Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 396
January 21, 2013
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?
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, 2013
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?
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
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?
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
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?
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?
January 16, 2013
January 16, 2013: Back to School Hopes, Part Three
[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 my expectations for myself as I continue to work with our graduating English majors.In my education reform post a couple weeks back, I focused mostly on elementary and secondary education, and on issues and ideals connected to those earliest and most universal educational experiences. But of course higher education has its own set of interconnected contemporary crises, including many related to the same issues (lack of funding and support, narratives of “accountability” and their impacts on teachers and institutions, critiques of public educators) I addressed in that post. And in the last few years, as I have begun teaching our departmental capstone course (a required class for all graduating senior English majors), I have found myself confronted more overtly by two other, related challenges facing higher education: the increasingly uncertain futures facing college graduates, particularly those with humanities degrees; and the questions about the meaning and value of such degrees, and of university departments and programs in the humanities.Obviously I believe that humanities degrees, and specifically English ones, are incredibly valuable, in the most practical as well as the most philosophical senses. But it’s one thing to believe something, and another to communicate it, and more exactly to help others work toward it; when it comes to two key aspects of the Capstone, I know I can and will improve in how I help my students engage with these issues. On the practical questions of their future possibilities, I’ve made sure since I started teaching Capstone that the students produced tangible materials to help: sample resumes and CVs, job cover letters and grad school statements of purpose, and the like. But in each of the three sections to date I’ve nonetheless come to feel as if many of the students leave the course feeling no more clear about what’s next than where they began; while I don’t expect that they’ll identify one definite career or future, I would like them to have a more specific sense of options and opportunities, and of the next steps related to them. So this spring I expect to add more conversations and materials to help them get there—and would love your input on how I can best do that!If those practical, future-centered materials provide one of the course’s three focal points and objectives, the other two—shared readings drawn from our department’s different tracks, and the accompanying class conversations about those texts and contexts; student work on their required senior portfolios, where they assemble and reflect on pieces from across their college careers—are both places where I can see us addressing more fully the philosophical questions of the meaning and value of an English major, of studying the humanities, of the kinds of writing and reading our students do in their tracks and courses. While I hope that both the class discussions and the portfolio work have helped the students think about these broader questions and stakes, I have to admit that I haven’t really foregrounded them in any explicit way in the prior sections. But I’d say it’s time, time to get the students talking and thinking about why we do what we do, and why doing it is has significantly meaning and value in our lives, our communities, our society. And again, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to introduce such questions into our discussions, into their portfolio process, into every aspect of a culminating class like the Capstone.Next spring hopes tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think? Thoughts on this course and these questions? Hopes of yours for the spring you’d share?
On my expectations for myself as I continue to work with our graduating English majors.In my education reform post a couple weeks back, I focused mostly on elementary and secondary education, and on issues and ideals connected to those earliest and most universal educational experiences. But of course higher education has its own set of interconnected contemporary crises, including many related to the same issues (lack of funding and support, narratives of “accountability” and their impacts on teachers and institutions, critiques of public educators) I addressed in that post. And in the last few years, as I have begun teaching our departmental capstone course (a required class for all graduating senior English majors), I have found myself confronted more overtly by two other, related challenges facing higher education: the increasingly uncertain futures facing college graduates, particularly those with humanities degrees; and the questions about the meaning and value of such degrees, and of university departments and programs in the humanities.Obviously I believe that humanities degrees, and specifically English ones, are incredibly valuable, in the most practical as well as the most philosophical senses. But it’s one thing to believe something, and another to communicate it, and more exactly to help others work toward it; when it comes to two key aspects of the Capstone, I know I can and will improve in how I help my students engage with these issues. On the practical questions of their future possibilities, I’ve made sure since I started teaching Capstone that the students produced tangible materials to help: sample resumes and CVs, job cover letters and grad school statements of purpose, and the like. But in each of the three sections to date I’ve nonetheless come to feel as if many of the students leave the course feeling no more clear about what’s next than where they began; while I don’t expect that they’ll identify one definite career or future, I would like them to have a more specific sense of options and opportunities, and of the next steps related to them. So this spring I expect to add more conversations and materials to help them get there—and would love your input on how I can best do that!If those practical, future-centered materials provide one of the course’s three focal points and objectives, the other two—shared readings drawn from our department’s different tracks, and the accompanying class conversations about those texts and contexts; student work on their required senior portfolios, where they assemble and reflect on pieces from across their college careers—are both places where I can see us addressing more fully the philosophical questions of the meaning and value of an English major, of studying the humanities, of the kinds of writing and reading our students do in their tracks and courses. While I hope that both the class discussions and the portfolio work have helped the students think about these broader questions and stakes, I have to admit that I haven’t really foregrounded them in any explicit way in the prior sections. But I’d say it’s time, time to get the students talking and thinking about why we do what we do, and why doing it is has significantly meaning and value in our lives, our communities, our society. And again, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to introduce such questions into our discussions, into their portfolio process, into every aspect of a culminating class like the Capstone.Next spring hopes tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think? Thoughts on this course and these questions? Hopes of yours for the spring you’d share?
