Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 390
April 4, 2013
April 4, 2013: Baseball in America: International Arrivals
[In honor of this week’s Opening Day, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies connections to the national pastime. Add your responses and thoughts for a weekend post that’s sure to touch ‘em all!]
On two relatively recent communities of international Major Leaguers, and the divergent strains of immigration to which they connect.To my mind, the most interesting way to frame the mid-20th and early-21stcentury histories of baseball (not from the sport’s earliest moments, that is, but over the last fifty to seventy-five years) is through the lens of diversification. Of course the most famous and striking moments on that timeline relate to African American ballplayers: the rise of the Negro Leagues, the stories of Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, the inspiring and uglier sides to Hank Aaron’s record-setting career, and so on. But in the last few decades, paralleling of course the nation’s expanding and evolving multi-cultural community, baseball has grown far more diverse still: with the explosion of Hispanic and Latin American ballplayers, for example, but also with the increased presence of the two groups of international stars on whom I want to focus in this post, Japanese and Cuban players.These two groups share a couple of core similarities: both have to this point featured mostly players who were already successful professional ballplayers in their home countries (a very different dynamic from young Latin American players drafted in their teens, for example); and both became particularly prominent with the mid-1990s arrivals of especially legendary such national stars, including the brothers Livan and Orlando “El Duque” Hernándezfrom Cuba and Hideo Nomo and Hideki Irabu from Japan. But due to the drastically distinct situations in those home nations, such stars came to the United States and the Major Leagues in very different ways: the Cuban players generally defectingand escaping from the closed-off island nation, and thus often leaving family and friends behind in the process; and the Japanese players generally being publicly courted through high-priced bidding wars, and thus often leaving their prior teams and leagues as conquering heroes. Of course I can’t speak for any of these individuals, but it seems clear that the move to the majors was thus far more fraught, diplomatically and personally, for the Cuban than the Japanese stars.Those Cuban professional athletes are not, of course, directly equivalent in any way to other potential refugees from that nation or similar situations—but they can remind us that even in a high-profile world like major league baseball, the very different cultural and historical paths to American identity and community remain. Similarly, while the Japanese stars are not in the identical situation as immigrants who come to the United States to (for example) study at elite universities or perform high-skilled occupations, they do connect to such experiences, and to the complex narratives of national and immigrant need that both link and contrast those immigration stories with the arrivals at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Professional sports can feel like a fantasy world, and in many ways do fit that description; but as with any part of our culture and society, they’re full of exemplary histories and trends, and ripe for AmericanStudying.Final diamond connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these histories, or other aspects of diversity in sports? Other baseball connections you’d highlight?
On two relatively recent communities of international Major Leaguers, and the divergent strains of immigration to which they connect.To my mind, the most interesting way to frame the mid-20th and early-21stcentury histories of baseball (not from the sport’s earliest moments, that is, but over the last fifty to seventy-five years) is through the lens of diversification. Of course the most famous and striking moments on that timeline relate to African American ballplayers: the rise of the Negro Leagues, the stories of Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, the inspiring and uglier sides to Hank Aaron’s record-setting career, and so on. But in the last few decades, paralleling of course the nation’s expanding and evolving multi-cultural community, baseball has grown far more diverse still: with the explosion of Hispanic and Latin American ballplayers, for example, but also with the increased presence of the two groups of international stars on whom I want to focus in this post, Japanese and Cuban players.These two groups share a couple of core similarities: both have to this point featured mostly players who were already successful professional ballplayers in their home countries (a very different dynamic from young Latin American players drafted in their teens, for example); and both became particularly prominent with the mid-1990s arrivals of especially legendary such national stars, including the brothers Livan and Orlando “El Duque” Hernándezfrom Cuba and Hideo Nomo and Hideki Irabu from Japan. But due to the drastically distinct situations in those home nations, such stars came to the United States and the Major Leagues in very different ways: the Cuban players generally defectingand escaping from the closed-off island nation, and thus often leaving family and friends behind in the process; and the Japanese players generally being publicly courted through high-priced bidding wars, and thus often leaving their prior teams and leagues as conquering heroes. Of course I can’t speak for any of these individuals, but it seems clear that the move to the majors was thus far more fraught, diplomatically and personally, for the Cuban than the Japanese stars.Those Cuban professional athletes are not, of course, directly equivalent in any way to other potential refugees from that nation or similar situations—but they can remind us that even in a high-profile world like major league baseball, the very different cultural and historical paths to American identity and community remain. Similarly, while the Japanese stars are not in the identical situation as immigrants who come to the United States to (for example) study at elite universities or perform high-skilled occupations, they do connect to such experiences, and to the complex narratives of national and immigrant need that both link and contrast those immigration stories with the arrivals at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Professional sports can feel like a fantasy world, and in many ways do fit that description; but as with any part of our culture and society, they’re full of exemplary histories and trends, and ripe for AmericanStudying.Final diamond connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on these histories, or other aspects of diversity in sports? Other baseball connections you’d highlight?
April 3, 2013
April 3, 2013: Baseball in America: Ruth and Gehrig
[In honor of this week’s Opening Day, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies connections to the national pastime. Add your responses and thoughts for a weekend post that’s sure to touch ‘em all!]
