Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 321

May 22, 2015: BlockbusterStudying II: E.T. and Aliens

[A couple years ago, I spent a fun week AmericanStudying summer blockbusters—this year, it’s time for the sequel! Add your thoughts, on these or other blockbusters, for a weekend post that’s sure to set box office records!]On friendly and hostile extraterrestrials, and the real bad guys in any case.In the shape of his head, E.T.(star of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 film of the same name) looks a tiny bit like a distant cousin of the mother alien (the “bitch,”that is) from James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). But that slight comparison is about the only possible way in which these two summer blockbusters aren’t wholly distinct from one another. E.T.is perhaps Spielberg’s most kid-centered film, from its youthful protagonists to its product placements for Reese’s Pieces and the good ol’ Speak and Spell, its drunken slapstick to its underlying theme of growing up in a single-parent household. While Aliens has to be one of the most adult, hard-R-rated summer blockbusters ever, featuring one nightmare-inducing, graphically violent and horrifying sequence and image after the next (to say nothing of the Space Marines’ extremely salty repartee).E.T. and Aliens aren’t just at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to their ratings and intended audiences, however. They also embody two entirely different perspectives on the question not of whether there is life other than our own in the universe (both films agree that there is), but of what attitude toward Earth and humanity those extraterrestials might hold. The summer blockbuster Independence Day (1994), about which I blogged here, explicitly engages with these contrasting perspectives, featuring a number of characters who believe the aliens might come in peace before their true, hostile intentions are revealed. Because of its status as a sequel to a film in which the alien creature could not be more hostile and destructive to humans, Aliens can dispense with the debate and move immediately into the story of how its human characters will combat the extraterrestrial threats. And by tying his extraterrestrial’s first entrance into the film to the creature’s love of Reese’s Pieces, Spielberg similarly signals from the start that his alien will be friendly to—indeed, overtly parallel to—his young protagonist Elliot.E.T. isn’t without antagonists, though—but they’re of the human variety, the community of threatening scientists and government officials who seek to capture and (if necessary) kill E.T. to learn his secrets (and who in the original film carry guns, not walkie talkies, in that pursuit). And in that sense, E.T. and Aliens aren’t quite as far apart as they might seem—because in the latter film’s major reveal (SPOILER alert), it turns out that Paul Reiser’s corporate scientist Carter Burke is far more overt of a villain than the aliens, who are after all only fighting for their own survival (rather than driven by greed and manipulation, and a willingness to sacrifice anyone who gets in their way, as Burke and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation for which he works are revealed to be). If there’s one thing on which such disparate summer blockbusters can apparently agree, it’s that the powers that be—whether corporate or governmental—represent a far greater threat, to humans and extraterrestrials alike, than any alien invaders. Crowd-sourced post this weekend,Ben
PS. So one more time: what do you think? Other summer blockbusters you’d analyze?

May 21, 2015: BlockbusterStudying II: Broken Arrow and Face/Off

[A couple years ago, I spent a fun week AmericanStudying summer blockbusters—this year, it’s time for the sequel! Add your thoughts, on these or other blockbusters, for a weekend post that’s sure to set box office records!]On a mixed merger of Hong Kong and American films, and what we should remember regardless.With 1996’s Broken Arrow (released in February, but a summer blockbuster through and through) and 1997’s Face/Off, legendary Hong Kong action filmmaker John Woomade his Hollywood film debuts. In so doing, he also introduced the world (although I don’t think we quite recognized it at the time) to a new style of performance, now affectionately known as mega-acting: the style has come to be associated most closely with Nicolas Cage, who certainly has his moments of mega-acting in Face/Off; but in these two films was employed most consistently by John Travolta, who has likewise continued to mega-act in many, many many, action films in the years since. Indeed, given the central role that both Cage and Travolta have played in American action films over the decades since these two movies, it’s fair to say that hiring and using them in this way might be the most significant legacy of Woo’s American action debuts.When it comes to assessing the broader legacies of Woo’s transition to Hollywood filmmaking, however, the results seem (to put it kindly) more mixed. To be clear, Woo didn’t and would never need Hollywood success to be regarded as one of the greats of late 20th and early 21st century film: by the time he came to Hollywood he had already made 25 films, across a number of periods and genres, including a handful (such as A Better Tomorrow [1986], The Killer [1989], and Hard Boiled [1992]) that are considered among the greatest Hong Kong and action films of all time. Yet it’s equally undeniable that his Hollywood action efforts, including the aforementioned pair as well as Mission: Impossible II (2000) and Paycheck (2003), were neither as innovative nor as successful as those Hong Kong films had been. And by 2009, Woo had decided to leave Hollywood and return to Hong Kong cinema. If we focused our AmericanStudying of Woo on these less successful Hollywood films, though, we’d be missing out on a couple significant points. For one thing, in this globalized, transnational21st century moment, American audiences can engage and have engaged with Woo’s Hong Kong films just as easily and fully as they could his Hollywood ones; indeed, by most accounts all current action filmmaking, American and otherwise, has been influenced by Woo’s career, an argument for transnational identity and community if ever there were one. And for another, Woo’s Hollywood career included not only all those action efforts, but also Windtalkers (2002), a World War II action drama about the vital role played by Navajo codebreakers in the Allied war efforts. Perhaps because Windtalkersfeatures Nicolas Cage and Christian Slater, stars of Woo’s earliest Hollywood films, it has generally been lumped in with the rest of his American filmography—but while it has its own flaws, it also represents the only major feature film to date to tell this amazing and crucial American story. But to my mind, it’s the one summer blockbuster through which Woo’s American efforts should most fully be remembered, and another important part of his career and legacy.Last blockbuster post tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other summer blockbusters you’d analyze?