January 15, 2013
January 15, 2013: Back to School Hopes, Part Two
[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 inspirations I have received and hope to continue receiving from the student projects in my Ethnic American Literature course.I wrote at length in this post, and at even greater length in this article for the online journal Teaching American Literature, about my creation of a new Ethnic American Literature syllabus, with a couple main innovations (at least in my own teaching): reading two works at the same time, to make cross-generational connections within similar ethnic or racial communities (between the autobiographies of Frederick Douglassand Richard Wright, for example); and having the students produce not essays or analyses of the readings, but multi-generational family timelines and analysis projects. My goal for the latter choice was to have the students treat their own identities, families, and heritages with the same analytical rigor we’d bring to our readings; and thus, at the same time, to help them connect themselves to the “others” about whom we’d be reading all semester.I’ve taught this new Ethnic syllabus three times now (this spring’s section will be the fourth), and I would say the projects have definitely helped us achieve (or at least move closer to) those interconnected goals. But they’ve also had an unexpected and not at all unimportant side effect: they have provided all of us, and most definitely me, with complex, varied, and thoroughly inspiring American stories. Every project has included such inspiring details, and in many cases they have helped the students themselves connect much more fully with (or even learn about for the first time) their inspiring ancestors and family histories. But without question some particularly noteworthy individuals have stood out among that impressive cohort, including: the student’s grandmother who immigrated illegally from Mexico, worked in the worst conditions for many decades, and through that effort funded her daughter’s college education and now works instead at the company that daughter founded; the student’s mother who escaped an abusive marriage, received a nursing degree while working two jobs and raising her three children by herself, and inspired her twin daughters (two of my best students) to pursue nursing as well; the student who was raised in foster homes alongside her three younger siblings and who has become a role model for each of them, with all four (at that time) attending or about to begin college.The students share some of their project’s stories and analyses in end-of-semester presentations, and I’m quite sure that these and many other inspiring individuals have impacted everyone who has heard about them. But again, I can’t overstate how much I personally have been impacted by them, and by realizing how much these students are the culmination (or rather continuation) of such histories. I’ve danced around it long enough in this space, so I’ll just come out and say it: I’m in the midst of getting divorced, and am, among many other emotions, so uncertain about the future, for myself, for my boys, for my family. So neither can I overstate how much I will depend on such inspiring stories, and on the reminders they provide of the importance of perseverence and strength, of responding to the toughest times and circumstances with the best of what we—we Americans, we humans—can be. My students have given me numerous inspiring examples already, and I hope and believe I’ll get many more in the semester to come.Next spring hopes tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think? Thoughts on this course and these projects? Hopes of yours for the spring you’d share?
On the inspirations I have received and hope to continue receiving from the student projects in my Ethnic American Literature course.I wrote at length in this post, and at even greater length in this article for the online journal Teaching American Literature, about my creation of a new Ethnic American Literature syllabus, with a couple main innovations (at least in my own teaching): reading two works at the same time, to make cross-generational connections within similar ethnic or racial communities (between the autobiographies of Frederick Douglassand Richard Wright, for example); and having the students produce not essays or analyses of the readings, but multi-generational family timelines and analysis projects. My goal for the latter choice was to have the students treat their own identities, families, and heritages with the same analytical rigor we’d bring to our readings; and thus, at the same time, to help them connect themselves to the “others” about whom we’d be reading all semester.I’ve taught this new Ethnic syllabus three times now (this spring’s section will be the fourth), and I would say the projects have definitely helped us achieve (or at least move closer to) those interconnected goals. But they’ve also had an unexpected and not at all unimportant side effect: they have provided all of us, and most definitely me, with complex, varied, and thoroughly inspiring American stories. Every project has included such inspiring details, and in many cases they have helped the students themselves connect much more fully with (or even learn about for the first time) their inspiring ancestors and family histories. But without question some particularly noteworthy individuals have stood out among that impressive cohort, including: the student’s grandmother who immigrated illegally from Mexico, worked in the worst conditions for many decades, and through that effort funded her daughter’s college education and now works instead at the company that daughter founded; the student’s mother who escaped an abusive marriage, received a nursing degree while working two jobs and raising her three children by herself, and inspired her twin daughters (two of my best students) to pursue nursing as well; the student who was raised in foster homes alongside her three younger siblings and who has become a role model for each of them, with all four (at that time) attending or about to begin college.The students share some of their project’s stories and analyses in end-of-semester presentations, and I’m quite sure that these and many other inspiring individuals have impacted everyone who has heard about them. But again, I can’t overstate how much I personally have been impacted by them, and by realizing how much these students are the culmination (or rather continuation) of such histories. I’ve danced around it long enough in this space, so I’ll just come out and say it: I’m in the midst of getting divorced, and am, among many other emotions, so uncertain about the future, for myself, for my boys, for my family. So neither can I overstate how much I will depend on such inspiring stories, and on the reminders they provide of the importance of perseverence and strength, of responding to the toughest times and circumstances with the best of what we—we Americans, we humans—can be. My students have given me numerous inspiring examples already, and I hope and believe I’ll get many more in the semester to come.Next spring hopes tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think? Thoughts on this course and these projects? Hopes of yours for the spring you’d share?
January 14, 2013
January 14, 2013: Back to School Hopes, Part One
[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 three ways I hope digital resources can contribute to my American literature survey sections this spring.In one of my September 2012 “Fall Forward” posts, I wrote about my plans to bring digital resources more fully into some of my core American lit syllabi. I didn’t exactly get to that work this fall, but I’m most definitely still hoping to add such digital materials to my two sections of American Literature II (Civil War to the present) this spring. For example, our first long reading in the course is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1885), and it’s long past time I made better use of all the relevant materials on my Dad’s Mark Twain in His Times website. I envision starting each of our four discussions of the novel with a particular text or context from the site—one of Kemble’s illustrations, one of Twain’s influences, a contemporary review of the novel—and using it to help provide some jumping off points for the students’ own takes on the novel and these related questions. As long as I make clear to the students that such contextual materials don’t have “right” interpretations any more than the primary text does, I think it should give them additional ways in to reading and analyzing Twain’s novel.The Twain site is an obvious, specific digital resource for that novel, but I’m also hoping to bring in more parallel but equally relevant historical and cultural materials for other readings. For example, our second long reading is Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition(1901), and I’m planning for the third day of discussions—the one focused on the section of the novel dedicated to the near-lynching of an innocent African American servant—to ask the students to spend some time examining the pictures and artifacts collected at the amazing Without Sanctuary site . Again, I don’t think there are definite interpretations or answers that we can or should take away from either that site or Chesnutt’s portrayal of lynching—but I’ll be very interested to hear what the students notice and think, and I can’t imagine that our conversation about the issue and the novel won’t be enriched by putting Chesnutt’s story side by side with this unparalleled archive and resource.Then there are my more open-ended and (so far) undefined digital plans and hopes. Our third and fourth long readings, Nella Larsen’s linked novellas Quicksand and Passing (1928 and 1929) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), are each set in and centrally defined by their Roaring ‘20s worlds. (Quicksandsomewhat less so, as its protagonist Helga travels to many locations; but 1920s Harlem is the only place to which she returns in the novella.) I imagine my students, like most Americans, will have some sense of that period and world; but I’d love for us to use digital resources to help reconnect more fully with the era’s details and environment. But what would that mean, exactly? Recordings and contextual materials for 1920s jazz artists? Various material culture artifacts and other primary sources from the Harlem Renaissance? Clips from Hollywood films, newsreels, and other materials from the decade? Those all seem possible, but there’s only so much time and space, and only so much I can ask my students to look at (particularly in addition to our readings). So I’m still thinking about this one for sure—and would love to hear your takes, suggestions, or perspectives!That goes for all of this, of course—and all week! Next spring hopes tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think? Thoughts on this course and these connections? Other hopes for the spring you’d share?