On the iconic teammates who embody two contrasting narratives of American identity.One of the most defining, originating American myths is that of the “Puritan [or sometimes Protestant] work ethic,” the concept of a community of quiet, stoic everymen and –women going about their often thankless but vital labors with determination and persistence. Yet at the same time, two of the first genuinely famous American individuals would have to be Miles Standish and John Smith, both boisterous, hard-living, larger-than-life, and self-aggrandizing soldiers and explorers who famously wooed the ladies and carved new territories with (seemingly) their forceful personalities alone. (Seriously, if you haven’t read Smith’s third-person personal narrative of his own heroism, you have to, if only for the passage where he fights off hundreds of Indian attackers and uses his guide as a personal shield.) And these two narratives came together to form Revolutionary America’s defining icon, Ben Franklin, a self-made man composed (if you read hisautobiography) of equal parts persistent hard work and self-conscious myth-making.Like all enduring national narratives, these defining images have evolved over the centuries; yet they have likewise retained some core elements that remain visible in many different incarnations. For example, we can see strong respective elements of each in two of the 20th century’s most famous and iconic sports figures, a pair who happened to be teammates on the New York Yankees: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Each was interesting and complicated in his own right, but there’s no question that their most iconic qualities fit these two enduring narratives quite closely: Gehrig was known first as “The Iron Horse” for his astounding and record-setting consecutive-games-played streak, and second for his stoic and inspiring battlewith the tragic illness (ALS) now generally known by his name; Ruth was known as “The Sultan of Swat,” as much for his legendary parties and excesses as for his titanic homers, and like the aforementioned American icons went out of his way to embrace and extend his own mython every occasion. (An interestingly similar dichotomy could be identified in two subsequent Yankees teammates, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle.)It’s easy to side with Gehrig and quiet hard work over Ruth and boisterous excess, and of course my own phrasings and frames here have undoubtedly done so. It’s certainly fair to add that, if we think of icons as role models (an idea that various sports figures have passionately critiqued), far more of us parents would likely direct our kids to emulate Gehrig than Ruth. But from an AmericanStudies perspective, it’s particularly interesting to consider the enduring co-existence of these two narratives, the sense that we have found ways, across the centuries and in many different social and cultural contexts, to valorize such seemingly contrasting and even directly opposed ideals. We are of course big, and contain multitudes; but narratives and images like these can help us push past that bigness to consider and analyze some of the communal emphases that have defined and continue to define us, and that reveal the multiple sides to our shared national identity and culture.Next diamond connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on Ruth and Gehrig, or these narratives? Other baseball connections you’d highlight?
On the iconic teammates who embody two contrasting narratives of American identity.One of the most defining, originating American myths is that of the “Puritan [or sometimes Protestant] work ethic,” the concept of a community of quiet, stoic everymen and –women going about their often thankless but vital labors with determination and persistence. Yet at the same time, two of the first genuinely famous American individuals would have to be Miles Standish and John Smith, both boisterous, hard-living, larger-than-life, and self-aggrandizing soldiers and explorers who famously wooed the ladies and carved new territories with (seemingly) their forceful personalities alone. (Seriously, if you haven’t read Smith’s third-person personal narrative of his own heroism, you have to, if only for the passage where he fights off hundreds of Indian attackers and uses his guide as a personal shield.) And these two narratives came together to form Revolutionary America’s defining icon, Ben Franklin, a self-made man composed (if you read hisautobiography) of equal parts persistent hard work and self-conscious myth-making.Like all enduring national narratives, these defining images have evolved over the centuries; yet they have likewise retained some core elements that remain visible in many different incarnations. For example, we can see strong respective elements of each in two of the 20th century’s most famous and iconic sports figures, a pair who happened to be teammates on the New York Yankees: Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Each was interesting and complicated in his own right, but there’s no question that their most iconic qualities fit these two enduring narratives quite closely: Gehrig was known first as “The Iron Horse” for his astounding and record-setting consecutive-games-played streak, and second for his stoic and inspiring battlewith the tragic illness (ALS) now generally known by his name; Ruth was known as “The Sultan of Swat,” as much for his legendary parties and excesses as for his titanic homers, and like the aforementioned American icons went out of his way to embrace and extend his own mython every occasion. (An interestingly similar dichotomy could be identified in two subsequent Yankees teammates, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle.)It’s easy to side with Gehrig and quiet hard work over Ruth and boisterous excess, and of course my own phrasings and frames here have undoubtedly done so. It’s certainly fair to add that, if we think of icons as role models (an idea that various sports figures have passionately critiqued), far more of us parents would likely direct our kids to emulate Gehrig than Ruth. But from an AmericanStudies perspective, it’s particularly interesting to consider the enduring co-existence of these two narratives, the sense that we have found ways, across the centuries and in many different social and cultural contexts, to valorize such seemingly contrasting and even directly opposed ideals. We are of course big, and contain multitudes; but narratives and images like these can help us push past that bigness to consider and analyze some of the communal emphases that have defined and continue to define us, and that reveal the multiple sides to our shared national identity and culture.Next diamond connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on Ruth and Gehrig, or these narratives? Other baseball connections you’d highlight?
April 2, 2013
April 2, 2013: Baseball in America: The Black Sox
[In honor of this week’s Opening Day, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies connections to the national pastime. Add your responses and thoughts for a weekend post that’s sure to touch ‘em all!]
