Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 347

July 21, 2014: American Autobiographers: John Woolman

[Some of the most interesting and inspiring Americans have written their own stories, in a variety of genres and forms. In this week’s series, I’ll highlight a handful of such American autobiographers and analyze what their texts and identities reveal. Please share autobiographical writings, memoirs, and voices that have interested and inspired you for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the autobiographer who traced his own wanderings, and so can help guide us on our own.Maybe this will change as I get older and realize just how much kids today don’t get it and how much they could use a wise older voice and perspective (not unlike my own, mayhaps) to show them the light, but for now, I have to admit that many of the works of American literature most overtly intended to inspire change, to convince an audience of the benefits of following the author’s revolutionary philosophical ideas, leave me pretty cold. From 19th century/American Renaissance classics like Emerson’s “Nature” (1836) and Thoreau’s Walden (1854) to Beat manifestos like Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956) and Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)—and each of those four texts is far more complex than I’m giving them credit for here, but all I believe are meant to leave the reader convinced that the author has, if not all of the answers, at least some good starting points toward them—my response has largely been the same: I see the power and brilliance, but I’m ultimately more annoyed than impressed.If I had to boil the reasons for my annoyance down to one idea, it’d be that all those texts seem to have been written with the answers already in mind, with the author already comfortable in his philosophical position and hoping both to narrate how he got there and convince us to do the same. That might seem to be a necessary condition for the writing of any work, much less a philosophical or persuasive one, yet I think it elides just how much any individual’s perspective and philosophy, like his or her identity and experiences, continue to evolve and (ideally) grow and deepen. For that reason, I find the Emerson who emerges in his journals to be infinitely more interesting and complex and attractive (as a thinker, as a writer, as an inspiration) than the one from whom we hear in the speeches and essays. And likewise, my vote for the most powerful and convincing work of American philosophy would be another journal, and one only published posthumously and so not at all written with immediate publication and persuasion among its goals: the journal of John Woolman (1720-1772), the itinerant Quaker minister who traveled through America for much of the 18th century, developing an impassioned and evolving perspective on religion and faith, community and charity, anti-slavery and Indian rights, pacifism and social activism, and many other complex questions through those journeys and the many people and worlds he encountered on them.Woolman’s journal is eloquent and beautifully written, a literary masterpiece that has been in print since prior to the Revolution (it was published in 1774, two years after Woolman’s death) and so can lay claim to being one of our most foundational texts. Yet despite that stylistic and formal impressiveness it has an intimate quality, a rawness of perspective, that makes clear just how closely it reflects the open mind and heart of its author. From its first line—“I have often felt a motion of love to leave some hints in writing of my experience of the goodness of God, and now, in the thirty-sixth of my age, I begin this work”—Woolman stresses both that intimacy and the text’s fluidity, its ability to grow and develop alongside him and his identity (and indeed he would write it throughout his final decade and a half of life). And in the book’s twelfth and final chapter, written over the months before Woolman’s death—and in fact in that chapter’s final paragraphs, likely composed just days before that tragic event, with it perhaps in sight—Woolman writes, “I have gone forward, not as one travelling in a road cast up and well prepared, but as a man walking through a miry place in which are stones here and there safe to step on, but so situated that one step being taken, time is necessary to see where to step next.” I don’t know that any single sentence has ever better captured life’s journey than that one—and I do know that few American texts offer a better guide to moving through life than does Woolman’s journal.Next autobiographer tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other life writings you’d highlight for the weekend post?