On three ways I hope digital resources can contribute to my American literature survey sections this spring.In one of my September 2012 “Fall Forward” posts, I wrote about my plans to bring digital resources more fully into some of my core American lit syllabi. I didn’t exactly get to that work this fall, but I’m most definitely still hoping to add such digital materials to my two sections of American Literature II (Civil War to the present) this spring. For example, our first long reading in the course is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1885), and it’s long past time I made better use of all the relevant materials on my Dad’s Mark Twain in His Times website. I envision starting each of our four discussions of the novel with a particular text or context from the site—one of Kemble’s illustrations, one of Twain’s influences, a contemporary review of the novel—and using it to help provide some jumping off points for the students’ own takes on the novel and these related questions. As long as I make clear to the students that such contextual materials don’t have “right” interpretations any more than the primary text does, I think it should give them additional ways in to reading and analyzing Twain’s novel.The Twain site is an obvious, specific digital resource for that novel, but I’m also hoping to bring in more parallel but equally relevant historical and cultural materials for other readings. For example, our second long reading is Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition(1901), and I’m planning for the third day of discussions—the one focused on the section of the novel dedicated to the near-lynching of an innocent African American servant—to ask the students to spend some time examining the pictures and artifacts collected at the amazing Without Sanctuary site . Again, I don’t think there are definite interpretations or answers that we can or should take away from either that site or Chesnutt’s portrayal of lynching—but I’ll be very interested to hear what the students notice and think, and I can’t imagine that our conversation about the issue and the novel won’t be enriched by putting Chesnutt’s story side by side with this unparalleled archive and resource.Then there are my more open-ended and (so far) undefined digital plans and hopes. Our third and fourth long readings, Nella Larsen’s linked novellas Quicksand and Passing (1928 and 1929) and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), are each set in and centrally defined by their Roaring ‘20s worlds. (Quicksandsomewhat less so, as its protagonist Helga travels to many locations; but 1920s Harlem is the only place to which she returns in the novella.) I imagine my students, like most Americans, will have some sense of that period and world; but I’d love for us to use digital resources to help reconnect more fully with the era’s details and environment. But what would that mean, exactly? Recordings and contextual materials for 1920s jazz artists? Various material culture artifacts and other primary sources from the Harlem Renaissance? Clips from Hollywood films, newsreels, and other materials from the decade? Those all seem possible, but there’s only so much time and space, and only so much I can ask my students to look at (particularly in addition to our readings). So I’m still thinking about this one for sure—and would love to hear your takes, suggestions, or perspectives!That goes for all of this, of course—and all week! Next spring hopes tomorrow,BenPS. So what do you think? Thoughts on this course and these connections? Other hopes for the spring you’d share?
January 13, 2013
January 13, 2013: Lincoln Redux
I’ve already written in this space about Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln; but I hadn’t seen the movie at that point, and now I have. So it felt appropriate to revisit that post and some of its questions, and in particular to highlight three things that stood out to me about the movie and American history:
1) As I wrote in that prior post, the most common critique of the film, at least among scholars, has been the absence of active African American characters and choices. While I agree with the film’s defenders that to some degree these critics are advocating for an entirely different film than this one, I would nonetheless agree with the critics on this note: one of the film’s powerful and intimate moments is a conversation between Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley, the former slave turned Mrs. Lincoln’s seamstress; and it would have been incredibly easy, and entirely appropriate, for screenwriter Tony Kushner to add a sentence or two to that conversation about Keckley’s social activism among African Americans in Washington and beyond. Not sure why he didn’t, and it is an unfortunate absence.2) On the other hand, the conversation does exemplify what I would call the film’s best and most historical moments—not the big details nor the sweeping monologues, important as both are to the unfolding plot and story; but small and intimate moments in which characters, and particularly of course Lincoln, make seemingly minor choices or decisions that have significant impacts on their lives and our shared histories. While there are of course complications and downsides to the “Great Man” theory of history, it’s nonetheless true that a figure like Lincoln profoundly influenced our national arc—and I think it’s compelling and accurate to present that influence through small but potent moments and choices.3) But on the other other hand, perhaps my single favorite moment in the film is an overtly and self-consciously big one. I won’t spoil all the details of it, but it involves one of my American heroes and the film’s most fun and compelling character, Thaddeus Stevens (as played to the hilt by the great Tommy Lee Jones; minor spoilers in that clip). Yet despite the overarching importance and themes in this moment, what makes it truly great is the way Jones plays the gradual and yet striking and crucial evolution of Stevens’ ideas and words in this sequence; and how, along the way, he rediscovers one of the most central American ideals: the paramount importance of equality under the law.All in all, despite its inevitable limitations, I’d call it one of the best American historical films I’ve seen. Well worth your time, and I’d love to hear your thoughts if you have already seen it or when you do.Next series starts tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on the film? On other historical films?