May 20, 2015: BlockbusterStudying II: Jurassic Park

[A couple years ago, I spent a fun week AmericanStudying summer blockbusters—this year, it’s time for the sequel! Add your thoughts, on these or other blockbusters, for a weekend post that’s sure to set box office records!]On two ways the groundbreaking film oversimplified the novel, and why they matter.Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) has a great deal in common with his Jaws (1975), widely considered the first summer blockbuster; I’m far from the first to make that point, of course, but it remains an interesting way to AmericanStudy the two films and their respective moments. But there are differences between the two films as well, including this important one: to my mind, Jaws actually improved substantially on the relatively slight Peter Benchley novel, adding a number of layers of compelling characterization and story; whereas I would argue that the reverse is true in the case of Jurassic Park’s relationship to Michael Crichton’s sci fi bestseller. And it’s not just that Crichton’s novel has more depth than the film (that seems inevitable when comparing a 400-page book to a 2-hour movie)—it’s that a couple of the film’s most significant choices significantly change and lessen the novel’s themes.For one thing, there’s the drastic oversimplification of mathematician Ian Malcolm’s (played, mostly for laughs, by Jeff Goldblum in the film) ideas about chaos theory. Of course a blockbuster film can’t stop for the kinds of long expositional speeches with which Crichton provides this character; nor could the novel’s central structuring element, the use of Malcolm’s ideas of “iterations” of a chaotic event to frame the book’s different parts, quite translate into visual storytelling. But on the other hand, the film likewise fundamentally changes the character’s overall arc: in the novel (SPOILER alert), Malcolm’s character dies gradually and painfully over the book’s second half, and in the process finds his perspective and ideas greatly altered. This “paradigm shift,” as Malcolm defines it, becomes a broader idea through which Malcolm and Crichton argue for how all of us can and must come to see the world diffently, particularly when it comes to our relationship to and role in the natural world. So if the film had had the guts to kill off Malcolm, it might have allowed for at least a few such moments of deeper reflection amidst the dinosaur attacks.That’s not the only, nor the most significant, death scene that the filmmakers decided to cut, however. In the novel (SPOILER alert once more), John Hammond, the billionaire entrepreneur behind Jurassic Park, likewise dies, and in one of the most ironic sequences in modern American fiction: Hammond’s grandchildren, whom he has invited to the park to test its effects on children, are playing with the sound system and create a T-Rex roar; Hammond believes it’s the real T-Rex, stumbles and falls into a ravine, and injures his leg badly; and while lying there he is set upon and slowly devoured by Compys, the park’s smallest dinosaurs who survive by scavenging. Ironically, it was likely Spielberg’s own desire to create a film that could appeal to older kids (hence its controversial PG-13 rating) that made the inclusion of such a scene impossible. But in the process, the film turns Hammond from a dark, pointed commentary on capitalism and the modern corporate world into more of a naïve but good-hearted teddy bear, played with silly charm by Richard Attenborough. And in so doing, Spielberg loses another chance to make his scary blockbuster into a more layered story.Next blockbuster post tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other summer blockbusters you’d analyze?