July 19-20, 2014: American Beaches: Jamie Hirami’s Guest Post on Venice Beach

[With beach season underway in earnest, in this week’s series I’ve AmericanStudied some famous beaches, leading up to this Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]
[Jamie Hiramiis a PhD candidate in American Studies at the amazing Penn State Harrisburg program, where she’s writing a dissertation on Venice Beach which promises to break significantly new ground in American material culture and cultural studies. This Guest Post is just a glimpse of what’s to come!]Freak Beach.  Muscle Beach.  Silicon Beach.  Coney Island of the Pacific.  Slum by the Sea.  Venice Beach, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, goes by many monikers.  None of those nicknames reference the original plan that founder Abbot Kinney, heir to a tobacco fortune, envisioned in 1898 when he bought out his real estate partners for the southern portion land that also originally encompassed Santa Monica: a resplendent, middle-class seaside resort and town, which would cater to its clientele with Chautauqua’s and other elements of high culture.  Ultimately, mass and popular cultures shaped its direction as an amusement destination while the counter cultures of the mid-twentieth century influenced its modern reputation as bohemian community. 
Modeled after Venice, Italy, Kinney transformed the marshy land into a series of navigable canals along which, early visitors could buy real estate for single-family home development. Venice-of-America officially opened on July 4, 1905 to a crowd of about 40,000 people.  Kinney’s grand cultural intentions culminated in a 3,400 seat auditorium built for educational lectures and cultural performances, which closed after one season.  Instead, visitors flocked to the pier, bathhouse, beach and other amusements.  In fact, rides and games proved to be so much more popular than the Chautauqua experience, that in January 1906, he opened the hugely popular midway plaisance, which included exhibits and freak shows from the world’s fairs in Portland and St. Louis.
By the time Kinney died in October 1920, Venice’s original luster had greatly diminished.  The canals did not drain properly, creating murky and dirty waterways, and the national trend for boardwalk amusements, in general, faded.  Years of opposition by the growing permanent residents and clergy to boxing matches, alcohol, dancing, and more sordid amusements was capped by a hugely destructive fire that caused over a $1 million in damages.  In 1925, the City of Los Angeles annexed Venice, filling its famous canals in 1929 to make room for roads. 
Over the next forty years, Venice remained an outwardly run-down version of its former self, but in its place, a vibrant counter-culture fomented cultural growth.  It became a Southern California hotbed for the Beats; a hippie commune during the Sixties; and it embraced transients, hustlers, artists, and performers.  Today, Venice’s increasingly gentrified neighborhoods have put homeless and homeowners, hustlers and shop-owners, and low-income versus high-income residents at odds, but it still maintains a fierce stance against the mainstream.  In 2007, Abbot Kinney Blvd. (the main commercial thoroughfare) opened its first chain store—Pinkberry—causing an uproar among residents and local shop owners who petitioned people to boycott the chain.  Three years later, it closed because it was underperforming.  More importantly, Venice still maintains ties to its popular culture beginnings with numerous sidewalk performers, a freak showalong the boardwalk, and a voyeuristic outdoor gym among other diversions.  Venice Beach, through its varied history, remains, at heart, a destination that caters to popular amusements.[Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?]