1) As I wrote in that prior post, the most common critique of the film, at least among scholars, has been the absence of active African American characters and choices. While I agree with the film’s defenders that to some degree these critics are advocating for an entirely different film than this one, I would nonetheless agree with the critics on this note: one of the film’s powerful and intimate moments is a conversation between Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley, the former slave turned Mrs. Lincoln’s seamstress; and it would have been incredibly easy, and entirely appropriate, for screenwriter Tony Kushner to add a sentence or two to that conversation about Keckley’s social activism among African Americans in Washington and beyond. Not sure why he didn’t, and it is an unfortunate absence.2) On the other hand, the conversation does exemplify what I would call the film’s best and most historical moments—not the big details nor the sweeping monologues, important as both are to the unfolding plot and story; but small and intimate moments in which characters, and particularly of course Lincoln, make seemingly minor choices or decisions that have significant impacts on their lives and our shared histories. While there are of course complications and downsides to the “Great Man” theory of history, it’s nonetheless true that a figure like Lincoln profoundly influenced our national arc—and I think it’s compelling and accurate to present that influence through small but potent moments and choices.3) But on the other other hand, perhaps my single favorite moment in the film is an overtly and self-consciously big one. I won’t spoil all the details of it, but it involves one of my American heroes and the film’s most fun and compelling character, Thaddeus Stevens (as played to the hilt by the great Tommy Lee Jones; minor spoilers in that clip). Yet despite the overarching importance and themes in this moment, what makes it truly great is the way Jones plays the gradual and yet striking and crucial evolution of Stevens’ ideas and words in this sequence; and how, along the way, he rediscovers one of the most central American ideals: the paramount importance of equality under the law.All in all, despite its inevitable limitations, I’d call it one of the best American historical films I’ve seen. Well worth your time, and I’d love to hear your thoughts if you have already seen it or when you do.Next series starts tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on the film? On other historical films?
January 12, 2013
January 12, 2013: Crowd-sourcing American Homes
[This AmericanStudier is about to move into a new home, with all the possibility and uncertainty that that transition entails. So this week’s series has highlighted some AmericanStudies connections to ideas and images, ideals and limitations, of home. This crowd-sourced post is drawn from the responses, suggestions, and home-ly ideas of fellow AmericanStudiers—add yours below, please!]
On Twitter, following up Monday’s post, Jason Parkshighlights some of his favorite Modernist texts portraying returns home: “The novel No-No Boy by John Okada , Hemingway's "Soldier's Home,"& various characters in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio .”As an Architect’s Daughter (her caps), Irene Martyniuk responds to the series by writing, “It seems to me that the aporia in your posts is the actual physicality of a home/house itself. America boasts some amazing houses in a number of categories. There are the super indulgent ones that people can now tour in Newport, but there are also the homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, and others (like the Glass House in Connecticut) that dot our landscape. These buildings have challenged us to rethink what space is and what is lived in space. I know my father is groaning at my clumsiness in writing this, but how we enclose space is vital to how we live. Architects encourage us to rethink space—how we use it, how we live in it, how we make it our own. The idea that there is a perfect space for everyone is balderdash, of course. Different cultures also have vastly different kinds of homes. The Peabody Essex Museum has a walk-through of a Chinese house, and most of us learn about Native American houses when we are growing up. The idea is that the physicality of space as it relates to a home is vastly different from culture to culture, but within a culture as well. … I guess my point is that architecture and architects should not be left out of the AmericanStudies discussion when it comes to homes and houses.”Special post tomorrow,BenPS. American images, ideas, and themes of home you’d add to these? Share ‘em please!
On Twitter, following up Monday’s post, Jason Parkshighlights some of his favorite Modernist texts portraying returns home: “The novel No-No Boy by John Okada , Hemingway's "Soldier's Home,"& various characters in Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio .”As an Architect’s Daughter (her caps), Irene Martyniuk responds to the series by writing, “It seems to me that the aporia in your posts is the actual physicality of a home/house itself. America boasts some amazing houses in a number of categories. There are the super indulgent ones that people can now tour in Newport, but there are also the homes designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, and others (like the Glass House in Connecticut) that dot our landscape. These buildings have challenged us to rethink what space is and what is lived in space. I know my father is groaning at my clumsiness in writing this, but how we enclose space is vital to how we live. Architects encourage us to rethink space—how we use it, how we live in it, how we make it our own. The idea that there is a perfect space for everyone is balderdash, of course. Different cultures also have vastly different kinds of homes. The Peabody Essex Museum has a walk-through of a Chinese house, and most of us learn about Native American houses when we are growing up. The idea is that the physicality of space as it relates to a home is vastly different from culture to culture, but within a culture as well. … I guess my point is that architecture and architects should not be left out of the AmericanStudies discussion when it comes to homes and houses.”Special post tomorrow,BenPS. American images, ideas, and themes of home you’d add to these? Share ‘em please!
January 11, 2013
January 11, 2013: American Homes: Elif Armbruster’s Guest Post
[This AmericanStudier is about to move into a new home, with all the possibility and uncertainty that that transition entails. So this week’s series will highlight some AmericanStudies connections to ideas and images, ideals and limitations, of home. Add your responses, suggestions, and home-ly ideas for the weekend post, please!]
[Elif Armbruster, Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University and the incoming co-president of the New England American Studies Association, is the author of one of the best works I know on American homes: Domestic Biographies: Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton at Home . So when I was planning this series I knew she’d be an ideal guest poster, and fortunately for us she has agreed to share this very interesting take on these themes of home, identity, and writing.]From Laura Esquivel to Suzan Colon:
Food and Female Identity in Fact and Fiction
Last fall I taught an Honors Seminar in Latina Literature in which I paired one of the classic works of the genre—Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate—with the little known work Cherries in Winter by Puerto Rican-American author, Suzan Colon. These works struck me as worthy of comparative study because both are organized around recipes which introduce the chapters and both use food as the primary tool of assertion, even identification, for each main female character. In Esquivel’s novel, this is Tita de la Garza, the youngest daughter of a Mexican family living at the turn of the twentieth century; in Colon’s work, it is Colon herself, who, having recently been laid off from her job as a magazine editor, uses her grandmother’s recipes to rebuild her life as an unemployed (or self-employed) writer, and thus, find herself.
In this guest post, I explore two ideas based upon these works: first, how the acts of preparing and cooking food empower, rather than limit, Latina women in general and these two female characters in particular; and second, how the use of food and the kitchen in Latina literature has changed (or not, as the case may be) in the twenty years that separate Esquivel’s work from Colon’s. This latter idea takes us from a study of Esquivel’s use of magical realism in her 1989 novel, to Colon’s vividly personal memoir, published in 2009.
In 1994, Teresa Cordova wrote that Latina women are traditionally regarded as “Tortilla makers and baby-producers, to be touched and not heard.” These words highlight the two realms that represent the most potent forms of constraint for the Latina woman: her sexuality and her role as obedient wife and caregiver in the domestic realm. Yet, as I argue here, Esquivel and Colon resist and revise the traditional patriarchal views of Latinas by giving the women the power to control not just their own, but the lives of others through the food that their respective female characters make. The production and consumption of food, is essential for not only sustaining but also reproducing life.