On three different ways to interpret what remains one of sport’s most stunning scandals.When a group of players on the White Sox conspired with gamblers to “fix” (or rather, from the players’ perspective, throw) the 1919 World Series, a story that unfolded over the following two years and culminated in the 1921 “Black Sox trial,” the scandal seemed to exemplify ideas of lost innocence and purity (which were already in the air in that post-World War I, “lost generation” moment). Nothing summed up those ideas better than the mythic but enduring image of a young boy confronting “Shoeless” Joe Jackson outside the courthouse with the words, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” And in Eight Men Out (1963), his seminal book on the scandal, Eliot Asinofhelped reiterate and enshrine those images of the scandal’s corrupting effects and meanings on America’s national pastime and perspective.There was another side to Asinof’s portrayal of the scandal, however—one that didn’t necessarily take hold of the popular consciousness in his era, but on which John Sayles’ 1988 film adaptation of the book focuses at length. This interpretation focuses less on the effects of the scandal and more on one of its key causes: the striking yet representative greed and selfishness of Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner, in an era when professional athletes had (compared to their employers, at least) no power or say in their careers and fates. Sayles, for whom labor history is one of the defining American issues and stories, pulls no punches in his portrayal of Comiskey specifically and the era’s labor dynamics more broadly—he likes to say that he tries to push beyond black and white in his films and engage with the grey areas in between, and I believe he has done so to great success on many occasions, but to my mind his Eight Men Out is at its heart a clear and ringing indictment not of corrupt baseball players, but of a corrupt capitalist system that uses and then scapegoats them.There’s another way to characterize that system, though: to focus on how much, to quote Denzel Washington’s character in Glory, “We all covered up in it, too. Ain’t nobody clean.” To see, that is, the Black Sox as emblematic of unifying American goals and desires, however much we might like to locate them outside of us instead. It’s to that end, I would argue, that F. Scott Fitzgerald makes Jay Gatsby’s closest New York associate the mysterious Meyer Wolfshiem, a fictional version of Arnold Rothstein, “the man who fixed the World’s Series” (as Gatsby puts it). One could of course argue that Gatsby’s association with Wolfshiem reveals his shadier and more shameful side, the kinds of gangster connections that Tom Buchanan scornfully critiques. But to my mind, Gatsby ultimately embodies nothing less than the American Dream—there’s a reason Fitzgerald nearly changed his title to Under the Red, White, and Blue—and so too, in its own dark and twisted way, does making a fortune by fixing the nation’s most significant sporting event and spectacle.Next diamond connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on the Black Sox? Other baseball connections you’d highlight?
On three different ways to interpret what remains one of sport’s most stunning scandals.When a group of players on the White Sox conspired with gamblers to “fix” (or rather, from the players’ perspective, throw) the 1919 World Series, a story that unfolded over the following two years and culminated in the 1921 “Black Sox trial,” the scandal seemed to exemplify ideas of lost innocence and purity (which were already in the air in that post-World War I, “lost generation” moment). Nothing summed up those ideas better than the mythic but enduring image of a young boy confronting “Shoeless” Joe Jackson outside the courthouse with the words, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” And in Eight Men Out (1963), his seminal book on the scandal, Eliot Asinofhelped reiterate and enshrine those images of the scandal’s corrupting effects and meanings on America’s national pastime and perspective.There was another side to Asinof’s portrayal of the scandal, however—one that didn’t necessarily take hold of the popular consciousness in his era, but on which John Sayles’ 1988 film adaptation of the book focuses at length. This interpretation focuses less on the effects of the scandal and more on one of its key causes: the striking yet representative greed and selfishness of Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner, in an era when professional athletes had (compared to their employers, at least) no power or say in their careers and fates. Sayles, for whom labor history is one of the defining American issues and stories, pulls no punches in his portrayal of Comiskey specifically and the era’s labor dynamics more broadly—he likes to say that he tries to push beyond black and white in his films and engage with the grey areas in between, and I believe he has done so to great success on many occasions, but to my mind his Eight Men Out is at its heart a clear and ringing indictment not of corrupt baseball players, but of a corrupt capitalist system that uses and then scapegoats them.There’s another way to characterize that system, though: to focus on how much, to quote Denzel Washington’s character in Glory, “We all covered up in it, too. Ain’t nobody clean.” To see, that is, the Black Sox as emblematic of unifying American goals and desires, however much we might like to locate them outside of us instead. It’s to that end, I would argue, that F. Scott Fitzgerald makes Jay Gatsby’s closest New York associate the mysterious Meyer Wolfshiem, a fictional version of Arnold Rothstein, “the man who fixed the World’s Series” (as Gatsby puts it). One could of course argue that Gatsby’s association with Wolfshiem reveals his shadier and more shameful side, the kinds of gangster connections that Tom Buchanan scornfully critiques. But to my mind, Gatsby ultimately embodies nothing less than the American Dream—there’s a reason Fitzgerald nearly changed his title to Under the Red, White, and Blue—and so too, in its own dark and twisted way, does making a fortune by fixing the nation’s most significant sporting event and spectacle.Next diamond connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on the Black Sox? Other baseball connections you’d highlight?
April 1, 2013
April 1, 2013: Baseball in America: Symbolism
[In honor of this week’s Opening Day, a series on some of the many AmericanStudies connections to the national pastime. Add your responses and thoughts for a weekend post that’s sure to touch ‘em all!]
On two novels that put the sport to very distinct symbolic work.