July 18, 2014: American Beaches: Baywatch

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]
On why those beautiful beach bodies are also a body of evidence.Late last year, I humorously but also earnestly noted that to a dedicated AmericanStudier, any text, even Baywatch, is a possible site of complex analysis. I stand by that possibility, and will momentarily offer proof of same. But before I do, it’s important to foreground the basic but crucial reason for Baywatch’s existence and popularity, one succinctly highlighted by Joey and Chandler: pretty people running in slow-motion in bathing suits. While I plan to make a bit more of the show and its contexts and meanings than that, it’d be just plain cray-cray to pretend that either the show’s intent or its audience didn’t focus very fully on those beautiful bodies. Moreover, such an appeal was nothing new or unique—while the beach setting differentiated Baywatch a bit, I would argue that most prime-time soap operas have similarly depended on the attractiveness of their casts to keep their audiences watching.If Baywatch was partly a prime-time soap opera, however, it would also be possible to define the show’s genre differently: in relationship to both the police and medical dramas that were beginning to dominate the TV landscape in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Baywatch debuted in 1989). After all, the show’s plotlines typically included both rescues and crimes; while the lifeguards often dealt with romantic and interpersonal drama as well, so too did the docs of ER or the cops of Miami Vice (to name two of the era’s many entries in these genres). Seen in this light, and particularly when compared to the period’s police dramas, Baywatch was relatively progressive in the gender balance of its protagonists—compared to another California show, CHiPs, for example, which similarly featured pretty people solving promised land problems but which focused almost entirely on male protagonists. Yes, the women of  Baywatch were beautiful and dressed skimpily—but the same could be said of the men, and both genders were equally heroic as well.The creators of Baywatch tried to make the cop show parallel overt with the ill-fated detective spinoff Baywatch Nights , about which the less said the better (even AmericanStudiers have their limits). But the problem with BN wasn’t just its awfulness (Baywatch itself wasn’t exactly The Wire , after all), it was that it missed a crucial element to the original show’s success: the beach. And no, I’m not talking about the bathing suits. I would argue that the most prominent 1970s and 1980s cultural images of the beach were Jaws and its many sequels and imitators, a set of images that made it seem increasingly less safe to go back in the water. And then along came David Hasselhoff, Pam Anderson, and company, all determined to take back the beaches and shift our cultural images to something far more pleasant and attractive than . Whatever you think of the show, is there any doubt that they succeeded, forever inserting themselves and their slow-mo running into our cultural narratives of the beach?Special guest post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

July 17, 2014: American Beaches: On the Beach

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]
On the intense and tragic film that couldn’t compete with historic fears.1959, the same year as the original Gidget movie about which I blogged yesterday, also saw the release of a very, very different beach film: On the Beach . Based on British-Australian writer Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel, the film featured an all-star cast (including Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire) as the sailors, scientists, and their friends and loved ones dealing with a post-apocalyptic world. It’s 1964, World War III has taken place, and the resulting radiation is slowly taking over the world and destroying its remaining inhabitants. Mostly set on or around Peck’s submarine, the film uses that setting to create a broadly claustrophobic tone, portraying a world in which likely slow death by radiation poisoning or the humane but absolute alternative of suicide pills seem to be the only possible futures. It’s unrelenting and uncompromising, and deserves to be much better remembered than it is.While that’s true of the film on its own artistic merits, it’s even more true in terms of what the film reveals about the Cold War’s threats and fears. When I think of World War III scenarios in popular films, I tend to think of over-the-top dramatics of one kind or another: the ridiculous satire of Dr. Strangelove (1964); the teenage humor and heroics of War Games (1983) and The Manhattan Project (1986); the flag-waving jingoism of Red Dawn (1984). All of those films can illustrate certain important aspects of the period, but all feel, again, exaggerated in one way or another, extreme in both their plots and tones. Whereas On the Beach, to this AmericanStudier at least, feels profoundly grounded, offers a socially and psychologically realistic depiction not just of the potential aftermath of a nuclear war, but also and even more tellingly of the period’s collective fears about what such a war would mean and do. Seeing [SPOILER ALERT] Fred Astaire kill himself rather than face imminent radiation poisoning—well, that feels deeply representative of the moment’s worst fears.You’d think that such fears might have led to more widespread opposition to the Cold War’s arms race and military industrial complex—and indeed the U.S. military must have thought so too, as they denied the filmmakers permission to use a submarine or any other official materials. But I would argue that whatever possible influence such fears might have had was far outweighed by a different set of fears, ones exemplified by October 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis: fears not of nuclear war and its aftermath per se, but rather of the Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal, and what would happen if America’s did not match and even exceed that opposing threat. Whereas On the Beach portrayed the horrific results of a nuclear war, the Missile Crisis reflected and amplified fears that the U.S. was potentially unprepared for such a war, one that our enemy was willing and able to bring to our very doorstep. Perhaps no film, not even one as compelling and convincing as On the Beach, could compete with such historic threats—and so the arms race and the Cold War only deepened in the 1960s and beyond.Last beach context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