Neither Tita in Esquivel’s work, nor Suzan in her memoir, submit to traditional domestic roles even though both are found at the center of the house in the respective works; both women come to life in the kitchen and both provide life to others through their work in the kitchen. The domestic role has changed for these Latina women, though, for, by standing resolutely in a sphere once known primarily for its repression—and claiming it entirely for themselves—both women—and their authors—remake that sphere into one of total freedom. The kitchen in both works becomes the key to authorship, to creativity, and to life itself. In a sense it’s an incubator for much more than recipes.
This is not to say that the female domestic space of the kitchen is not a highly contested one. One critic, Maite Zubiaurre, writes in her essay, “Culinary Eros in Contemporary Hispanic Female Fiction” (2006), that a careful reading of Like Water for Chocolate reveals Tita’s “utter solitude” and “self-absorption” while in the kitchen, and that because Tita keeps her culinary power and knowledge largely to herself, she—and her sphere, the kitchen—reinforces her sense of isolation, rather than fostering a sense of solidarity or congeniality. Zubiaurre goes further to state that the kitchen environment is hierarchical and secretive, claiming, “The kitchen mirrors an authoritarian and segregationist society, instead of fostering an alternative sense of community, solidarity and equalitarian justice among women” (4).
Predictably, other scholars argue the opposite. Kristine Ibsen, for example, writing in her essay, “On Recipes, Reading, and Revolution,” in the Hispanic Review (in 1995), claims that Esquivel’s kitchen gives Tita power and control as the cook, and that by drawing others in to either help prepare certain foods, or to eat the food, Tita is able to establish a sense of security in the world, not a feeling of isolation from it. While both points of view are valid, Esquivel writes that for Tita, the kitchen is a safe haven, it is her “realm,” a space over which she exerts control, and in which she grows “vigorous and healthy” (7), words which invest the space with good qualities rather than deprivations. Throughout the novel, Tita counters her seeming isolation in the kitchen by inviting her sisters in to observe and to help; at times these moments end badly, but they also can be positive; for example, when Tita invites Gertrudis and Rosaura to sprinkle water on the griddle pan in the opening chapter, Gertrudis “found the game enticing and threw herself into it with the enthusiasm she always showed where rhythm, movement, or music were involved” (8). Similarly, the bond between Tita and Nacha, the actual cook, is unbreakable. Nacha is the primary caretaker for Tita throughout her childhood, and provides her with the love and support that Mama Elena fails to give; as the source of most of the recipes in the book, she is also the source of Tita’s sustenance, physical and otherwise. While she dies on the day of Rosaura's wedding, she returns throughout the narrative as a spiritual guide for Tita, and thus spiritually sustains her as well.
While Zubiaurre and Ibsen take opposing views towards Tita in the kitchen, I would like to propose that the kitchen in Like Water for Chocolate functions in yet a third way. It may be the site of a congenial community (most of the time, only Tita and Nacha are in the kitchen; others remain outside, and that’s where the community bonding takes place—i.e.: at the dining room table or at the baptismal banquet for example) and an isolationist zone, but it also, for Tita, grows to be a sanctuary, a place where she discovers herself and comes to accept and love herself. Even when the kitchen is a source of suffering for her, as it is when she feels Pedro no longer loves her (69), she is able to “juggle ingredients and quantities at will, obtaining phenomenal results,” just as “a poet plays with words” (69). Here Tita functions as an author; her authority in the kitchen is unrivaled and her culinary mastery sustains her through periods of deep pain. Tita also evinces authority (and functions like an author) in the way she “breaks rules” in the kitchen. While her mother (when alive) expects Tita to follow recipes to “the letter,” Tita can’t resist “the temptation to violate the oh-so-rigid rules her mother imposed in the kitchen…and in life” (198). Tita sees her rule-breaking as evidence of her “creativity”; she improvises as an actor or poet might.
By October, and nearing the end of the book and calendar year, Tita has found her voice enough to stand up to her mother, who chastises her for having had sex with Pedro. When her mother shouts “Shut your mouth! Who do you think you are?” Tita retorts full of vengeance and power, “I know who I am! A person who has a perfect right to live her life as she pleases!” (199). These words—the entire exchange in fact—speak volumes about the distance Tita has traveled psychically as she has found her power in the kitchen. Because of the power she has tapped into there, she is finally able to express herself in this manner towards her mother. Tita’s gifts in the kitchen extend to other types of nurturing as well, another reason why the production and consumption of food becomes so empowering for her. When Pedro’s son, Roberto, is born, and unable to feed, Tita is suddenly able to produce milk and fill the baby up. She in essence saves Roberto’s life and becomes a “Goddess of plenty” (76).
Most important in this novel perhaps is the fact that food evokes the past and allows one to tap into memory, bringing the past into the present and thereby informing it. This cannot be clearer than it is at the end of the book, for there we find that Tita has traveled through time and space via her kitchen, to remain eternally present for her great-niece, who invokes Tita as she peels onions, tears flowing freely, in the present moment: “Perhaps I am as sensitive to onions as Tita, my great-aunt, who will go on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes” (246). The fact that Tita will “go on living,” to my mind suggests a solid presence in the lives of her descendants, and thus enables the strongest sort of congeniality and community. To remain alive in spirit is to remain eternal and thus the bonds between women in this book are unbreakable.
We find the same sort of unbreakable community and lasting connection to the past—and one’s heritage—created through food in Suzan Colon’s memoir, Cherries in Winter: My Family’s Recipe for Hope in Hard Times. This work, a first person memoir, travels between Suzan’s present in 2008 in Hudson County, New Jersey, where she lives; the early 20th century Bronx, where her grandmother lived; and the mid-20th century New York City where Suzan was raised by her single mother. For Suzan, preparing food creates a specific nurturing atmosphere that fosters community among women. She explains that in the writing of her memoir, she’s learned the difference between “showing up for dinner at my parent’s house and making dinner with my mother” (213). The essential difference for Colon as for Tita is that “as the ingredients go into the food, the stories come out of the making” (213). These stories in turn provide one with an identity and a history. In both books, the cook’s recipes (Nacha’s in Like Water for Chocolateand Nana’s in Cherries in Winter) keep the family’s heritage alive and allow people to connect with the spirits of the past.
