Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 392

January 28, 2013: Football in America, Part One

[In this week leading up to Super Bowl 47—that’s XLVII if you prefer how long-dead Romans would have referred to it—I’ll be highlighting some AmericanStudies issues and questions related to football in our past and present. Your Super responses, thoughts, and perspectives very welcome for a weekend post that’s sure to be a touchdown!]
On the longstanding historical debates that provide some important contexts for Rob Parker’s controversial recent critique of Robert Griffin III.It’s easy, in our era of 24-hour news cycles and instant internet tempests in tea pots and the like, to get over-excited about the latest shocking or scandalous comments. But even in a quieter age, sports journalist Rob Parker’s December 13th remarks about Washington Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III would likely have raised quite a stir. Appearing on ESPN’s “First Take” morning talk show, Parker called into question Griffin’s authentic blackness, asking whether he’s “one of us” (Parker is also African American) or instead a “cornball brother,” and pointing to (among other things) his  white fiance, his rumored affiliation with the Republican Party, and his general attitude toward the idea of the “black quarterback.” The comments were unsurprisingly greeted by an uproar, and have led to Parker’s 30-day suspension from all ESPN programming. Just another silly ESPN controversy over race and quarterbacking, right Rush?Certainly it is that; but Parker’s critique also relates to a long and complex set of narratives and debates in the African American community. In his 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth,” W.E.B. Du Bois argued that a cadre of impressive African American leaders would play a vital role in uplifting the community and race as a whole; that, as his striking first sentence put it most succinctly (in the gendered language of the day), “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” Du Bois was referring specifically to the need for higher education, an idea he would further develop in the same year in “Of the Training of Black Men” (a chapter from the seminal The Souls of Black Folk ). But he was also making a broader and more complex case: that a subset of highly successful, and highly visible, members of a particular community can improve, if not the conditions for all others members of that community (and certainly the ideal is that they will work to do so in one way or another), at least the external society’s narratives and perceptions of that group.Each part of that case, or at least of my framing of it within that sentence (as always with Du Bois, his dense and layered ideas deserve their own reading), is fraught with potential controversy and debate. Do successful members of a community in fact owe it to their community to work for its general well-being? (This is what Parker was implying, for example, when he said of Griffin that he might not be “down with the cause.”) Regardless, does their success change society’s views of their community? Can it? Should it? If it should and yet doesn’t, is that their fault, the society’s, nobody’s, everybody’s? These questions, as applied specifically to African Americans, were debated in Du Bois’s era, continued to be throughout the 20thcentury (with Du Bois himself revising his position in a 1948 speech), and are no less—and perhaps even more—significant in the age of Obama. They are also relevant, if distinct and worth separate analysis to be sure, to arguments over whether Asian Americans are a “model minority,” what that status would entail, what effects such narratives have on young Asian Americans, and so on. Which is to say, Rob Parker might have created a tempest in a teapot, but there’s a lot of historical and contemporary value to continuing to talk after the storm dies down.Next gridiron-inspired topic tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on Parker, Griffin, or these other issues? Other football and America stories or themes you’d highlight?