Sports in general make very good metaphors—just ask George Carlin, whose bit on baseball vs. football remains one of the great metaphorical analyses of all time. But it seems to me that in American stories and narratives, no sport has more consistently offered up metaphors for key themes and issues than baseball: from fathers and sons in Field of Dreams (1989; spoiler alert!) to relationships and love in Bull Durham (1988) and For Love of the Game (1999), good and evil in The Natural (1952) to life and death in Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), communal hope and disappointment in “Casey at the Bat”(1888) to the Civil War in Play for a Kingdom (1998), American culture and literature are full to overflowing with baseball tales that depict yet transcend the sport. (I’ve even got my personal favorite baseball and America story, for when I finally write that screenplay.)With the exception of the putrid For Love of the Game, each of the works in that paragraph (and plenty of others I didn’t mention, such as 2011’s The Art of Fielding ) has a lot to recommend it. But to my mind there are two baseball novels that stand out even among that crowded and impressive field, vying for the title not only of greatest baseball work but of the ever-elusive Great American Novel. Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973) does so self-consciously, overtly, swinging for the fences from its title on; but if David James Duncan’s The Brothers K (1992) is not quite so blatant in its ambition, both the novel’s social and historical sweep (it covers with equal breadth the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s; Vietnam, leftist radicalism, Eastern philosophy, religion, work, love, death) and its multi-layered echoes of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) make clear its own quest for the pennant. The two novels differ greatly in tone—Roth’s is, like much of his work, sarcastic and cynical; Duncan’s far more earnest and poignant—but also, and more relevantly for this week’s series, in the uses to which they put their baseball threads.On the one hand, Roth’s novel is far more centrally composed of such threads than Duncan’s—every character in The Great American Novelis connected in one way or another to the book’s fictional baseball team (the Ruppert Mundys) and league (the Patriot League), whereas in Brothers K there are long sections in which we follow characters into very distinct settings and worlds (Vietnam, India, an isolated Canadian cabin) where baseball has little if any presence. Yet on the other hand, and without spoiling the specifics too fully, Duncan uses baseball, and its symbiotic relationship to the brothers’ father in particular, as a framing element in deeper and more structural ways, so that wherever the boys go, and whatever other themes their stories involve, we see the interconnections with the sport and its defining familial and American presences. Which is to say, I don’t know if Roth’s novel would fundamentally change if it focused on basketball, or soccer, or the publishing world, or any other sphere; while Duncan’s is to my mind, despite its breadth, a baseball novel through and through.Next diamond connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Baseball stories or works you’d highlight?
On two novels that put the sport to very distinct symbolic work.
Sports in general make very good metaphors—just ask George Carlin, whose bit on baseball vs. football remains one of the great metaphorical analyses of all time. But it seems to me that in American stories and narratives, no sport has more consistently offered up metaphors for key themes and issues than baseball: from fathers and sons in Field of Dreams (1989; spoiler alert!) to relationships and love in Bull Durham (1988) and For Love of the Game (1999), good and evil in The Natural (1952) to life and death in Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), communal hope and disappointment in “Casey at the Bat”(1888) to the Civil War in Play for a Kingdom (1998), American culture and literature are full to overflowing with baseball tales that depict yet transcend the sport. (I’ve even got my personal favorite baseball and America story, for when I finally write that screenplay.)With the exception of the putrid For Love of the Game, each of the works in that paragraph (and plenty of others I didn’t mention, such as 2011’s The Art of Fielding ) has a lot to recommend it. But to my mind there are two baseball novels that stand out even among that crowded and impressive field, vying for the title not only of greatest baseball work but of the ever-elusive Great American Novel. Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973) does so self-consciously, overtly, swinging for the fences from its title on; but if David James Duncan’s The Brothers K (1992) is not quite so blatant in its ambition, both the novel’s social and historical sweep (it covers with equal breadth the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s; Vietnam, leftist radicalism, Eastern philosophy, religion, work, love, death) and its multi-layered echoes of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) make clear its own quest for the pennant. The two novels differ greatly in tone—Roth’s is, like much of his work, sarcastic and cynical; Duncan’s far more earnest and poignant—but also, and more relevantly for this week’s series, in the uses to which they put their baseball threads.On the one hand, Roth’s novel is far more centrally composed of such threads than Duncan’s—every character in The Great American Novelis connected in one way or another to the book’s fictional baseball team (the Ruppert Mundys) and league (the Patriot League), whereas in Brothers K there are long sections in which we follow characters into very distinct settings and worlds (Vietnam, India, an isolated Canadian cabin) where baseball has little if any presence. Yet on the other hand, and without spoiling the specifics too fully, Duncan uses baseball, and its symbiotic relationship to the brothers’ father in particular, as a framing element in deeper and more structural ways, so that wherever the boys go, and whatever other themes their stories involve, we see the interconnections with the sport and its defining familial and American presences. Which is to say, I don’t know if Roth’s novel would fundamentally change if it focused on basketball, or soccer, or the publishing world, or any other sphere; while Duncan’s is to my mind, despite its breadth, a baseball novel through and through.Next diamond connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Baseball stories or works you’d highlight?
March 31, 2013
March 31, 2013: March 2013 Recap
[A recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying, which in this case began March 4thafter the February recap on March 2-3.]