July 16, 2014: American Beaches: Gidget and The Beach Boys

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]
On popular cultural images of the beach, and what we might make of them.An alien observer seeking to learn about America solely from its popular culture might well think that in the early 1960s the whole nation had gone surf crazy. The hit 1959 film Gidget (1959), starring Sandra Dee as a rebellious 17 year old who joins the local surfer culture and Cliff Robertson as the Korean War vet turned surf guru who shepherds her along, quickly spawned two popular sequels: 1961’s Gidget Goes Hawaiian (with Deborah Walley taking over the title role) and 1963’s Gidget Goes to Rome (with Cindy Carol doing the same). One of 1962’s best-selling rock albums was Surfin’ Safari, the debut by the California group The Beach Boys; less than a year later they released their first mega-hit, Surfin’ U.S.A. (1963). There were of course many other popular trends in these years, but on both the big screen and the record machine, surfing was a surefire early 1960s hit.Trying to make sense of why and how American fads get started can be pretty difficult at best, but I would argue that the surfing fad in popular culture can be analyzed in a couple different ways. For one thing, the fad represents an interesting way to illustrate the transition between the 1950s and 1960s—as Gidget demonstrates, surfing culture has often been portrayed as a counter-culture, an alternative to the more buttoned-down mainstream society, and of course the rise of counter-cultures (and the kinds of social and cultural movements to which they connected) is a key element to the 1960s in America. So the popularity of these surfing texts (like the popularity of early rock and roll more generally) could be read as an indication that Americans were ready for such counter-culture movements, and Gidget itself could be defined as a 1959 origin point for much of what followed in next decade. Seen in that light, the hugely popular 1966 documentary The Endless Summer represents a high-water mark for all these trends, before the counter-culture began to distintegrate later in the decade.While that specific historical context would be one way to analyze the early 1960s surfing fad, however, I think a longstanding American narrative could offer another option. It was three decades later that the film Point Break (1991) overtly linked surfers to outlaws, potraying a band of surfing bank robbers led by Patrick Swayze’s philosophical Bodhi (a character not unlike Cliff Robertson’s in Gidget). But to my mind, surfing culture has always contained echoes of the Wild West, represented a new lawless frontier where rough but noble cowboys escape the confines of civilization, battle for survival in extreme conditions, and, if they’re lucky, ride off in Western sunsets. The Wild West was always more of a cultural image than a historical or social reality, of course, and an image constructed with particular clarity in a pop culture text, the Western. That genre was famously moving toward more revisionist films by the late 1960s—but perhaps it had already been supplanted, or at least supplemented, in popular consciousness by surfing stories. In any case, to quote “Surfin’ Safari”: “I tell you surfing’s mighty wild.” Next beach context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

July 15, 2014: American Beaches: The Inkwell

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]
On three layers to one of America’s most unique historic beaches.The small town of Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard, includes one of America’s most historic African American resorts, a summertime community with and a vibrant contemporary presence. That community has long designated its preferred stretch of the Oak Bluffs town beach “The Inkwell,” a name that was originally conferred out of racial bigotry but that (at least as I understand it, and I’m directly descended from one of the island’s foremost historians!) was subsequently and lovingly adopted by the African American community itself. Indeed, scholar and frequent Islander Henry Louis Gates Jr. named his genealogical and historical organization the Inkwell Foundation, a detail which nicely ties together the site’s past and present roles and meanings in African American and American life.The Inkwell and Oak Bluff’s African American community are also the titular and principal setting for one of the more unique recent American bestselling novels, Stephen Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002). Carter, a law professor who has gone on to write many more, equally successful works of fiction, was famously paid a seven-figure advance for Emperor, which combines multiple genres (it’s a murder mystery and legal thriller that’s also an academic satire, historical novel, and romance) into a work that’s not always more than the sum of its parts but is always readable and compelling. And as its titular emphasis on Martha’s Vineyard’s African community suggests (Ocean Park adjoins The Inkwell), Carter’s novel is at its heart a historical and sociological study of that community, and of the complexities of identity that arise from its combination of race, class, and family history (his narrator is the son of that titular emperor, a preeminent African American judge).Similarly connected to those complexities of identity, community, and history is another frequent summer visitor to Martha’s Vineyard, President Barack Obama. Political commentators have often linked Obama and his family’s Vineyard vacations to those of his Democratic presidential predecessor, Bill Clinton; conservative commentators have used the vacations to argue that Obama is out of touch with most Americans. But others, including many Islanders, have instead linked the Obama family’s time on the Vineyard to the island’s historic and contemporary African American communities. That Obama’s vacations could be read as either deeply connected to those communities or entirely distinct from them is a reflection not only of his own complex American identity, but also of the evolving history and story of this complex and potent American beach and site.Next beach context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

