome back! Today I want to highlight another layer to Marrow’s greatness: the minor character Lee Ellis. A young white journalist who works for the Morning Chronicle (the white supremacist newspaper edited by the novel’s white protagonist, Major Philip Carteret), and one leg of the novel’s love triangle plot, Ellis reflects the truly multi-faceted complexity and humanity that Chesnutt brings to every character in his fictional town of Wellington, North Carolina. In only a handful of moments and chapters, we learn about Ellis’s Quaker background in a small Southern town, and what that means for his perspective on issues such as race, segregation, and lynching; about his code of personal and civic ethics and how it informs his actions in both romantic and homosocial settings; and about the limits to this character’s inspiring and even idealized perspective and identity, especially when faced with the horrors of the novel’s climactic, historical violence. All of those layers and complexities could make Ellis a compelling protagonist for many historical novels, but Chesnutt dispenses with them in a handful of perfectly-wrought scenes.And that relative absence, even more than his compelling presence, is what makes Ellis emblematic of Marrow’s greatness. First of all, it reflects Chesnutt’s willingness to take the character most likely to elicit a progressive white reader’s sympathies and generally sideline him, especially in a climactic section that quite simply refuses to give audiences any easy answers. And second of all, Ellis’s relative absence reflects the novel’s central focus (in the sections focused on white characters, at least) on Philip Carteret and his wife Olivia, both of whom are far less sympathetic, far more linked to overt white supremacy (in Philip’s case) or blatant bigotry and prejudice (in Olivia’s), and yet imbued with the same multi-layered humanity that Chesnutt brings to all his characters. American historical fiction is full of characters like Lee Ellis, embodying as he does Georg Lukács’s concept of the “middle-of-the-road hero” in historical novels; I know of few historical novels, or novels at all, that create and focus on protagonists like the Carterets. One more argument for Marrow’s unique greatness.Next novel tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other nominees for the GAN?

April 10, 2018: Great American Novel Studying: The Great Gatsby

[On April 10th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Gatsby and other contenders for the elusive Great American Novel crown, leading up to a special weekend post on some recent contenders!]On the limits of an unquestionably great novel, and how we can complement them.First things first, both out of respect to the many wonderful teachers and scholars I know who love this book (including AmericanStudier pére!) and because I certainly do feel the same way: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby(1925) is, indeed, a great American novel. I don’t know if I can entirely agree with Random House’s Modern Library, who put it second on their list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century (it’s the only American novel in the top three); that kind of slight overrating is part of what I’m responding to in this post, I suppose. But there’s no doubt that Fitzgerald’s is that truly rare novel which is both formally and aesthetically perfect (that structure! that lyrical style! Nick’s novelist-narrator narration!) and thematically rich and resonant, both profoundly representative of its particular historical, social, and cultural moment and milieu and yet able to connect with deeply universal human questions and issues. If I were to make a list of 25 novels all Americans should read and then talk about—as part of my idea of a national Big Read, perhaps—The Great Gatsbywould definitely be in contention, and would probably make the final list.So how the heck, you might be wondering, can I have called Fitzgerald’s novel a non-favorite? Well, I will answer, the problem lies in his titular protagonist, Jay Gatsby (neé James Gatz), and more precisely in Gatsby’s motivations as a character. Gatsby has long been linked to the American Dream (to the point where there was an indie rock band named Gatsby’s American Dream), but his version of it seems so superficial: a nouveau rich monstrosity of a mansion, must-attend parties where all the most famous current celebrities can be seen, the adoration of all and sundry, and shady business deals with known gangsters which help fund that lifestyle. And when the curtain is pulled back and we learn the true motivation behind all of that, I don’t know that it’s necessarily any deeper: yes, it’s the love of his life; but a) that love is Daisy Buchanan, a complex character but one who overtly and unquestionably symbolizes extreme wealth and privilege (“her voice is … made of money,” Gatsby realizes at one point in the novel); and b) Gatsby only met and loved and was loved by Daisy once he had already remade himself into an imaginary man of extreme wealth and privilege in his own right, and he consistently pursues her as that faux-person, rather than as James Gatz. You can certainly argue that Fitzgerald wants us to analyze and critique these elements of his title character, but they nonetheless to my mind represent profound limits of Gatsby’s characterization, and especially of our ability to sympathize with him (or, really, with any character in the novel, as all of them are implicated in one way or another in the same issues).None of that, to be clear and to echo my opening paragraph, would comprise reasons not to read Fitzgerald’s novel. But I would certainly argue that there are any number of early 20th century novels which offer distinct, and to my mind more meaningful and broadly resonant, images and narratives of American Dreams. There’s Janey in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), searching for relationships (including romantic ones to be sure) and communities where she can successfully be the strong black woman she is. Or Irene and Clare in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), two African American women struggling with the question of whether and how to “pass” for white in a society far too defined by race and color. Or Sara in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925), trying to balance her highly Orthodox Jewish father’s Old World demands with her evolving life and goals as an ambitious young woman in New York City. Or Ántonia in Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), an immigrant woman battling the elements and social prejudices on the Nebraska plains. Obviously it wouldn’t be possible to read all these books in place of (for example) Gatsby’s frequent location on syllabi—although of course groups of students could be assigned different texts and then could come together to talk about similarities and differences. Or even brief excerpts of each could be presented alongside Gatsby, to highlight and discuss the era’s many distinct identities, communities, and dreams. In any case, all of these works and characters importantly complement Fitzgerald’s novel, and could help make our conversations about it more of a favorite for this AmericanStudier.Next novel tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other nominees for the GAN?