March 4: Popular Fiction: Cultural Work: A series on popular fiction begins with Jane Tompkins, Twilight, Oprah, and the question of how and why we analyze popular art.March 5: Popular Fiction: Christian Novels: The series continues with one of the most under-narrated yet most consistently popular genres in American literature.March 6: Popular Fiction: Small-Town Soaps: The genre that links seemingly contrasting authors Sinclair Lewis and Grace Metalious, as the series rolls on.March 7: Popular Fiction: Guilty Pleasures: Thinking about the popular fiction we’re ashamed to love—yet love and read nonetheless!March 8: Popular Fiction: Paradigm Shift: The series concludes with the complex question of how and why we disparage or value best-sellers.March 9-10: Crowd-sourced Popular Fiction: Other AmericanStudiers weigh in on the week’s posts and topics.March 11: Supreme Contexts: Marbury and Balance: A series on key 19thcentury Supreme Court decisions starts with the one that established the Court’s role and power.March 12: Supreme Courts: Georgia and Sovereignty: The series continues with the cases that illustrate both the limitations and the possibilities of how the Court can respond to national issues.March 13: Supreme Contexts: Dred Scott and Definitions: The case that represents a low point for the Court’s social role—but the height of its defining powers.March 14: Supreme Contexts: Santa Clara County and Revision: The case that reimagined both the role of American businesses and one of our landmark laws, as the series rolls on.March 15: Supreme Contexts: Plessy and Activism: The historical portion of the series concludes with a case that can and perhaps should shift our sense of “judicial activism.”March 16-17: Supreme Contexts: The Cases Before Us: My take on a few of the lessons that such historical analyses of the Court can hold for very significant contemporary cases.March 18: Spring in America: Williams and Eliot: Snowstorms be damned, a series on spring in America starts with two distinct but perhaps parallel poetic visions of the season.March 19: Spring in America: “Appalachian Spring”: The series continues with the composer and work that helped bring America and classical music together.March 20: Spring in America: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”: The song that exemplifies why simple and symbolic can work just fine for social and political protest music.March 21: Spring in America: Children’s Stories: Frog and Toad, Abdul Gasazi, and children’s stories of spring explorations, as the series rolls on.March 22: Spring in America: The Mayflower and the Maypole: The series concludes with two very different sides to the Pilgrims/Puritans, as revealed by two spring images.March 23-24: Crowd-sourced Spring: Responses and other spring thoughts from many fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours please!March 25: National Big Read Recaps, Part 1: A follow up series to my roundtable on nominations for the Even Bigger Read, starting with Mary Rowlandson’s narrative.March 26: National Big Read Recaps, Part 2: The series continues with a nomination of Letters from an American Farmer.March 27: National Big Read Recaps, Part 3: The Day of the Locust, as the Even Bigger Read series rolls on.March 28: National Big Read Recaps, Part 4: Why we should all read Invisible Man.March 29: National Big Read Recaps, Part 5: James Welch’s Fool’s Crow, another nominee for a national Big Read.March 30: National Big Read Recaps, Part 6: The series concludes with the case for Sebastian Junger’s War.Next series starts tomorrow,BenPS. Responses to any of these posts or series? Things you’d like to see on the blog? Guest post ideas? Share, please!
March 4: Popular Fiction: Cultural Work: A series on popular fiction begins with Jane Tompkins, Twilight, Oprah, and the question of how and why we analyze popular art.March 5: Popular Fiction: Christian Novels: The series continues with one of the most under-narrated yet most consistently popular genres in American literature.March 6: Popular Fiction: Small-Town Soaps: The genre that links seemingly contrasting authors Sinclair Lewis and Grace Metalious, as the series rolls on.March 7: Popular Fiction: Guilty Pleasures: Thinking about the popular fiction we’re ashamed to love—yet love and read nonetheless!March 8: Popular Fiction: Paradigm Shift: The series concludes with the complex question of how and why we disparage or value best-sellers.March 9-10: Crowd-sourced Popular Fiction: Other AmericanStudiers weigh in on the week’s posts and topics.March 11: Supreme Contexts: Marbury and Balance: A series on key 19thcentury Supreme Court decisions starts with the one that established the Court’s role and power.March 12: Supreme Courts: Georgia and Sovereignty: The series continues with the cases that illustrate both the limitations and the possibilities of how the Court can respond to national issues.March 13: Supreme Contexts: Dred Scott and Definitions: The case that represents a low point for the Court’s social role—but the height of its defining powers.March 14: Supreme Contexts: Santa Clara County and Revision: The case that reimagined both the role of American businesses and one of our landmark laws, as the series rolls on.March 15: Supreme Contexts: Plessy and Activism: The historical portion of the series concludes with a case that can and perhaps should shift our sense of “judicial activism.”March 16-17: Supreme Contexts: The Cases Before Us: My take on a few of the lessons that such historical analyses of the Court can hold for very significant contemporary cases.March 18: Spring in America: Williams and Eliot: Snowstorms be damned, a series on spring in America starts with two distinct but perhaps parallel poetic visions of the season.March 19: Spring in America: “Appalachian Spring”: The series continues with the composer and work that helped bring America and classical music together.March 20: Spring in America: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”: The song that exemplifies why simple and symbolic can work just fine for social and political protest music.March 21: Spring in America: Children’s Stories: Frog and Toad, Abdul Gasazi, and children’s stories of spring explorations, as the series rolls on.March 22: Spring in America: The Mayflower and the Maypole: The series concludes with two very different sides to the Pilgrims/Puritans, as revealed by two spring images.March 23-24: Crowd-sourced Spring: Responses and other spring thoughts from many fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours please!March 25: National Big Read Recaps, Part 1: A follow up series to my roundtable on nominations for the Even Bigger Read, starting with Mary Rowlandson’s narrative.March 26: National Big Read Recaps, Part 2: The series continues with a nomination of Letters from an American Farmer.March 27: National Big Read Recaps, Part 3: The Day of the Locust, as the Even Bigger Read series rolls on.March 28: National Big Read Recaps, Part 4: Why we should all read Invisible Man.March 29: National Big Read Recaps, Part 5: James Welch’s Fool’s Crow, another nominee for a national Big Read.March 30: National Big Read Recaps, Part 6: The series concludes with the case for Sebastian Junger’s War.Next series starts tomorrow,BenPS. Responses to any of these posts or series? Things you’d like to see on the blog? Guest post ideas? Share, please!