January 26-27, 2013: Crowd-Sourcing Second Terms

[With Monday’s Inauguration Day, Barack Obama begins his second term as President. So this week I’ve highlighted some interesting second term moments and issues from American history. As always, this crowd-sourced post on all things second terms and presidencies is drawn from the responses and thoughts of fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours, please!]Following up the Woodrow Wilson post, Maggi Smith-Dalton writes, “Ok. Woodrow Wilson DOES get a bad rap. Disclaimer up front: he is one of my favorite Presidents, because of his complexity and yet...because of a certain attractive simplicity in his worldview--which envisioned a world of justice and peace. One must always take into account his personal AND historical context vis a vis being the first Southern president elected since the end of the Civil War, and the fact his formative memories included the landscape of southern devastation. That he was a prisoner of his personal and historical time in terms of race relations (or with ferreting out the "Reds") is of course not laudable, but it is also not unusual nor is it beyond understanding. Civil liberties of US citizens have been violated repeatedly by governing bodies and Presidents great and mediocre since the establishment of government. As for the war involvement...well...that is far too complex a subject to address here in nuanced argument but my bottom line is that I respectfully object to the argument that hypocrisy entered into his decision to go to war. Furthermore.... Faults or not, mistakes or not, in my opinion he waged a heartbreaking, admirable, and difficult subsequent campaign to bring people to the table with words rather than swords, and his very failure to bring the US into the League of Nations nevertheless laid the seeds which saw fruition later in the establishment of the UN.  Such is often the case in human endeavor...like a garden plant, death must occur to nourish the soil for new plants to thrive. I have way more to say here but suffice to say I do not see Wilson's second term as a failure. And as an addendum, I truly believe his illness had much to do with the sorrows of this term, more than a failure of character or political will.” Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Interesting second term and/or presidential highlights you’d share?

January 25, 2013: Second Terms: The Runner-Ups

[With Monday’s Inauguration Day, Barack Obama begins his second term as President. So this week I’ll be highlighting some interesting second term moments and issues from American history. As always, your responses, thoughts, and other ideas, on Obama’s second term or any other one, will be appreciated for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
Briefer thoughts on the second terms that almost made the cut for a full post in this week’s series.1)      The Virginians: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, the Virginia triumvirate who held the presidency from 1801 through 1825, each served two terms. The two biggest events of the period happened in their first terms—the Louisiana Purchase and the opening of the War of 1812—but there’s plenty of interest in the second terms: Aaron Burr’s 1807 treason trial; the Battle of New Orleans in 1814-1815; the Missouri Compromise of 1820. All worth their own posts—maybe next time, Virginians!2)      Andrew Jackson: Jackson’s second term was full of high-stakes showdowns, from the Nullification Crisis that foreshadowed the Civil War and the unfolding battle between Jackson and Nicholas Biddle’s National Bank to the conflict over Indian Removal that led to the Trail of Tears. Really seems like there’s a full post in there—my bad, Old Hickory!3)      Ulysses S. Grant: You might have thought that no presidential administration could top Grant’s first term for corruption, nepotism, and scandal. Then there was Grant’s second term, which proved you mistaken. Yikes, Hero of Appomattox. Yikes. 4)      Late 19th/Early 20th Century Pseudo-Second-Termers: Grover Cleveland was the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms, so does he count? Then there’s William McKinley, who served less than 5 months of his second term before he was assassinated. Finally, there’s Teddy Roosevelt, who took over for McKinley, finished that term, and then was elected to another—his second? His first? I dunno. Sorry, guys, but not quite clear enough to make the cut.5)      Everybody Else: Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman are the same as TR—took over when Warren Hardingand Franklin Roosevelt died, were only elected once, missed the cut. FDR himself was elected to four terms—does he still have a second term in that case? As for Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush—you all were close competitors, lots of interesting late 20th and early 21stcentury trends and issues, plenty to AmericanStudy there. Sorry, dudes. Just didn’t happen.But of course there’s a great way to focus more on these second terms—add your thoughts on any or all of them for the weekend post! See you then,BenPS. You know what to do!