May 19, 2015: BlockbusterStudying II: Ghostbusters

[A couple years ago, I spent a fun week AmericanStudying summer blockbusters—this year, it’s time for the sequel! Add your thoughts, on these or other blockbusters, for a weekend post that’s sure to set box office records!]On two distinct ways to analyze science and the supernatural in the classic scary comedy.First things first: Ghostbusters (1984) is a really fun, funny, scary, entirely successful film, full of great performances, great music, and lines and moments that have stuck with me to this day. (The less said about Ghostbusters II [1989], the better.) It’s important, in the course of these analytical series, not to lose sight of the fact that summer blockbusters are designed and intended, first and foremost, to entertain—that doesn’t mean that they can’t or shouldn’t also be smart or interesting (none of that “It’s not supposed to be Shakespeare” crap here, bud), just that we can’t overlook the qualities that make them fun and make them endure. And Ghostbusters has endured as well as any summer blockbuster I know, and indeed largely created (and certainly popularized) a new genre—the horror comedy—that to my mind has never been done any better than it was done here.But if you think that means we can’t also analyze Ghostbusters—well, you clearly didn’t read my post on Baywatch! And when we start to turn our analytical attention to the film, it seems to clearly take a side within the longstanding and ongoing debate between science and the supernatural (or spiritual). The film opens with our heroes getting fired from their university research job because of their focus on the supernatural. Its main antagonist (yes, Zuul is the climactic villain, but this guy’s hostility drives much of the film) is William Atherton’s incredibly annoying EPA agent Walter Peck. And when the Ghostbusters convince the Mayor to side with them over that EPA agent, they do so by arguing that what’s going to happen to New York is “a disaster of Biblical proportions… Old Testament, real Wrath of God type stuff.” Just as Weird Tales did in their own era, the film suggests that all our modern science isn’t sufficient to engage with another side of the world, an older and perhaps more primal supernatural side that demands its own understanding—and its own heroes to combat it.Yet at the same time, the way those heroes combat the supernatural is precisely through science: their energy streams and containment units, all that they had been working on in that university research role and brought with them to their “private sector” alternative. That is, we could read the film’s attitudes as divided not between science and the supernatural, but rather traditional vs. experimental science, cautious and bureaucractic perspectives such as those of staid academics and the buttoned-up EPA vs. the more liberated and forward-thinking ideas of Egon and his partners. Those latter perspectives are certainly willing and able to engage with the world’s oldest and deepest spiritual truths, but they are also much better equipped to come up with modern answers for those supernatural threats. In that way, we could see Ghostbusters as an example of a modern American Gothic—recognizing a world full of darkness and the supernatural, but ready to push back with courage and rationality. Who else you gonna call?!Next blockbuster post tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other summer blockbusters you’d analyze?

May 18, 2015: BlockbusterStudying II: Back to the Future

[A couple years ago, I spent a fun week AmericanStudying summer blockbusters—this year, it’s time for the sequel! Add your thoughts, on these or other blockbusters, for a weekend post that’s sure to set box office records!]On what the time travel blockbuster gets wrong, and what it gets right.Since the future moment to which Doc, Marty McFly, and Jennifer travel at the end of Back to the Future (1985)—and in which most of Back to the Future Part II (1989) is set—is 2015, there have been a number of pieces published this yearassessing what the film series got right about the future that’s now and what it didn’t. It’s a fun premise, and one that can certainly help us think about how we’ve perceived the future at different moments in our past (although the truth, as revealed by 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968], Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles [1950], and many other cultural texts, is that we’re almost always wrong when we imagine specific future moments). But since the first Back to the Future is set instead in the past—1955, to be exact—it offers a different and equally valuable lesson: how a mid-80s blockbuster film imagined American history.I generally agree with the piece hyperlinked at “1955, to be exact”: filmmaker Robert Zemeckis and his crew got a good deal about 1955 right, from the music and teenage life and community to the clothes and settings. But when it comes to the one deeper social issue with which the film (briefly) attempts to engage, race, I’d argue that it gets things very wrong. In two different, seemingly throwaway moments, young white Marty McFly is shown contributing to—if not, indeed, directly causing—sweeping social changes for African Americans: he launches the town’s Civil Rights revolution by convincing a young African American janitor that he could run for mayor someday (which we know from the film’s 1985 opening that he later did); and he kicks off the rock and roll revolution as well, when an African American musician calls his friend Chuck Berry to share McFly’s futuristic guitar stylings. Both moments are intended as gags, of course—but the nature of summer blockbusters is that their jokes and other entertainment-driven choices can and do connect to and influence more serious conversations, and the film’s portrayal of 1950s era racial progress and change is frustratingly wrong.Fortunately, we now have other cinematic options if we want a more accurate portrayal of race, America, and the Civil Rights movement. And in a different way—and one admittedly much more central to its story—Back to the Future gets something very right about our relationship to the past, and more exactly to our parents’ pasts. Granted, it does so through a pseudo-incestuous storyline that requires a definite suspension of disbelief (if not of ethics, morality, or squeamishness). But nonetheless, I think Back to the Future captures a profound truth: the difficulty, but also the importance, of trying to connect to our parents not just as our parents (although of course we can never escape that relationship entirely, nor in most cases would we want to), but as the individual people they are, with lives and histories and stories all their own. Most of us (well, all of us) will never have the opportunity that Marty McFly does, to go back in time and meet our parents as young people, just starting to figure out who they are and where they’re headed. But it’s pretty important that we try to imagine them there, for their own sake and because (as Marty learns) it has a great deal to tell us about our own identities and lives as well.Next blockbuster post tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Other summer blockbusters you’d analyze?