April 9, 2018: Great American Novel Studying: The Blithedale Romance

[On April 10th, 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Gatsby and other contenders for the elusive Great American Novel crown, leading up to a special weekend post on some recent contenders!]On the novel that significantly shifted an author’s career—and yet its continuity with his two prior masterpieces.Nearly a century before Richard Wright published his autobiographical essay “I Tried to Be a Communist” (1944), Nathaniel Hawthorne published a semi-autobiographical novel that could have been titled the exact same thing. Between April and November 1841, Hawthorne lived at George and Sophia Ripley’s West Roxbury, Massachusettsutopian experiment Brook Farm; the experiment brought together many other prominent Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. Hawthorne’s experience with the Brook Farm community (which continued for another six years or so after his depature) was mixed, as reflected both in the letters he wrote while there to his future wife Sophia Peabody and in his subsequent description of the period as “essentially a daydream, and yet a fact.” And just over a decade later, he would portray a strikingly similar utopian community in The Blithedale Romance (1852).Blithedale was Hawthorne’s third romance in three years—following The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851)—and marked a significant shift from the prior two. I would categorize both of them as historical romances: Scarlet quite overtly, as it is set more than two hundred years prior to its publication date; and Gables in its central use of the Salem Witch Trials, a history which Hawthorne calls in the novel’s famous Preface“a legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad day-light, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist.” Blithedale, on the other hand, is not only set in its own historical moment but centrally focused on engaging with, challenging, and at times satirizing that moment’s philosophies and ideals, most especially those of both Transcendentalism and communism. Perhaps to aid in that sense of present grounding, Hawthorne likewise shifts from the earlier novels’ third-person narrators to a semi-autobiographical (if also quite complex) first-person one, Miles Coverdale, who narrates for us his own experiences of the Blithedale utopian community.But if Blithedale is interestingly distinct from the two novels that preceded it, I would nonetheless argue that reading it in relationship to those historical romances helps us analyze how Hawthorne chooses to depict his socially realistic topic. After all, both earlier novels likewise featured realistic historical subjects—community in Puritan New England and the causes and legacies of the Witch Trials—but portrayed them through what Hawthorne described, in that Gables Preface, as the Romance’s “right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation” (in contrast to the Novel, which he argues “is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity … to the probable and ordinary course of man’s experience”). Literary historians have long sought to pin down which Blithedale character is which historical figure—Zenobia is Fuller! Hollingsworth is Ripley! and so on—but Hawthorne’s definition of the Romance would lead us in a different direction: to consider instead how he bends the historical realities of that place and time into a new, more Romantic shape, “manages his atmospherical medium” to present “the truth of the human heart.” Like both prior novels, that is, Blithedaleultimately presents the human heart of its histories—an important achievement indeed.Next novel tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other nominees for the GAN?

April 7-8, 2018: Crowd-sourced American Drama

[On April 6th, 1947, the first Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre—or the Tony Awards for short—were given in New York City. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of texts and moments in American theater, leading up to this crowd-sourced post drawn from the responses and ideas of fellow AmericanDramaStudiers. Add yours in comments, please!]First, here’s Emily Lauer’s great Guest Post on Hamilton! For this post, Emily Tweets, “It feels like I’ve been writing frequently about theater lately! Here’s a link to a particularly American theater story I wrote about Fun Home for @womenoncomics.” Responding to Monday’s post on Trifles, Irene Martyniuk writes, “I actually begin every semester of Modern Drama out of chronological order with Glaspell’s Trifles.  It is so smart on so many levels and offers much to consider—not only in content, but also in understanding how plays work. Trifles is brilliant at helping students understand staging, costumes, and different acting interpretations.  And, it emphasizes how sometimes really important things aren’t there—you don’t have to cast Minnie Foster and Mr. Wright, but they are central characters.”Kelly Stowell writes, “The first thing I thought of was Minstrel shows, which are often called ‘the roots of black theatre.’ Oddly enough, they were first written by whites, and performed by actors in blackface for white audiences. Then there's the whole Harlem Renaissance that started around 1920, which was a wonderful period of artistic and social expansion for Blacks. I have to run off and collect set pieces, and don't have time to expand on this...but the Minstrel show aspect is interesting and kind of typical of white folks...and the Harlem Renaissance is fascinating.”Matt Ramsdenhighlights, “Always Suzan-Lori Parks. She approaches theatre as an ‘incubator for history’ which allows her to reimagine the past as she sees fit. Great plays to check out are Topdog/Underdog , Father Comes Home from The Wars and In The Blood .”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other dramatic works or moments you’d highlight?