July 14, 2014: American Beaches: Revere Beach

[With beach season underway in earnest, a series AmericanStudying some famous beaches. Leading up to a special weekend Guest Post from a talented young scholar!]
On three stages in the history of an exemplary American beach.On July 12th, 1896, Revere Beach greeted nearly 50,000 visitors on its opening dayas America’s first public beach. The site and occasion represented the confluence of multiple turn of the century trends: the completion of an urban railroad line that allowed those numerous visitors to reach the beach; the City Beautiful movement that heavily influenced landscape architect Charles Eliot, who designed Revere Beach; the increased possibility of free time for leisure and entertainment (thanks in large part to the successes of the labor movement), which led to the popularity of sites like Coney Island and Revere Beach; and the recent waves of immigration, since many of those public visitors to Revere Beach were immigrant families. For all those reasons and more, Revere Beach was more than just the nation’s first public beach—it was a hugely iconic symbol of turn of the 20th century American society.By the second half of the century, however, Revere Beach had become a very different and far more contested kind of symbol. A number of 1960s and 70s factors and narratives contributed to increasingly negative images of the beach and, ultimately, its near-abandonment: demographic shifts that brought more African American visitors to the beach, during the same era as the Boston busing riots which demonstrated just how contentious race remained in the region (particularly between African Americans and working class white ethnics, the two communities who came to comprise Revere Beach’s principal clienteles); deterioration of the beach’s surrounding  neighborhoods, leading to a substantial increase in crime within a short period of time (there were 500 arrests near the beach in 1969 and 2700 in 1974); and the historic Blizzard of 1978, which destroyed or drove out most of the amusements, businesses, and landmarks that had not already succumbed. Whether fairly or unfairly, by the early 1980s Revere Beach was best known for the image of hypodermic needles littering the sand.As the recent article at that last link illustrates, many of those negative images remain in the Bostonian consciousness into the early 21st century. But there’s no question that Revere Beach has also entered a new stage, one marked by the debates over developmentand gentrification on the one hand and traditionand preservationon the other that have informed so much of America’s urban landscape over the last few decades. As always, it’s not necessarily either-or—Revere’s waterfront can be developed (and to a degree must be if it is to survive) without the history being lost, and the history can be preserved (and to my mind must be if we are to remember our past) without sacrificing future growth. And as always, what’s most needed is an awareness of the past that does not elide the darkest times but preserves the ideals; so that whatever Revere Beach becomes in the future, the site can remain emblematic of its status as America’s first public beach.Next beach context tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