May 16-17, 2015: Summer and Fall Courses

[As another semester winds to a close, this week’s series has highlighted some of the moments that have stood out to me and what conclusions I’d take away from them. Leading up to this special weekend post on some of my summer and fall plans. Share yours in comments, please!]Lots going on for the summer and fall, but here I wanted to focus specifically on three new courses I’m very excited to teach, and ask you to share an upcoming course (summer, fall, or any other time) of your own in comments! To wit:1)      Analyzing 21st Century America: An Interdisciplinary Perspective: This summer, I get to teach my first hybrid grad class, one that will meet once a week (for five weeks) but include a good bit of material and conversation online as well. And I think the focus is perfect for that format, as well as something I’ve never taught and am very excited to. Highlights for me: folders of primary and secondary texts on contemporary issues from #BlackLivesMatterto Iggy Azalea, sports to immigration; amazing short stories from the 2013 Best American Short Stories anthology as our shared readings; and individual presentations where students will watch a few episodes of a TV show they’ve never seen before and analyze it from an interdisciplinary lens. Can’t wait!2)      Interdisciplinary Studies Capstone: The interdisciplinary focus will continue but shift a bit in this undergraduate course, which I’ll be teaching for the first time this fall. The IDIS Capstone mirrors the English Studies one which I’ve taught (and written about here) a few times, including in the use of shared readings and conversations which I anticipate in this case will parallel my grad class’s focus on 21st century American issues. But just as the English Capstone asks students to create their senior portfolios within it, so too do IDIS majors research and create a culminating senior project in their Capstone, pulling together three distinct disciplines in the process. I’m a bit scared but mostly excited at the chance to help students create such interdisciplinary projects, and to teach and model interdisciplinary thinking and research along the way.3)      Honors English Seminar: I’ve taught individual students from FSU’s Honors program (which my friend Joe Moser is about to take over directing) before, but have never had the chance to teach that program’s sophomore-level literature seminar. Well, that changes this fall, and to say that I’m excited at the opportunity to teach a seminar on America in the Gilded Age—one including works by Sui Sin Far, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Charles Chesnutt, among others—to this group of smart, engaged, dedicated, passionated students … well, that’d be a serious understatement. Just one more thing I’m looking forward to!Next series starts Monday,Ben
PS. What upcoming course(s) are you excited about? Other summer and fall plans (or spring conclusions) you’d share?

May 15, 2015: Semester Conclusions: The Mara Award and Inspiring Teachers

[As another semester winds to a close, a week’s series on some of the moments that have stood out to me and what conclusions I’d take away from them. Leading up to a weekend post on some of my summer and fall plans. Share your spring follow ups or summer/fall plans in comments, please!]I’m honored and excited to be able to share here the fact that I’m the 2015 recipient of Fitchburg State University’s Vincent J. Mara Excellence in Teaching Award. I’ll be officially receiving it at Saturday’s Undergraduate Commencement, and wanted to share in this space both because I’m immensely proud, and because it gives me a chance to share a bunch of my past tribute posts (in no particular order) on meaningful teachers in my own life (besides the two amazing ones who raised me!):1)      This one on great colleagues/writers who are also great writing teachers;2)      This one on my favorite summer camp and the great history teacher behind it;3)      This one on Sarah Sadowski and the Expanding Horizons program at FSU;4)      This one on my grad school teachers and mentors, Miles Overall and Carolyn Karcher;5)      This one on inspiring public school teachers, mine and overall;6)      This one on perhaps the single best teacher I ever had, Proal Heartwell;7)      This one on the most committed college educator I know right now, Jeff Renye;8)      And this one on meaningful teachers from throughout my life.I know you’ve got some inspiring teachers to share as well! Summer and fall plans this weekend,Ben
PS. Thoughts on this semester conclusion? Ones of yours you’d share?