Suzan Colon in her book reconnects with her grandmother—Nana—through the family recipe box. Suzan describes the recipes not simply as instructions for how to make certain dishes, but as physical proof of her past and as a tangible way for her to connect with her Nana, as well as her mother and grandfather. “They’re artifacts,” she writes, “from times both good and bad—not vague references, but proof that we’ve been through worse than this [her current unemployment] and have come out okay” (9). The recipes function as conversations between Colon and her ancestors; each recipe—typed in small font or written in Nana’s small hand and reproduced as such in the book—tells Suzan a different story about her past and imparts wisdom with it. She learns, for example, that “her ancestors transformed their suffering into gratitude, and finding their recipes and hearing their stories made me realize that many of my happiest memories are associated with food” (228).
What’s different and unique about Colon’s book, and particularly, what makes Colon different from Tita, is that she was first a professional single woman, and only second, and much later in life, a married woman who learned to cook. She writes, “As far as food is concerned, I write about it a lot better than I can cook it… When I lived alone…I had dinners out with friends … or ate single-girl food—steamed vegetables and brown rice from the Chinese restaurant around the corner” (36). She knew her way “around an office much better than a kitchen” (36), she goes on, but once she marries and gets laid off from her day job, she writes, “I want to cook well…especially since I’m home all the time [now].” (36). Cooking is thus something that not only reconnects Colon to her grandparents through the recipe box, and to her parents by cooking for them, but a domain that awakens her to a new side of herself and enhances her life with her husband. Her newfound culinary skills do not restrict her; they liberate her in the same way they do Tita. Even though she can no longer afford to shop for groceries at the “designer store,” as she calls what is most likely Whole Foods, she gains several new identities. She writes, “I’ve gone from spending my days at an office to planning marathon supermarket trips to being both an imaginary CEO and my husband’s mistress” (166).
In some ways, Suzan Colon and Esperanza’s (unnamed) daughter with Alex Brown are literary sisters; Esperanza’s daughter learns the recipes of her great aunt, Tita, in the same way that Suzan culls them from her grandmother, Nana. Both third-generation women are empowered by following the recipes of their forebears. While we sense Esperanza’s daughter’s contentment and security in life, now two generations removed from Tita, we similarly feel Suzan’s. Suzan, for example, concludes her narrative by writing that she’s grateful that she’s been able to realize almost all of Nana’s dreams, the ones [she] never knew until [she] found the recipe file (217), among them going to college and becoming a writer. And just as Tita lives on in the onions which make her grand-niece cry, so Nana lives on in Suzan’s mind: “Now she’s inspiring me to go further, to aim higher than I thought I could go…” (217).
Suzan Colon offers a new way for Latina women to present themselves in Cherries in Winter: that is, in real life, versus in a realm infused with magic and spirit as in Like Water for Chocolate. Colon writes about quotidian rituals like turning forty, going to the gym, living on a budget, and getting mammograms. She tries to maintain a professional identity, seeking freelance writing or editing work. Perhaps her most significant divergence from previous Latina heroines (not unlike Tita, incidentally, though Tita takes on the maternal role to Pedro’s son Roberto whom she nurses through his childhood) is the fact that she remains child-free. This is a complicated issue for Suzan as she does not necessarily do so by choice. She writes: “When I started thinking about marriage and children, I vowed I’d wait for a man who would stick around and be a husband and a father. I didn’t realize that, in my case, waiting for the former might mean having to give up on the latter” (200). After more than two years of trying the “good old-fashioned way,” Suzan sought help from an acupuncturist, to no avail. When her husband plaintively asks, “What are we doing wrong?,” Suzan realizes that nothing is wrong and that they are fine. She concludes: “I said good-bye to my doctors. I gave up drinking forest tea. And now I stop trying to beat egg whites that, for whatever reason, aren’t meant to be meringues” (206). In this scene, Suzan conflates her relentless beating of egg whites and her unflagging efforts to make a baby; somehow seeing the endeavors for what they are—vain and unnecessary—allows her to drop both and move on with her life. She writes, “Now I have to accept that, for whatever reason, [these] [the child and lemon meringue pie] aren’t meant to be…Nathan and I share a slice of the tart that had hoped to be a pie, and I wouldn’t change a thing” (208).
Both Tita and Suzan achieve a certain reference for food but while Tita’s passionate affair with Pedro ends in a conflagration, Suzan, writing her own story—her own life—ends up with more love and appreciation for her life than ever before: “Now, every time I go to the market, every time I set a plate in front of my husband, I think of my family…Four generations of love are in my heart and in my hands, and I put my gratitude into the food I make” (228). Her love affair with both her family and her husband has been reignited and burns stronger than ever. Yet in an interesting way, Esquivel suggests that the very same holds true for Esperanza’s daughter, who cooks in reverence to the memory of her grandmother Tita; thus while 20 years separate these two books, very little actually separates the two women who live on in our minds today.
[Ben PS. What do you think? Responses to Elif? Other images and ideas of home in America you’d highlight? Last chance for the weekend post!]
[Elif Armbruster, Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University and the incoming co-president of the New England American Studies Association, is the author of one of the best works I know on American homes: Domestic Biographies: Stowe, Howells, James, and Wharton at Home . So when I was planning this series I knew she’d be an ideal guest poster, and fortunately for us she has agreed to share this very interesting take on these themes of home, identity, and writing.]From Laura Esquivel to Suzan Colon:
Food and Female Identity in Fact and Fiction
Last fall I taught an Honors Seminar in Latina Literature in which I paired one of the classic works of the genre—Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate—with the little known work Cherries in Winter by Puerto Rican-American author, Suzan Colon. These works struck me as worthy of comparative study because both are organized around recipes which introduce the chapters and both use food as the primary tool of assertion, even identification, for each main female character. In Esquivel’s novel, this is Tita de la Garza, the youngest daughter of a Mexican family living at the turn of the twentieth century; in Colon’s work, it is Colon herself, who, having recently been laid off from her job as a magazine editor, uses her grandmother’s recipes to rebuild her life as an unemployed (or self-employed) writer, and thus, find herself.