July 12-13, 2014: Crowd-sourcing the ALA

[In late May, I had the chance to make a quick trip to Washington, DC, to attend a portion of the American Literature Association’s annual conference. I wasn’t able to stay as long as I would have liked, but did have a chance to attend some very interesting panels while I was there. So this week I’ve highlighted a few of them, as well as a couple other contexts for the conference. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the follow ups of a couple fellow AmericanStudiers—if you were there, add yours, please!]
Agnes Herra follows up Monday’s post on her panel on contemporary literature and cultural movements, writing, “Thank you so much for write up, Ben! It was so nice to meet you. I had a great experience at the ALA conference. It was my first time at a specific American studies conference and I was really excited to hear about everyone's work. Since I'm currently starting to focus on the activist figure in American literature in my research, it was great to see how scholars are approaching American lit generally. Everyone was really welcoming!”AnneMarie Donahue responds to Friday’s post on the ALA and the FRC, writing, “I worry, and always have worried, that ‘American Identity’ is a subjective term. And while it is subjective, as all historical perspectives are, it's the idea that some subjectivities are more valid than others. That while I consider myself a ‘flaming liberal’ others could easily put me in a conservative camp. My 10th grade history teacher, who was and is a misogynistic jerk, made a great point one day in between bad-mouthing title 9 and pointing out that women destroyed the single-income economy. He said that all scales must be put in proper perspective, that my views of gender equality (and neutrality, as I have been very lucky to work with some brave young people whose gender of the mind and body conflict have helped me re-term it) are actually quite conservative, as I see a citizen's rights as paramount. The idea that the government would want to ban abortion is very liberal when looked at through the lens of government invading on the individual's freedoms and rights. With that in mind I worry that our nation's ‘trend’ towards fundamentalism (which is really what this all boils down to, and I am speaking as a proud culturally-catholic person) will allow a narration of American Identity that is trying to define the terms liberal and conservative to their own standards and remove that sliding scale that my history teacher (whose name I can't recall, how's that for respect?) spoke of. But the biggest fear is that this new ‘historiography’ denies the most important fact that any historian must be aware of at all times. They are being subjective. And through that acknowledgement of subjectivity comes a larger tolerance to contrasting ideas, theories, accounts and philosophies. But without this little reminder that ‘we can't keep ourselves out of the narration so at least admit you are throwing yourself in the narration’ we lose that goal of objectivity. I worry about my students growing up in a country with a very strange definition of itself, but what worries me more is that they are growing less and less aware that those coming up with the definition are doing so with an agenda.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Thoughts on any of the week’s topics? Other follow ups you’d share?

July 11, 2014: ALA Follow Ups: The ALA and the FRC

[In late May, I had the chance to make a quick trip to Washington, DC, to attend a portion of the American Literature Association’s annual conference. I wasn’t able to stay as long as I would have liked, but did have a chance to attend some very interesting panels while I was there. So this week I’ll highlight a few of them, as well as a couple other contexts for the conference. If you were there, I’d love to hear your takeaways for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On the jokes, the ideals, and the realities of a strange juxtaposition.In the same hotel as ALA, and often in immediately adjacent rooms and spaces, was some sort of convention for the Family Research Council, James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and Tony Perkins’ evangelical, conservative political and social organization. That led to lots of jokes from ALA attendees about comparisons between the two organizations, and since I just linked to a Southern Poverty Law Center page on the FRC, you can guess that I made a few of those jokes myself. (“We all have our sacred texts,” I noted; “Mine just happen to be by Chesnutt, Faulkner, and Silko.”) Since I find the FRC, at the leadership level at least, to be neither Christian nor conservative according to any meaningful definition of those terms, I don’t feel badly about making those jokes; but at the same time, I recognize that they’re not the ideal perspective to take on this coincidental juxtaposition.To put it bluntly, if I’m serious about trying to produce public AmericanStudies scholarship—and I am—then I have to be willing and able to talk to audiences, individual and communal, whose perspective on any number of issues and on America itself is different from my own. I hope and believe that some such audiences have been part of my year of book talks, and that the talks have felt respectful and engaging even to those audience members who might disagree with many or even all of my ideas. But those would be random such audience engagements, unplanned and haphazard and difficult to assess—here was the opposite, a chance to connect with a built-in, clearly identified audience who are overtly interested in American identity and community and yet hold such distinct, contrasting perspectives on those topics from mine. I’m not saying I should have walked into their prayer breakfast and started declaiming (even if I would have been allowed to do so); but rather that I could have easily stopped an individual or two with the FRC badge and asked if we could talk for a bit about both of our perspectives.So that would have been the ideal—but I have to be honest, I literally couldn’t and can’t imagine actually doing so. Does that make me cowardly, or unwilling to put my words into action? Maybe. Does it instead make me not a total loud-mouthed jerk? Also maybe. But what I’d really say it makes me is realistic about one of the most frustrating but undeniable elements to 21st century American life: the way in which different communities exist in almost entirely different realities. How can any individual shift in historical understanding make a dent in a distinct reality and the worldview that comes from it? How can any nuanced, subtle change in perspective compete with such defining ideas and ideologies? I simply don’t know—but if I’m going to keep moving forward with these public scholarly goals, I’d better keep thinking about possible answers.Crowd-sourced follow ups this weekend,BenPS. So one more time: were you at ALA? If so, what stood out to you?