May 14, 2015: Semester Conclusions: Football Debates

[As another semester winds to a close, a week’s series on some of the moments that have stood out to me and what conclusions I’d take away from them. Leading up to a weekend post on some of my summer and fall plans. Share your spring follow ups or summer/fall plans in comments, please!]Two distinct but complementary sites for a campus-wide conversation.Throughout the Spring 2015 semester, Fitchburg State’s Center for Conflict Studies hosted a series of presentations, panels, and conversations focused on football, and more exactly on issues of violence and other controversies linked to that hugely popular sport. I’ve blogged about football in Super Bowl series each of the last couple years, and have engaged briefly in those series with many of the issues that became part of these campus-wide conversations: concussionsand brain trauma; rapeand sexual violence; racism; the exploitation of college athletes. As much as I hope for this space to be conversational and communal, though, the truth is that it’s always framed and driven at least initially by my own interests, ideas, and perspectives, and so these semester-long Fitchburg State conversations about football and its debates added a great deal to my own perspective in multiple ways.One way was through those conversations that were planned, such as a late April roundtable discussion of the highly controversial question, “Should football be banned?” The roundtable featured the kinds of interdisciplinary voices and connections that represent the best of Fitchburg State as a scholarly community, with presentations by philosopher David Svolba, Director of Athletics Sue Lauder, sociologist G.L. Mazard Wallace, exercise physiologist Monica Maldari, and my English Studies colleague Kisha Tracy. But besides the value of putting these voices and frames in conversation, the roundtable also allowed each presenter to develop a particular part of his or her identity at compelling length: Monica, for example, talked about how her discipline and her knowledge impacted her family’s decision not to let their young son play football; while G.L. highlighted how we can’t discuss football without addressing the issues of ethics, race, work and labor, and social obligations that form key parts of his teaching and scholarship.Alongside those planned conversations, however, and offering an importantly complementary window into attitudes about and perceptions of these issues, were more impromptu debates that sprung up online. The most interesting such debate came in the wake of the aforementioned roundtable, in emails to the entire university community, and featured three voices: a Fitchburg State assistant football coach, who had not been able to attend the roundtable but offered his impassioned defense of the sport and its value; a Fitchburg State hockey coach, who had likewise attended and argued for the value of the roundtable itself as a layered scholarly conversation; and one of the event’s organizers, who followed up both emails in hopes of keeping the conversation going beyond that event and this spring’s series. These messages reminded us all that there are individuals, in our community and in every one, directly impacted by such debates and their potential outcomes and effects—the players most especially, in every sense, but lots of others as well. But they also made clear that in our 21st century moment, important public conversations don’t have to and can’t happen simply in individual places and times; they have to continue online, and I’d love for you to share any responses to help this one continue here!Last conclusion tomorrow,Ben
PS. Thoughts on this semester conclusion? Ones of yours you’d share?