March 30, 2013
March 30, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 6
[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that takes us there—and back again.The roundtable’s sixth and final presenter, my Fitchburg State University colleague Irene Martyniuk, nominated Sebastian Junger’s War . Compared to any of the other five nominees, Junger’s book—a very recent bestseller, and the inspiration for an Academy Award-nominated documentary to boot—might seem the least in need of broader exposure. But Irene made a compelling case that we can and should engage much more fully with War and its subjects, on a number of different levels.For one thing, as Irene noted, you could say the same two things of the war in Afghanistan that I just did about Junger’s book: that it’s been prominently featured in our collective consciousness for a good while now; yet that we somehow manage much of the time not to engage with it nearly enough. Junger’s book, quite simply, takes us there. For another thing, as Irene argued with particular force, tens of millions of American lives have been directly impacted by that war, and will continue to be for many decades to come—and Junger’s book brings the war home with its soldiers, and forces us to better recognize and engage with this sizeable and evolving American community.There’s at least one more significant, and perhaps even more complicated, place to which Junger’s book takes us, though: to the defining role that war has, in our contemporary moment, in our enduring national identity, and, perhaps, in our human consciousness. As Irene put it, a hard but seemingly clear truth, and one from which Junger does not flinch, is that we are drawn to war, that it speaks to us somehow. I’m not claiming that’s true for all individuals, as that’d be a serious injustice to some of the best individuals I know. But collectively? We’ve got a deadly serious obsession with war, I’d say—and Junger’s book can help us admit that we’ve got a problem.March recap tomorrow,BenPS. So last chance for now: thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
The nominee that takes us there—and back again.The roundtable’s sixth and final presenter, my Fitchburg State University colleague Irene Martyniuk, nominated Sebastian Junger’s War . Compared to any of the other five nominees, Junger’s book—a very recent bestseller, and the inspiration for an Academy Award-nominated documentary to boot—might seem the least in need of broader exposure. But Irene made a compelling case that we can and should engage much more fully with War and its subjects, on a number of different levels.For one thing, as Irene noted, you could say the same two things of the war in Afghanistan that I just did about Junger’s book: that it’s been prominently featured in our collective consciousness for a good while now; yet that we somehow manage much of the time not to engage with it nearly enough. Junger’s book, quite simply, takes us there. For another thing, as Irene argued with particular force, tens of millions of American lives have been directly impacted by that war, and will continue to be for many decades to come—and Junger’s book brings the war home with its soldiers, and forces us to better recognize and engage with this sizeable and evolving American community.There’s at least one more significant, and perhaps even more complicated, place to which Junger’s book takes us, though: to the defining role that war has, in our contemporary moment, in our enduring national identity, and, perhaps, in our human consciousness. As Irene put it, a hard but seemingly clear truth, and one from which Junger does not flinch, is that we are drawn to war, that it speaks to us somehow. I’m not claiming that’s true for all individuals, as that’d be a serious injustice to some of the best individuals I know. But collectively? We’ve got a deadly serious obsession with war, I’d say—and Junger’s book can help us admit that we’ve got a problem.March recap tomorrow,BenPS. So last chance for now: thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
March 29, 2013
March 29, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 5
[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that disorients, devastates, and entirely delivers.The roundtable’s fifth presenter, Jim Donahue of SUNY Potsdam, nominated James Welch’s Fool’s Crow . If Invisible Man is a famous American novel that (I believe) few Americans have actually read, Fool’s Crow is an almost criminally unknown novel that, Jim compellingly argued, we should all read. For one thing, Jim reminded us, the novel dramatizes the events surrounding one of the most under-remembered (including, I’m ashamed to admit, by me) crucial American events: the 1870 Marias River Massacre. But even beyond such vital historical contexts, Fool’s Crow’s unique form produces two distinct and equally important effects on its readers.I’ve written in this space about Karl Jacoby’s amazing Shadows at Dawn, and specifically about Jacoby’s multi-vocal and –perspectival structure. Welch’s novel is similarly structured, moving through sections focalized entirely through the voice, perspective, and worldview of both Blackfoot and European American characters. Yet while Jacoby’s work of nonfiction has its historian “narrator” to guide readers through those sections, Welch throws us into each perspective with no guidance—leaving non-English words untranslated, introducing specific and uncontextualized place and character names, and so on. For non-native (perhaps even non-Blackfoot) readers, the effect is profoundly disorienting, forcing us to do what Jim called the “cognitive work” of trying to understand this distinct perspective.So on the one hand, to echo the end of yesterday’s post, Welch’s novel would fall squarely onto the “challenging” end of the spectrum. Yet on the other, as Jim argued and as I would agree, Fool’s Crow is one of the most beautifully written novels of the last few decades (and then some). And when it comes to considering works for a National Big Read, it’s difficult to overstate how important such aesthetic power could be—after all, if we want to introduce Americans to historical significance and cultural diversity we could give them Jacoby’s book (and that’d be great); but if we want to demonstrate the value and pleasure of reading itself, what it can do to us, I don’t know of any books that would hit us more than Fool’s Crow.Final nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