In this guest post, I explore two ideas based upon these works: first, how the acts of preparing and cooking food empower, rather than limit, Latina women in general and these two female characters in particular; and second, how the use of food and the kitchen in Latina literature has changed (or not, as the case may be) in the twenty years that separate Esquivel’s work from Colon’s. This latter idea takes us from a study of Esquivel’s use of magical realism in her 1989 novel, to Colon’s vividly personal memoir, published in 2009.
In 1994, Teresa Cordova wrote that Latina women are traditionally regarded as “Tortilla makers and baby-producers, to be touched and not heard.” These words highlight the two realms that represent the most potent forms of constraint for the Latina woman: her sexuality and her role as obedient wife and caregiver in the domestic realm. Yet, as I argue here, Esquivel and Colon resist and revise the traditional patriarchal views of Latinas by giving the women the power to control not just their own, but the lives of others through the food that their respective female characters make. The production and consumption of food, is essential for not only sustaining but also reproducing life.
Neither Tita in Esquivel’s work, nor Suzan in her memoir, submit to traditional domestic roles even though both are found at the center of the house in the respective works; both women come to life in the kitchen and both provide life to others through their work in the kitchen. The domestic role has changed for these Latina women, though, for, by standing resolutely in a sphere once known primarily for its repression—and claiming it entirely for themselves—both women—and their authors—remake that sphere into one of total freedom. The kitchen in both works becomes the key to authorship, to creativity, and to life itself. In a sense it’s an incubator for much more than recipes.
This is not to say that the female domestic space of the kitchen is not a highly contested one. One critic, Maite Zubiaurre, writes in her essay, “Culinary Eros in Contemporary Hispanic Female Fiction” (2006), that a careful reading of Like Water for Chocolate reveals Tita’s “utter solitude” and “self-absorption” while in the kitchen, and that because Tita keeps her culinary power and knowledge largely to herself, she—and her sphere, the kitchen—reinforces her sense of isolation, rather than fostering a sense of solidarity or congeniality. Zubiaurre goes further to state that the kitchen environment is hierarchical and secretive, claiming, “The kitchen mirrors an authoritarian and segregationist society, instead of fostering an alternative sense of community, solidarity and equalitarian justice among women” (4).
Predictably, other scholars argue the opposite. Kristine Ibsen, for example, writing in her essay, “On Recipes, Reading, and Revolution,” in the Hispanic Review (in 1995), claims that Esquivel’s kitchen gives Tita power and control as the cook, and that by drawing others in to either help prepare certain foods, or to eat the food, Tita is able to establish a sense of security in the world, not a feeling of isolation from it. While both points of view are valid, Esquivel writes that for Tita, the kitchen is a safe haven, it is her “realm,” a space over which she exerts control, and in which she grows “vigorous and healthy” (7), words which invest the space with good qualities rather than deprivations. Throughout the novel, Tita counters her seeming isolation in the kitchen by inviting her sisters in to observe and to help; at times these moments end badly, but they also can be positive; for example, when Tita invites Gertrudis and Rosaura to sprinkle water on the griddle pan in the opening chapter, Gertrudis “found the game enticing and threw herself into it with the enthusiasm she always showed where rhythm, movement, or music were involved” (8). Similarly, the bond between Tita and Nacha, the actual cook, is unbreakable. Nacha is the primary caretaker for Tita throughout her childhood, and provides her with the love and support that Mama Elena fails to give; as the source of most of the recipes in the book, she is also the source of Tita’s sustenance, physical and otherwise. While she dies on the day of Rosaura's wedding, she returns throughout the narrative as a spiritual guide for Tita, and thus spiritually sustains her as well.
While Zubiaurre and Ibsen take opposing views towards Tita in the kitchen, I would like to propose that the kitchen in Like Water for Chocolate functions in yet a third way. It may be the site of a congenial community (most of the time, only Tita and Nacha are in the kitchen; others remain outside, and that’s where the community bonding takes place—i.e.: at the dining room table or at the baptismal banquet for example) and an isolationist zone, but it also, for Tita, grows to be a sanctuary, a place where she discovers herself and comes to accept and love herself. Even when the kitchen is a source of suffering for her, as it is when she feels Pedro no longer loves her (69), she is able to “juggle ingredients and quantities at will, obtaining phenomenal results,” just as “a poet plays with words” (69). Here Tita functions as an author; her authority in the kitchen is unrivaled and her culinary mastery sustains her through periods of deep pain. Tita also evinces authority (and functions like an author) in the way she “breaks rules” in the kitchen. While her mother (when alive) expects Tita to follow recipes to “the letter,” Tita can’t resist “the temptation to violate the oh-so-rigid rules her mother imposed in the kitchen…and in life” (198). Tita sees her rule-breaking as evidence of her “creativity”; she improvises as an actor or poet might.
By October, and nearing the end of the book and calendar year, Tita has found her voice enough to stand up to her mother, who chastises her for having had sex with Pedro. When her mother shouts “Shut your mouth! Who do you think you are?” Tita retorts full of vengeance and power, “I know who I am! A person who has a perfect right to live her life as she pleases!” (199). These words—the entire exchange in fact—speak volumes about the distance Tita has traveled psychically as she has found her power in the kitchen. Because of the power she has tapped into there, she is finally able to express herself in this manner towards her mother. Tita’s gifts in the kitchen extend to other types of nurturing as well, another reason why the production and consumption of food becomes so empowering for her. When Pedro’s son, Roberto, is born, and unable to feed, Tita is suddenly able to produce milk and fill the baby up. She in essence saves Roberto’s life and becomes a “Goddess of plenty” (76).
Most important in this novel perhaps is the fact that food evokes the past and allows one to tap into memory, bringing the past into the present and thereby informing it. This cannot be clearer than it is at the end of the book, for there we find that Tita has traveled through time and space via her kitchen, to remain eternally present for her great-niece, who invokes Tita as she peels onions, tears flowing freely, in the present moment: “Perhaps I am as sensitive to onions as Tita, my great-aunt, who will go on living as long as there is someone who cooks her recipes” (246). The fact that Tita will “go on living,” to my mind suggests a solid presence in the lives of her descendants, and thus enables the strongest sort of congeniality and community. To remain alive in spirit is to remain eternal and thus the bonds between women in this book are unbreakable.