January 24, 2013: Second Terms: Woodrow Wilson

[With Monday’s Inauguration Day, Barack Obama begins his second term as President. So this week I’ll be highlighting some interesting second term moments and issues from American history. As always, your responses, thoughts, and other ideas, on Obama’s second term or any other one, will be appreciated for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On what made Wilson’s second term pretty bad—and why that’s not even close to the worst part.I nominated Woodrow Wilson for a Memory Day because, as I wrote there, I think he’s gotten a bit of a bad rap. Granted, I’m primed to defend anybody whom Glenn Beck describes as a “President You Should Hate,” and it’s true that much of what bothers Beck about Wilson—his academic background and temperament, his connections to the Progressive movement and its goals for making the federal government bigger and more responsive to Americans’ needs, his anti-war and internationalist efforts with the League of Nations—are to my mind among his best qualities and efforts instead. But I also think Wilson stands out, and looks even better, in direct contrast to his most explicit political adversaries: Teddy Roosevelt, with his uber-masculine ethos and often racist worldview; and the Republican Party of Calvin Coolidge, with its extreme laissez faire and pro-industry policies. For national political leaders of his era, Wilson was probably as good as it gets.On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that Wilson’s second term as president included two of the more troubling and even shameful elements of any presidential administration. The more famous of the two is also one of the most quick and hypocritical changes in policy in our history: having run for reeelection on a platform of neutrality with respect to World War I, and with the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson then decided to, well, go to war; he severed diplomatic relations with Germany less than two weeks after his inauguration, and then, addressing Congress about two months later, asked for and received a War Resolution. I’m not arguing that there wasn’t cause to go to war, nor that it was the wrong decision, necessarily; as with any international conflict, things were complicated and evolving and the U.S. may well have had little choice by 1917 but to join the war. But the simple fact is that Wilson had to know, at least by the end of the campaign, that the situation was changing and that his second term policy likely would have to follow, and so to continue running on the neutrality slogan was, at least, a deceptive and hypocritical choice (and at worst a betrayal of any and all pacifists or opponents of the war who voted for him for that reason).If his World War I policy represented a sudden and (in at least those ways) shameful shift at the start of his second term, however, the moment within that term that I’d call Wilson’s low point was unfortunately more consistent with his administration’s policies. Despite having run for office as a Progressive on race relations, Wilson had instead become the first president to segregate the federal civil service, and his record on issues and questions of race did not improve from there. But to my mind the low point came in 1919, and directly relates to the racist “race riots” that swept the nation in what came to be called the “Red Summer.”  Those riots were precipitated not only by the usual racial tensions and problems, but also by a combination of racist worries about returning African American soldiers and anti-communist fears (which would lead to the Red Scare soon afterward). And Wilson played into all of those racist and xenophobic fears, noting in a White House conversation that “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America.” One of the least presidential moments I know of, and part of a pretty bad second term all the way around.Final second term tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on Wilson, on Obama, or on any other president’s second term?

January 23, 2013: Second Terms: Abraham Lincoln

[With Monday’s Inauguration Day, Barack Obama begins his second term as President. So this week I’ll be highlighting some interesting second term moments and issues from American history. As always, your responses, thoughts, and other ideas, on Obama’s second term or any other one, will be appreciated for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
One two things I love about how Lincoln’s second term started, and one I especially hate about how it ended.It’s not quite the Gettysburg Address, but Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address (March 4, 1865) offers its own pretty remarkable combination of brevity and power. “Little that is new could be presented,” Lincoln noted at the outset in justifying his conciseness; after four years of brutal civil war and all the public coverage, response, and damage it had brought with it, he had a point, but of course a lack of cause has never kept many American politicians from rambling on. Moreover, just as he did at Gettysburg, Lincoln packed a number of striking phrases and ideas into this 700-word speech, such as his invocation of Scripture and Christian faith to at once link and yet contrast the North and South: “Each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged.” And I don’t know that the conclusion of any American speech begins more strongly than “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”Just over a month later, on April 9th, Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant and the Union at Appomattox Court House. Two days later, Lincoln delivered an impromptu speech from the White House’s front window on the prospects and his hopes for Reconstruction. The speech certainly extended the idea of charity for all, expressing Lincoln’s clear desire for a relatively magnanimous set of policies toward the former Confederate states. But it ended with one of Lincoln’s most overt and impassioned statements on behalf of African Americans, in this case an overt argument for extending the vote to African American men as quickly as possible. “The colored man,” Lincoln argued, “in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end.” For a president whose racial perspectives and politics had been complex, if consistently evolving, this moment can be seen as a high point, and in any case represented an impressively strong stand on what would become one of Reconstruction’s most contested questions.Unfortunately, Lincoln would not live to play a role in that debate or any other aspect of Reconstruction; in the audience for his April 11thspeech was actor and Southern partisan John Wilkes Booth, who three days later would assassinate Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. There is of course no shortage of reasons to mourn Lincoln’s untimely death, and to echo every word of Walt Whitman’s poetic eulogy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” But what I especially hate is that America was denied the chance to see a second Lincoln term, to witness the continuing evolution and (if history is any indication) growth of this unique and impressive leader. It’s easy to say that that’s partly hindsight, given the kind of leader that Andrew Johnson turned out to be, and all the other things that went wrong in the subsequent years. But honestly, even if none of that were the case, I don’t know that any AmericanStudies “What If?” would be more painful to contemplate than a full second term for Abraham Lincoln. Damn you, Booth!Next second term tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on Lincoln, on Obama, or on any other president’s second term?