The nominee that disorients, devastates, and entirely delivers.The roundtable’s fifth presenter, Jim Donahue of SUNY Potsdam, nominated James Welch’s Fool’s Crow . If Invisible Man is a famous American novel that (I believe) few Americans have actually read, Fool’s Crow is an almost criminally unknown novel that, Jim compellingly argued, we should all read. For one thing, Jim reminded us, the novel dramatizes the events surrounding one of the most under-remembered (including, I’m ashamed to admit, by me) crucial American events: the 1870 Marias River Massacre. But even beyond such vital historical contexts, Fool’s Crow’s unique form produces two distinct and equally important effects on its readers.I’ve written in this space about Karl Jacoby’s amazing Shadows at Dawn, and specifically about Jacoby’s multi-vocal and –perspectival structure. Welch’s novel is similarly structured, moving through sections focalized entirely through the voice, perspective, and worldview of both Blackfoot and European American characters. Yet while Jacoby’s work of nonfiction has its historian “narrator” to guide readers through those sections, Welch throws us into each perspective with no guidance—leaving non-English words untranslated, introducing specific and uncontextualized place and character names, and so on. For non-native (perhaps even non-Blackfoot) readers, the effect is profoundly disorienting, forcing us to do what Jim called the “cognitive work” of trying to understand this distinct perspective.So on the one hand, to echo the end of yesterday’s post, Welch’s novel would fall squarely onto the “challenging” end of the spectrum. Yet on the other, as Jim argued and as I would agree, Fool’s Crow is one of the most beautifully written novels of the last few decades (and then some). And when it comes to considering works for a National Big Read, it’s difficult to overstate how important such aesthetic power could be—after all, if we want to introduce Americans to historical significance and cultural diversity we could give them Jacoby’s book (and that’d be great); but if we want to demonstrate the value and pleasure of reading itself, what it can do to us, I don’t know of any books that would hit us more than Fool’s Crow.Final nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
March 28, 2013
March 28, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 4
[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that would bring greater visibility to profoundly American histories and identities.The roundtable’s fourth presenter, Kelley Wagers of Penn State Worthington Scranton, nominated Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . I don’t imagine I need to say much to introduce Ellison’s novel, which it’s fair to say is one of the most acclaimed and famous works of 20thcentury American literature. But of course acclaim and fame don’t necessarily equate to actual awareness and engagement, and Kelley made a compelling case for how a broad national reading of Ellison’s novel would bring greater visibility to some American stories that deserve and need it.Kelley focused on two distinct but interconnected such stories: the histories with which the novel engages; and the identity to which its narrator connects. On the former, Invisible Man has often been described as its title character’s metaphorical journey through many of the complex and crucial stages of African American history, and Kelley argued not only for the broad relevance of such histories, but for how the novel thus engages with the balance between individual and national histories to which we all connect. And on the latter, she noted that the African American men represented at length in existing Big Read selections are almost all accused criminals, making Ellison’s protagonist’s far different experiences and identity that much more worth our attention.I would agree with both of those emphases of Kelley’s, and would extend the latter point even further. In the panel’s discussion portion we talked a lot about the balance between accessibility and difficulty, between works that engage and works that challenge, and I can see good arguments on both ends of the spectrum for sure. But if we compare The Invisible Man to (for example) Mark Twain’s Jim or Harper Lee’s Tom Robinson, there’s one way in which I would definitely argue for Ellison’s character: his final line, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?,” challenges all Americans to consider what connects us, not just as members of a national fabric but as individuals with a great deal of (often invisible) common threads. Invisible Man might help us see the pattern.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
The nominee that would bring greater visibility to profoundly American histories and identities.The roundtable’s fourth presenter, Kelley Wagers of Penn State Worthington Scranton, nominated Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . I don’t imagine I need to say much to introduce Ellison’s novel, which it’s fair to say is one of the most acclaimed and famous works of 20thcentury American literature. But of course acclaim and fame don’t necessarily equate to actual awareness and engagement, and Kelley made a compelling case for how a broad national reading of Ellison’s novel would bring greater visibility to some American stories that deserve and need it.Kelley focused on two distinct but interconnected such stories: the histories with which the novel engages; and the identity to which its narrator connects. On the former, Invisible Man has often been described as its title character’s metaphorical journey through many of the complex and crucial stages of African American history, and Kelley argued not only for the broad relevance of such histories, but for how the novel thus engages with the balance between individual and national histories to which we all connect. And on the latter, she noted that the African American men represented at length in existing Big Read selections are almost all accused criminals, making Ellison’s protagonist’s far different experiences and identity that much more worth our attention.I would agree with both of those emphases of Kelley’s, and would extend the latter point even further. In the panel’s discussion portion we talked a lot about the balance between accessibility and difficulty, between works that engage and works that challenge, and I can see good arguments on both ends of the spectrum for sure. But if we compare The Invisible Man to (for example) Mark Twain’s Jim or Harper Lee’s Tom Robinson, there’s one way in which I would definitely argue for Ellison’s character: his final line, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?,” challenges all Americans to consider what connects us, not just as members of a national fabric but as individuals with a great deal of (often invisible) common threads. Invisible Man might help us see the pattern.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
March 27, 2013
March 27, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 3
[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that speaks to much of our contemporary moment—and a broad American audience.The roundtable’s third presenter, Jeff Renye of Temple and La Salle Universities, nominated Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust . West’s tragically brief career produced (among a few other works) two particularly unique and striking novels, Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts ; both have plenty to recommend them and deserve more of a place in our collective consciousness, but Jeff argued convincingly for a couple particularly significant and salient components to Locust.For one thing, Locust remains, more than 70 years after its publication, perhaps the best and certainly one of the most complex and challenging representations of that defining American cultural presence and influence, Hollywood. West takes seriously the attractive as well as the destructive qualities to that place of dreams, and his depiction of it has yet to be surpassed. Yet as Jeff noted, West is fully aware of the even bigger dream—the American Dream—to which Hollywood, journeying to the West, and many other concurrent narratives can be connected, and there are likewise few novels that deal with the dark underbelly of the Dream (sometimes called the American Nightmare) better than Locust.Jeff also discussed at length some of the more practical questions that underlie my Even Bigger Read concept, however, and so I want to make sure to mention that part of his presentation as well. To paraphrase his point: it’s all well and good for interested academic scholars to talk about what books we’d like everyone to read, but it’s quite another matter to think actively about how we connect to our fellow Americans, particularly those for whom reading—and even literacy—is far more of a complicated challenge than a job requirement. At the very least, we need to think about books that will speak to broad American audiences—and Jeff made a great case that West’s novel can and would do so.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