July 10, 2014: ALA Follow Ups: Alfred Bendixen

[In late May, I had the chance to make a quick trip to Washington, DC, to attend a portion of the American Literature Association’s annual conference. I wasn’t able to stay as long as I would have liked, but did have a chance to attend some very interesting panels while I was there. So this week I’ll highlight a few of them, as well as a couple other contexts for the conference. If you were there, I’d love to hear your takeaways for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]
A tribute to the man who made ALA, and the vital and enduring reason why he did.At the ALA’s opening night reception, a number of the organization’s original members paid tribute to Alfred Bendixen, the ALA founder and outgoing Executive Director thanks to whose efforts and work this 25th annual ALA conference (like the 24 that came before it) existed at all. Dr. Bendixen’s career as a scholar and teacher of American literature has been significant and impressive in its own right (and is ongoing), but, as many of the reception speakers put it, it’s through his ALA service that he has truly and profoundly changed the discipline and profession, an achievement few scholars can ever claim. I’ve had the chance to meet and speak with Dr. Bendixen at a couple prior ALA conferences, and can also attest to his collegiality and hospitality, even in the midst of what I’m sure are the busiest and most hectic days of his year. The next ALA Executive Director couldn’t ask for a better model.As part of the reception speeches, I learned a lot more than I had previously known about the 1989 founding of the ALA. Apparently the organization had begun as a part of the Modern Language Association (MLA), but Bendixen and others felt that the MLA’s size and focus did not tend to allow for more in-depth examinations of particular works and authors, nor that the MLA’s more formal conference and atmosphere facilitated the kinds of communal, collegial conversations that these scholars hoped to find and take part in. I’ve attended most of the last decade’s worth of ALA conferences, beginning with the 2005 conference in Boston, and can definitely attest that both features—a consistent focus on specific authors and works, and a communal and collegial tone and atmosphere—remain hallmarks of the ALA; a tribute both to how much these features are valued by those of us in the profession and, I’m sure, to how much Dr. Bendixen has continued to advocate for them.Given my own absolute commitment to not specializing, to not focusing on particular authors or time periods (or any specific category within American literature and studies), it might seem hypocritical for me to praise this aspect of the ALA. But for one thing, my work is simply driven by my own interests and goals, and of course is far from the only option or path within this profession—and I’ve heard consistently wonderful work being shared at ALA conferences. And for another, if there’s one constant across all the ALA societies and categories, papers and panels, I’ve encountered, it’s been close and extended attention to the texts in front of us, out of which all broader connections and arguments develop. I hope it goes without saying that there’s no part of what we do as scholars, what we teach to our students, what we bring to all conversations, than such attention and analysis. And we all do it more consistently and better than to Alfred Bendixen and the organization he founded.Last follow up tomorrow,BenPS. Were you at ALA? If so, what stood out to you?