January 22, 2013: Second Terms: George Washington

[With Monday’s Inauguration Day, Barack Obama begins his second term as President. So this week I’ll be highlighting some interesting second term moments and issues from American history. As always, your responses, thoughts, and other ideas, on Obama’s second term or any other one, will be appreciated for the crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On three ways in which our first president’s second term set precedents for his successors.George Washington was reeelected unanimously (and unopposed) in 1792, the last time a president ran uncontested, but much of his second term was dominated by unexpected crises and scandals. That included the unfolding effects of the French Revolution and the related European wars, about which I’ll write more below; but no event was more striking and significant than the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. Tensions had been boiling over since Washington and his Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton instituted a new whiskey excise in 1791, and came to a head three years later when a group of Pennsylvania farmers destroyed a tax inspector’s home and began armed resistance against the federal government. When diplomatic resolutions failed and Hamilton led a military force (of 13,000 militia men) against American citizens, it became clear that Washington’s honeymoon period was over; the presidency and government had become the controversial and debated entities that they have remained ever since.Striking as the Whiskey Rebellion was, it paled in comparison to the domestic rebellion across the pond, the event that dominated the world’s headlines throughout the decade: the French Revolution. That event, and the war between France and England that followed it, threw a number of unexpected twists into Washington’s presidency, including the seditious efforts of French ambassador Edmond-Charles “Citizen” Genêt, who attempted to gain popular support for the French government in direct opposition to Washington’s neutrality. But these international threats allow led Washington to strive for the kinds of ambitious successes toward which many subsequent second-term presidents have worked; in this case, that meant treaties which would strengthen America’s international relationships and make the new nation more formidable on the world stage. As would always be the case, the popular responses to those ambitious efforts were mixed: the 1795 Jay Treaty with Britain was widely condemned by the opposing Democrat-Republican Party, while the same year’s Treaty of San Lorenzo (known here as Pinckney’s Treaty) with Spain was seen as a coup for Washington. Despite these ambitious treaties, or perhaps because of the wars and threats which necessitated them, Washington was very worried about international affairs, and dwelt at length on their dangers in another precedent-setting event: his 1796 farewell address to the nation. In that lengthy text, which he did not deliver but had published in newspapers, Washington reflected on what he had learned in his eight years in office, praised the best of American life and society and warned of its worst tendencies (particularly in the form of political parties, above which the no-longer-running-for-office Washington could now safely stand), and departed the national scene with a few final words of wisdom. Given that term limits had not been established, and that Washington could have run for a third term had he chosen, this farewell address reflects a clear choice on the first president’s part, a decision to end his administration on his own terms and to do so while seeking to influence the subsequent administrations and centuries of American life. It’s fair to say that every departing president since has tried to do the same, one more way in which Washington got our traditions started.Next second term tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Takes on Washington, or any other president’s second term?