The nominee that speaks to much of our contemporary moment—and a broad American audience.The roundtable’s third presenter, Jeff Renye of Temple and La Salle Universities, nominated Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust . West’s tragically brief career produced (among a few other works) two particularly unique and striking novels, Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts ; both have plenty to recommend them and deserve more of a place in our collective consciousness, but Jeff argued convincingly for a couple particularly significant and salient components to Locust.For one thing, Locust remains, more than 70 years after its publication, perhaps the best and certainly one of the most complex and challenging representations of that defining American cultural presence and influence, Hollywood. West takes seriously the attractive as well as the destructive qualities to that place of dreams, and his depiction of it has yet to be surpassed. Yet as Jeff noted, West is fully aware of the even bigger dream—the American Dream—to which Hollywood, journeying to the West, and many other concurrent narratives can be connected, and there are likewise few novels that deal with the dark underbelly of the Dream (sometimes called the American Nightmare) better than Locust.Jeff also discussed at length some of the more practical questions that underlie my Even Bigger Read concept, however, and so I want to make sure to mention that part of his presentation as well. To paraphrase his point: it’s all well and good for interested academic scholars to talk about what books we’d like everyone to read, but it’s quite another matter to think actively about how we connect to our fellow Americans, particularly those for whom reading—and even literacy—is far more of a complicated challenge than a job requirement. At the very least, we need to think about books that will speak to broad American audiences—and Jeff made a great case that West’s novel can and would do so.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
March 26, 2013
March 26, 2013: National Big Read Recaps, Part 2
[This past Saturday, I chaired my NeMLA Roundtable on a National Big Read. Each of the six participants shared interesting and provocative perspectives on his or her chosen book or author, and so I wanted to follow up those presentations with some further thoughts. Not least so you can add your take on these and other books and authors that all Americans could read at the same time!]
The nominee that raises, and embodies, some defining national questions.The roundtable’s second presenter, Diana Polley of Southern New Hampshire University, nominated J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer . As Diana noted, Crèvecoeur’s book, which while generally treated as non-fiction could also be described (as she nicely put it) as the first American novel, represents in any case one of the first post-Revolutionary attempts to address—and still to date one of the most extended and explicit engagements with—the evolving and crucial question of what “American” means and entails.Diana did a great job making the case for why it is precisely Crèvecoeur’s emphasis on questions, rather than any particular answer (of his or of ours in analyzing his work), that makes his book one all Americans should read. For one thing, those questions allow him to consider virtually every significant issue of the era (most of which remain salient today); for another, his opening question, “What then is the American, this new man?” is just as open and potent in 2013 as it was in 1782; and for yet another, thinking of American identity as a series of questions highlights as well the fraught, contested, and potentially mythic nature of our national community.Diana likewise mentioned how much Crèvecoeur’s own life and identity highlight such American questions, and I wanted to drive home that level to the book’s appeal. As she noted, it’s possible to describe Crèvecoeuras largely foreign to America—he was born and died in France, and by the time he published the book he was living in London. But if do categorize him as an international visitor to the U.S., we’d have to do the same for one of the Revolution’s most influential voices: Thomas Paine, who was born in England and spent his final years in France. Which is to say, Revolutionary America wasn’t just international because of Lafayette, and transnational AmericanStudies goes as far back as America does. Crèvecoeur can help us think about all of that.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
The nominee that raises, and embodies, some defining national questions.The roundtable’s second presenter, Diana Polley of Southern New Hampshire University, nominated J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer . As Diana noted, Crèvecoeur’s book, which while generally treated as non-fiction could also be described (as she nicely put it) as the first American novel, represents in any case one of the first post-Revolutionary attempts to address—and still to date one of the most extended and explicit engagements with—the evolving and crucial question of what “American” means and entails.Diana did a great job making the case for why it is precisely Crèvecoeur’s emphasis on questions, rather than any particular answer (of his or of ours in analyzing his work), that makes his book one all Americans should read. For one thing, those questions allow him to consider virtually every significant issue of the era (most of which remain salient today); for another, his opening question, “What then is the American, this new man?” is just as open and potent in 2013 as it was in 1782; and for yet another, thinking of American identity as a series of questions highlights as well the fraught, contested, and potentially mythic nature of our national community.Diana likewise mentioned how much Crèvecoeur’s own life and identity highlight such American questions, and I wanted to drive home that level to the book’s appeal. As she noted, it’s possible to describe Crèvecoeuras largely foreign to America—he was born and died in France, and by the time he published the book he was living in London. But if do categorize him as an international visitor to the U.S., we’d have to do the same for one of the Revolution’s most influential voices: Thomas Paine, who was born in England and spent his final years in France. Which is to say, Revolutionary America wasn’t just international because of Lafayette, and transnational AmericanStudies goes as far back as America does. Crèvecoeur can help us think about all of that.Next nominee tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this nomination? Other nominees for an Even Bigger Read?
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