May 13, 2015: Semester Conclusions: Fanny Fern Rocks

[As another semester winds to a close, a week’s series on some of the moments that have stood out to me and what conclusions I’d take away from them. Leading up to a weekend post on some of my summer and fall plans. Share your spring follow ups or summer/fall plans in comments, please!]On a moment that delightfully reinforced one of my longest-held scholarly beliefs.I’ve loved Fanny Fern since the first time I encountered her writing, in a few newspaper columns that were part of my (American) History and Literature Sophomore Tutorial. I loved her even more when I got to study her at length in a graduate school class with Carolyn Karcher, including reading all of Fern’s autobiographically, socially satirical novel Ruth Hall (1854) alongside many more of those columns. Since then, I’ve made a couple selected Fern columns a consistent part of my American Literature I syllabus, reading her alongside Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson in a week dedicated to expanding our images and narratives of the American Renaissance era to include different women’s voices and texts. Those two columns have always gone over well with students, but they’re very short (probably 2 pages total) and far more readable than Fuller or Dickinson, so I couldn’t use that response as definite confirmation that my Fern-love was widely shared.Well, consider my love shared. Fern’s Ruth Hall and a collection of many of her columns comprised one of our six main/long readings in my The Romantic Era in America senior seminar this semester, alongside Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Stoddard’s The Morgesons. Each of those other five authors and texts had their adherents in the class, and if I were to teach it again (this was my first time), I would probably keep all of them on the syllabus. But there’s no doubt in my mind that the Fern unit was the clear winner—the students took immediately and consistently to her wit and humor, her hyperbole and sarcasm, her creation of outrageous personas and subjects; and at the same time they recognized the serious issues underlying those stylistic elements (from domestic violence and abuse to poverty and prostitution, among many others), and appreciated Fern’s ability to balance those aspects of her texts and engage with her audiences on many levels simultaneously and successfully.To paraphrase the great Jack Nicholson line from the film As Good As It Gets, this collective response certainly made me feel good … about me. But it also and more importantly confirmed the significance of what I would call one of my most central lifelong scholarly goals: to add into our collective memories and conversations the figures, texts, stories and histories that have too often been forgotten or excluded instead. Fern is a great example, one hugely interesting in her own right but also connected to many other social, cultural, and historical issues from the period. And the truth, as my students’ responses amply demonstrated, is that better remembering such figures and voices isn’t the slightest bit like taking our medicine, forcing ourselves to do something unpleasant but necessary. Instead, it very frequently helps us connect with fun, engaging, inspiring works and lives, while at the same time expanding our collective perspectives in vital ways. Like Fern’s balance of humor and activism, that’s a very nice combination indeed.Next conclusion tomorrow,Ben
PS. Thoughts on this semester conclusion? Ones of yours you’d share?

May 12, 2015: Semester Conclusions: A Tough Crowd

[As another semester winds to a close, a week’s series on some of the moments that have stood out to me and what conclusions I’d take away from them. Leading up to a weekend post on some of my summer and fall plans. Share your spring follow ups or summer/fall plans in comments, please!]On an unexpected test of my public scholarly goals, its mixed results, and its value.I’ve written at great length, not only in this space but in the introduction to my third book, about my incredible experiences teaching in the Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) program. I’ve never encountered a group of students more excited by and committed to everything that happens in a classroom, nor one who bring more strong and rich perspectives and voices to share in those conversations. In each of my prior three ALFA courses, those two elements worked hand in hand to create the best pegagogical experiences of my career to date. But in this semester’s ALFA course, in which I both presented the students with five nominees for my in-progress American Hall of Inspiration and worked to elicit their own ideas for such nominees, the two elements were a bit more opposed: a couple of the strongest voices and perspectives in the group led those students to resist quite seriously my goals for the course.This different dynamic became clear right from the outset: on the first day I made the case for remembering Quock Walker and his peers alongside the more famous Founding Fathers in our collective memories of the Revolutionary Era, and these two students (out of only eight total in the class) were having none of it. Remembering stories and histories like Walker’s is fine, they argued, but much of American history has been driven first and foremost by Anglo (or at least European) Americans, and to make the case otherwise is to allow revisionist, politically correct impulses to outweigh our sense of history. (I may be overstating their position slightly, but I don’t believe so—that was certainly the gist of it at least.) As the weeks went along, one of these two students seemed to shift in her perspective somewhat, to recognize the value of learning about the figures whom we were studying, of reading their works and voices, of adding them to our collective memories. But the other student very much did not shift—on the last day, when I was asking them for their own nominees for the Hall, she declined to answer or participate in the conversation; and on the course evaluations (which I saw weeks later), she (I believe) wrote that “The instructor allowed his political perspective to impact the class too much.”That line, combined with the moment I highlighted in yesterday’s post, might make you think that I’m a regular Howard Zinn in the classroom. I don’t think I am, nor do I believe that my choices and emphases in this ALFA course should be defined as political in any partisan or even contemporary sense (although of course the right-wing opponents of the current AP US History standards and exam would no doubt beg to differ). Yet despite my disagreement with this student, and especially my sadness that she didn’t feel on that last day like her perspective would have been welcome (which it would, even if she nominated Joseph McCarthy for the Hall!), I came away from the experience very glad that it had happened. If I’m serious about one of my central, evolving career goals—my desire to add my public scholarly perspectives on America to our national conversations—then I had better get used to the idea of engaging with a wide variety of audiences and perspectives, including, indeed especially, those that disagree with me. I’m not sure I responded well in this particular instance, although perhaps the shift in the other student indicates that I did all right; but in any case, I’m very sure that it was great practice for such conversations, and thus an experience I’ll carry forward very fully and happily.Next conclusion tomorrow,Ben
PS. Thoughts on this semester conclusion? Ones of yours you’d share?