We find the same sort of unbreakable community and lasting connection to the past—and one’s heritage—created through food in Suzan Colon’s memoir, Cherries in Winter: My Family’s Recipe for Hope in Hard Times. This work, a first person memoir, travels between Suzan’s present in 2008 in Hudson County, New Jersey, where she lives; the early 20th century Bronx, where her grandmother lived; and the mid-20th century New York City where Suzan was raised by her single mother. For Suzan, preparing food creates a specific nurturing atmosphere that fosters community among women. She explains that in the writing of her memoir, she’s learned the difference between “showing up for dinner at my parent’s house and making dinner with my mother” (213). The essential difference for Colon as for Tita is that “as the ingredients go into the food, the stories come out of the making” (213). These stories in turn provide one with an identity and a history. In both books, the cook’s recipes (Nacha’s in Like Water for Chocolateand Nana’s in Cherries in Winter) keep the family’s heritage alive and allow people to connect with the spirits of the past.
Suzan Colon in her book reconnects with her grandmother—Nana—through the family recipe box. Suzan describes the recipes not simply as instructions for how to make certain dishes, but as physical proof of her past and as a tangible way for her to connect with her Nana, as well as her mother and grandfather. “They’re artifacts,” she writes, “from times both good and bad—not vague references, but proof that we’ve been through worse than this [her current unemployment] and have come out okay” (9). The recipes function as conversations between Colon and her ancestors; each recipe—typed in small font or written in Nana’s small hand and reproduced as such in the book—tells Suzan a different story about her past and imparts wisdom with it. She learns, for example, that “her ancestors transformed their suffering into gratitude, and finding their recipes and hearing their stories made me realize that many of my happiest memories are associated with food” (228).
What’s different and unique about Colon’s book, and particularly, what makes Colon different from Tita, is that she was first a professional single woman, and only second, and much later in life, a married woman who learned to cook. She writes, “As far as food is concerned, I write about it a lot better than I can cook it… When I lived alone…I had dinners out with friends … or ate single-girl food—steamed vegetables and brown rice from the Chinese restaurant around the corner” (36). She knew her way “around an office much better than a kitchen” (36), she goes on, but once she marries and gets laid off from her day job, she writes, “I want to cook well…especially since I’m home all the time [now].” (36). Cooking is thus something that not only reconnects Colon to her grandparents through the recipe box, and to her parents by cooking for them, but a domain that awakens her to a new side of herself and enhances her life with her husband. Her newfound culinary skills do not restrict her; they liberate her in the same way they do Tita. Even though she can no longer afford to shop for groceries at the “designer store,” as she calls what is most likely Whole Foods, she gains several new identities. She writes, “I’ve gone from spending my days at an office to planning marathon supermarket trips to being both an imaginary CEO and my husband’s mistress” (166).
In some ways, Suzan Colon and Esperanza’s (unnamed) daughter with Alex Brown are literary sisters; Esperanza’s daughter learns the recipes of her great aunt, Tita, in the same way that Suzan culls them from her grandmother, Nana. Both third-generation women are empowered by following the recipes of their forebears. While we sense Esperanza’s daughter’s contentment and security in life, now two generations removed from Tita, we similarly feel Suzan’s. Suzan, for example, concludes her narrative by writing that she’s grateful that she’s been able to realize almost all of Nana’s dreams, the ones [she] never knew until [she] found the recipe file (217), among them going to college and becoming a writer. And just as Tita lives on in the onions which make her grand-niece cry, so Nana lives on in Suzan’s mind: “Now she’s inspiring me to go further, to aim higher than I thought I could go…” (217).
Suzan Colon offers a new way for Latina women to present themselves in Cherries in Winter: that is, in real life, versus in a realm infused with magic and spirit as in Like Water for Chocolate. Colon writes about quotidian rituals like turning forty, going to the gym, living on a budget, and getting mammograms. She tries to maintain a professional identity, seeking freelance writing or editing work. Perhaps her most significant divergence from previous Latina heroines (not unlike Tita, incidentally, though Tita takes on the maternal role to Pedro’s son Roberto whom she nurses through his childhood) is the fact that she remains child-free. This is a complicated issue for Suzan as she does not necessarily do so by choice. She writes: “When I started thinking about marriage and children, I vowed I’d wait for a man who would stick around and be a husband and a father. I didn’t realize that, in my case, waiting for the former might mean having to give up on the latter” (200). After more than two years of trying the “good old-fashioned way,” Suzan sought help from an acupuncturist, to no avail. When her husband plaintively asks, “What are we doing wrong?,” Suzan realizes that nothing is wrong and that they are fine. She concludes: “I said good-bye to my doctors. I gave up drinking forest tea. And now I stop trying to beat egg whites that, for whatever reason, aren’t meant to be meringues” (206). In this scene, Suzan conflates her relentless beating of egg whites and her unflagging efforts to make a baby; somehow seeing the endeavors for what they are—vain and unnecessary—allows her to drop both and move on with her life. She writes, “Now I have to accept that, for whatever reason, [these] [the child and lemon meringue pie] aren’t meant to be…Nathan and I share a slice of the tart that had hoped to be a pie, and I wouldn’t change a thing” (208).
Both Tita and Suzan achieve a certain reference for food but while Tita’s passionate affair with Pedro ends in a conflagration, Suzan, writing her own story—her own life—ends up with more love and appreciation for her life than ever before: “Now, every time I go to the market, every time I set a plate in front of my husband, I think of my family…Four generations of love are in my heart and in my hands, and I put my gratitude into the food I make” (228). Her love affair with both her family and her husband has been reignited and burns stronger than ever. Yet in an interesting way, Esquivel suggests that the very same holds true for Esperanza’s daughter, who cooks in reverence to the memory of her grandmother Tita; thus while 20 years separate these two books, very little actually separates the two women who live on in our minds today.
[Ben PS. What do you think? Responses to Elif? Other images and ideas of home in America you’d highlight? Last chance for the weekend post!]
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