April 6, 2018: Theater in America: Angels in America and Rent

[On April 6th, 1947, the first Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre—or the Tony Awards for short—were given in New York City. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of texts and moments in American theater—share your dramatic responses and thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post sure to get a standing O!]On two dramatic works that helped change our national conversations.
When it comes to a controversial or difficult social and cultural topic, one of the more interesting lenses through which we can analyze the issue is to consider when and how overtly popular representations of it developed. I’m not talking about explicitly or centrally political or statement-making representations, but rather images of the issue in entertainments intended first and foremost to be popular, to be successful, to attract and affect a broad audience. So with an issue like interracial relationships and marriages, one could point for example to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967); certainly the film has a definite and even in the final scenes a pedantic message, but on the whole it tries to be a successful drama, one that will keep its audience interested and entertained throughout.  Or if Spencer Tracy’s final speech makes the film too political to fit this category, one could look just a few years down the road, at the many episodes of All in the Family (and then its spin-off The Jeffersons) that prominently featured an interracial couple (the Willises) who unsettle both Archie Bunker and George Jefferson; those episodes are, as the show always was, played first and foremost for laughs, without losing any nuance in their representations of the thorny issue itself.
If we turn to one of the most difficult and controversial issues in American society in the 1980s (and beyond), the AIDS epidemic, I’d say it’s pretty tough to pin down when that kind of popular representation really emerges. A case could definitely be made for Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America (1991), which despite calling itself A Gay Fantasia on National Themes and focusing almost entirely on gay characters is in many ways a big-budget blockbuster award-winning (including the Pulitzer Prize) kind of drama, featuring scenery-destroying descending angels, hallucinations of long-dead American historical figures who exchange witty banter with the play’s characters, and some of the foulest and funniest dialogue I’ve ever read (mostly spoken by the play’s fictionalized version of Roy Cohn). Or maybe the answer would be the Academy Award-winning hit film Philadelphia (1993), which starred two of Hollywood’s most prominent actors (Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington), featured musical contributions from legendary rock stars (including a great tune by some dude named Bruce), and relied on one of the oldest thriller plot devices, the courtroom drama, for much of its very effective creation of suspense and entertainment. And certainly both of these works, along with Magic Johnson’s much-publicized 1991 announcement of his own HIV-positive status, contributed to a sea-change in public consciousness about the illness in the early 1990s.
But for my money (and it’s gotten plenty of it over the years), I think the first truly popular entertainment to grapple with AIDS is Jonathan Larsen’s rock musical Rent (1996). It’s hard to argue with any measure of the musical’s popular successes: it was when it closed in 2008 the 9th longest-running Broadway show in history, at 12 years and over 5000 performances; it spun off into dozens of national tours and foreign productions, as well as a 2005 movie version featuring almost all of the original cast members; it grossed almost $300 million and won a Tony for Best Musical; and the list goes on. But in keeping with the show’s mantra, “No Day but Today,” I’d say you don’t need any of those facts or statistics to assess the show’s popular success: all you need to do is go see it somewhere if you get the chance, or watch a video of the production, or even just listen to the soundtrack (which features virtually the whole production, since there’s very little non-sung dialogue). The play pretty much literally has it all—it’s funny and angry, hugely emotionally affecting and cynical and smart-ass, big and sentimental and intimate and realistic, has a perfectly constructed circular structure (it starts and ends on Christmas Eves one year apart and uses New Year’s to bridge the two Acts), includes almost every genre of popular music in one or another of its songs, is based in great detail on a 100 year-old opera (Puccini’s La Boheme) and yet grounded in 1990s New York City and America in every way, and just plain sings, all the way through and by any measure. And at the same time it is deeply engaged at every moment—and politically engaged in many crucial ones—with the issue of AIDS and its many different communities and identities, causes and effects.Larsen died, unexpectedly and tragically, of a brain aneurysm on the day the play was to make its Off-Broadway premiere, and an entirely different and equally rich analysis could connect to great artists who died too young and the masterworks they left behind. But if Rent is any indication, Larsen would want his legacy to be precisely his achievement in finding that perfect combination of popular and political, successful and social, and thus contributing more (I believe) than any other single work to bringing AIDS out of the shadows and into the mainstream of American culture and consciousness. Crowd-sourced drama this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: what do you think? Other dramatic works or moments you’d highlight?