January 21, 2013: The Real King

[I wrote this post back in December 2010 and have re-posted it for each MLK Day since. Still seems relevant, and of course I’d love to hear your thoughts and responses and perspectives. So here ‘tis, and the week’s series will begin tomorrow.]

It probably puts me at significant risk of losing my AmericanStudies Card to say this—and you have no idea how hard it is to get a second one of those if you lose the first—but I think the “I Have a Dream” speech is kind of overrated. I’m sort of saying that for effect, since I don’t really mean that the speech itself isn’t as eloquent and powerful and pitch-perfect in every way as the narrative goes—it most definitely is, and while that’s true enough if you read the words, it becomes infinitely more true when you see video and thus hear audio of the speech and moment. But what is overrated, I think, is the weight that has been placed on the speech, the cultural work that it has been asked to do. Partly that has to do with contemporary politics, and especially with those voices who have tried to argue that King’s “content of their character” rather than “color of their skin” distinction means that he would oppose any and all forms of identity politics or affirmative action or the like; such readings tend to forget that King was speaking in that culminating section of the speech about what he dreams might happen “one day”—if, among other things, we give all racial groups the same treatment and opportunities—rather than what he thought was possible in America in the present.But the more significant overemphasis on the speech, I would argue, has occurred in the process by which it (and not even all of it, so much as just those final images of “one day”) has been made to symbolize all of—or at least represent in miniature—King’s philosophies and ideas and arguments. There’s no question that the speech’s liberal univeralism, its embrace (if in that hoped-for way) of an equality that knows no racial identifications, was a central thread within King’s work; and, perhaps more tellingly, was the thread by which he could most clearly be defined in opposition to a more stridently and wholly Black Nationalist voice like Malcolm X’s. Yet the simple and crucial fact is that King’s rich and complex perspective and philosophy, as they existed throughout his life but especially as they developed over the decade and a half between his real emergence onto the national scene with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and his assassination in 1968, contained a number of similarly central and crucial threads. There were for example his radical perspectives on class, wealth, and the focuses of government spending, a set of arguments which culminated in the last years of his life in both the “Poor People’s Campaign” and in increasingly vocal critiques of the military-industrial complex; and his strong belief not only in nonviolent resistance (as informed by figures as diverse as Thoreau and Gandhi) but also in pacifism in every sense, which likewise developed into his very public opposition to the Vietnam Year in his final years. While both of those perspectives were certainly not focused on one racial identity or community, neither were they broadly safe or moderate stances; indeed, they symbolized direct connections to some of the most radical social movements and philosophies of the era.To my mind, though, the most significant undernarrated thread—and perhaps the most central one in King’s perspective period—has to be his absolutely clear belief in the need to oppose racial segregation and discrimination, of every kind, in every way, as soon and as thoroughly as possible. Again, the contrast to Malcolm has tended to make King out to be the more patient or cautious voice, but I defy anyone to read “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”—the short piece that King wrote in April 1963 to a group of white Southern clergyman, while he was serving a brief jail sentence for his protest activities—and come away thinking that either patience or caution are in the top twenty adjectives that best describe the man and his beliefs. King would later expand the letter into a book, Why We Can’t Wait , the very title of which makes the urgency of his arguments more explicit still; but when it comes to raw passion and power, I don’t think any American text can top the “Letter” itself. Not raw in the sense of ineloquent—I tend to imagine that King’s first words, at the age of 1 or whenever, were probably more eloquent than any I’ll ever speak—but raw as in their absolute rejection, in the letter’s opening sentence, of his audience’s description of his protest activities as “unwise and untimely.” And raw as well in the razor sharp turn in tone in the two sentences that comprise one of the letter’s closing paragraphs: “If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”I guess what it boils down to for me is this: to remember King for one section of “I Have a Dream” is like remembering Shakespeare for the “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in Hamlet. Yeah, that’s a great bit, but what about the humor? The ghost? The political plotting and play within the play? The twenty-seven other great speeches? And then there’s, y’know, all those other pretty good, and very distinct, plays. And some poetry that wasn’t bad either. It’s about time we remembered the whole King, and thus got a bit closer to the real King and what he can really help us see about our national history, identity, and future.BenPS. What do you think?

January 19-20, 2013: Crowd-sourcing Back to School Hopes

[Every new semester brings with it lots of promise and possibilities; since I was on sabbatical in the fall, this will be my first time back in the classroom and the department in seven months, making it that much more of a new start. So this week I’ve highlighted some of those hopes and goals for my Spring 2013 semester. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses, and other spring hopes, of my fellow AmericanStudiers—add your hopes and thoughts, please!]

Responding to Wednesday’s post on the Capstone course, Max writes, “I do rather wish we'd had capstone when I was there... It's extremely scary going out into the world with an English degree. From all sides you get that question of ‘What are you going to do with that?’ It can be very disheartening.
How to fix that problem is a whole different barrel of fish of course. Emphasizing that it’s possible to be perfectly successful with an English degree is certainly important. Maybe point to all the people you know who have humanities degrees who are successful? Definitely pointing to people outside of academia who use their degrees. I always felt a little pigeon holed as far as job opportunities. Because seriously people love hiring English majors since we can write well.”Responding to Friday’s post, Max adds, “Speaking as some one who was in that first year writing program it would be monumental to actual see some change/growth there. Writing 1 is to this day probably the worst class I ever took and if that could be changed and/or better teacher/teacher communication could be brought about it would be amazing in my mind. Good luck!”Friday’s post was also Re-Tweeted by Monica Jacobe, Les Harrison, and Frank Mabee, reminding us of how many colleagues are committed to this kind of departmental and institutional change.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. So what do you think? Hopes of yours for the spring you’d share?

January 18, 2013: Back to School Hopes, Part Five

[Every new semester brings with it lots of promise and possibilities; since I was on sabbatical in the fall, this will be my first time back in the classroom and the department in seven months, making it that much more of a new start. So this week I’ll be highlighting some of those hopes and goals for my Spring 2013 semester. I’d love to hear some of yours for a crowd-sourced weekend post on our collective springs to come!]
On a much more complicated but pretty crucial long-term hope for my department and university.I wrote at length in this post, part of a series on summer jobs I’ve worked and their AmericanStudies connections, about the issue of adjunct labor in higher education, and more exactly the issues of how adjunct faculty are treated by the departments and institutions at which they work. I’ll reiterate here my final point from that post, since it raises one of the two main issues that I would identfy with the relationship between my department’s community and its own adjunct faculty members: that our adjuncts and our full-time faculty members have almost no contact of any kind, whether physically in our respective spaces, at meetings or in conversation, or in any other way. And the other problem, while very different, is also entirely connected to that reality: almost all of our sections of first-year writing, a core, required, two-semester course for all Fitchburg State students, are taught by adjuncts, thus making that course largely separate from the rest of the department.I also wrote at length in that post about many of the reasons why I believe it’s so important to address the first problem, the separation of adjunct faculty from the rest of their departments and institutions. But first-year writing presents another compelling reason: these courses comprise an opportunity for English departments to work with all students, and thus to consider what we particularly want these courses to be and do; and yet in many cases, such as ours, most of us English faculty members have very little connection to those courses, to the folks who are teaching them, to the students they’re impacting, to any aspect of this significant part of our departmental mission. At Fitchburg State, we’ve begun to address that issue in the last few years, working to create departmental objectives for our first-year writing courses, and to make sure that such conversations including adjunct as well as full-time faculty members at every stage. But there’s a lot more to do, and one of my longest-term hopes for the spring and beyond is that we can begin to design a First-Year Writing Program, a community where such conversations and connections can be consistently located and formalized, across any particular semesters and administrations.Creating such a program and space would also provide numerous and equally consistent opportunities for adjunct and full-time faculty members to meet, talk, and share our perspectives and goals for our courses and students. But whether or not we end up with a writing program, I believe, again, that it’s vital to find ways to make those connections more a part of our departments, institutions, and identities as we move forward. I know that’s a huge and nation-wide (or even international) problem, and I’m not pretending to have any easy answers. But I also know that the more of us who are aware of and engaging with these issues, the better—and so I hope to help move my department forward in that way in the spring and for many years thereafter. Crowd-soucred spring hopes tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think? Thoughts on these questions? Hopes of yours for the spring you’d share for that weekend post?

January 17, 2013: Back to School Hopes, Part Four

[Every new semester brings with it lots of promise and possibilities; since I was on sabbatical in the fall, this will be my first time back in the classroom and the department in seven months, making it that much more of a new start. So this week I’ll be highlighting some of those hopes and goals for my Spring 2013 semester. I’d love to hear some of yours for a crowd-sourced weekend post on our collective springs to come!]
On the recent and ongoing changes in the profession, and how my department can evolve in response to them.A few years back, our department was discussing a possible job listing in New Media, and one of my more senior colleagues said, with a touch of self-deprecation but also a good deal of (justified and well-earned) pride, that she had no idea what that phrase meant, and that perhaps her ignorance was due to the fact that she has “a 1970s image of an English Department.” Having grown up with a Dad who received his PhD from one English Department in the 1970s and then was immediately hired by another (where he’s taught ever since), I most definitely knew and understood what she meant. Of course there’s no one thing that English studies has ever meant, and of course the discipline continued to evolve throughout the 20th century; but I think the odds are good that almost every class offered in each of these 1970s English departments focused on, y’know, literature as traditionally defined: poems, fiction, plays, nonfiction, literary criticism, and so on. Maybe one or two radical professors were also teaching films, or using photographs or other visual media to complement their literary focal points—and some were definitely incorporating European theorists and their very distinct definitions of literature—but for the most part, English remained a traditional, textual, literary discipline.Fast forward four decades and the recent hires in our English Studies department include that New Media scholar, as well a Film Studies specialist and a Romanticist who, while teaching the traditional authors, has also created new coursesfocused on zombies, the punk movement, and an introduction to Cultural Studies. Of the many factors that have contributed to this expanded and still expanding definition of the discipline of English Studies, none is more central than that latter concept: Cultural Studies, the idea that everything (from traditional literature to film and TV, comic books to advertisements, material culture to MTV, shopping malls to social media, in our present moment and into the distant past) is a text. Literary scholars have, unsurprisingly, different perspectives on this addition to the discipline—you can probably imagine how those 1970s-trained folks I mentioned above feel, and from this blog’s varied focal points can probably get a good sense of my own take—but the bottom line is that the image of a 2010s English Department most definitely includes Cultural Studies alongside the more traditional focal points and studies. The question that remains, then, is whether and how each individual department develops that element, offers its possibilities and analytical frames to its majors and students, practices this newer and still evolving part of our discipline.There’s no right, and certainly no one, answer to that question. But in the case of my own department, one of my hopes for the spring is that we move toward the creation of a new, fourth track in Cultural Studies. One of our previous tracks has moved to another department on campus, so we have space and opportunity to add a new such concentration. We have those new colleagues and their courses, as well as the possibility to request a couple new hires to replace the faculty who moved with the previous track. And I think as a whole we have a department that recognizes the value, for our students and for ourselves, of teaching and studying and learning and practicing ways to analyze the variety of texts and contexts, media and modes, voices and communities that constitute our 21st century moment and that have in many ways comprised every era. Cultural Studies won’t mean the same thing for our Medievalist as it would for the Film Studies guy, will have distinct applications for a Shakespearean as it does for an AmericanStudier like me—but for all of us, it can become a strong component to what we do and who we are as we move forward.Final spring hopes tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think? Thoughts on these questions? Hopes of yours for the spring you’d share?