Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 402
November 8, 2012
November 8, 2012: Obama and America, Part Four
[I’m writing these posts ahead of time, as is my wont, so I can’t say whether this week’s series will be an epilogue on a four-year journey or a middle chapter in an evolving story. I sure hope the latter. But in any case, here are five posts through which I’ve tried to bring AmericanStudies to bear on our current president and some of the many national questions to which he connects. Your thoughts, on the election or the distant past or anything in between, will be very welcome for a special weekend post with my own new thoughts as well as yours.]
American Studies and the elephant in the room when it comes to race in contemporary America.The early 2008 Reverend Wright controversy and Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech in response, as well as the responses on the right that Obama had “thrown his grandmother under the bus” in part of that speech. The competing visions of the election itself: as a triumph of a “post-racial America,” as the culmination of the Civil Rights movement, or as an election stolen by ACORN. The literally untold numbers of racist images, jokes, slurs, and narratives created by Obama’s opponents. The books, whether attacking Obama’s identity (such as one on his “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview”), highlighting its symbolic power, or simply analyzing its racial and ethnic contexts. It’s no stretch to say that race has been the single most consistently defining aspect of Obama’s national presence over the last four years, and no long-shot to say that it will be just as defining in the upcoming election as well. [Which will be the recent election when this post runs. So adjust that sentence accordingly in your mind.]Yet aside from the more complex, scholarly engagements provided by books like the last two linked in that sentence above—and possibly by other books by up-and-coming young American Studiers—it’s also fair to say that we haven’t, in our collective conversations about the issue, analyzed race and Obama so much as deployed narratives in that general direction. Perhaps that’s a given—certainly much (all?) of our politics these days consists of deploying narratives rather than analyzing—but us American Studiers can and should work to push those conversations in more analytical and meaningful directions. Take, for example, the 2010 moment when Obama self-identified on the census as “black/African Am”: it might be impossible for our current racial narratives to deal with that moment with any real complexity; whereas an American Studies perspective could connect that complex choice to the long histories of mixed race Americans’ self-images and identities, to literary and cultural representations of those identities, to questions of passing and racial definitions and community in America, to David Hollinger’s emphases on “voluntary affiliations” as a new defining 21stcentury category of identity, to the evolution of the census itself (which had in 2000 for the first time included a separate category for “mixed race,” one checked by 6.8 million Americans; yet which had cut that category for the 2010 census), and more. That’s one example; it will come as a significant shock to you all, I’m sure, that I could go into another half-dozen or –million more. But as I have tried to do in the past, and will of course keep trying to do, I’d rather turn the American Studying over to you guys instead. So tell me: to what American histories, questions, issues, images, ideas, debates, figures, or stories would you turn to develop American Studies analyses of President Obama? Obviously that can and should go well beyond race, and wherever your American Studies perspectives take you and us will be very welcome; although I’d certainly be interested to hear your connections through this specific lens of race as well. In any case, I’d much, much rather end this week’s series (which I will do with a new post of mine tomorrow and then the crowd-sourced post this weekend) by adding some more voices and perspectives into the mix than by continuing to simply feature my own. So have at it! If you don’t want to log in to post a comment, email ‘em to me (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu)! Or Tweet ‘em (@AmericanStudier)! Final post in the series tomorrow,BenPS. You know what to do!11/8 Memory Day nominee: Dorothy Day!
American Studies and the elephant in the room when it comes to race in contemporary America.The early 2008 Reverend Wright controversy and Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech in response, as well as the responses on the right that Obama had “thrown his grandmother under the bus” in part of that speech. The competing visions of the election itself: as a triumph of a “post-racial America,” as the culmination of the Civil Rights movement, or as an election stolen by ACORN. The literally untold numbers of racist images, jokes, slurs, and narratives created by Obama’s opponents. The books, whether attacking Obama’s identity (such as one on his “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview”), highlighting its symbolic power, or simply analyzing its racial and ethnic contexts. It’s no stretch to say that race has been the single most consistently defining aspect of Obama’s national presence over the last four years, and no long-shot to say that it will be just as defining in the upcoming election as well. [Which will be the recent election when this post runs. So adjust that sentence accordingly in your mind.]Yet aside from the more complex, scholarly engagements provided by books like the last two linked in that sentence above—and possibly by other books by up-and-coming young American Studiers—it’s also fair to say that we haven’t, in our collective conversations about the issue, analyzed race and Obama so much as deployed narratives in that general direction. Perhaps that’s a given—certainly much (all?) of our politics these days consists of deploying narratives rather than analyzing—but us American Studiers can and should work to push those conversations in more analytical and meaningful directions. Take, for example, the 2010 moment when Obama self-identified on the census as “black/African Am”: it might be impossible for our current racial narratives to deal with that moment with any real complexity; whereas an American Studies perspective could connect that complex choice to the long histories of mixed race Americans’ self-images and identities, to literary and cultural representations of those identities, to questions of passing and racial definitions and community in America, to David Hollinger’s emphases on “voluntary affiliations” as a new defining 21stcentury category of identity, to the evolution of the census itself (which had in 2000 for the first time included a separate category for “mixed race,” one checked by 6.8 million Americans; yet which had cut that category for the 2010 census), and more. That’s one example; it will come as a significant shock to you all, I’m sure, that I could go into another half-dozen or –million more. But as I have tried to do in the past, and will of course keep trying to do, I’d rather turn the American Studying over to you guys instead. So tell me: to what American histories, questions, issues, images, ideas, debates, figures, or stories would you turn to develop American Studies analyses of President Obama? Obviously that can and should go well beyond race, and wherever your American Studies perspectives take you and us will be very welcome; although I’d certainly be interested to hear your connections through this specific lens of race as well. In any case, I’d much, much rather end this week’s series (which I will do with a new post of mine tomorrow and then the crowd-sourced post this weekend) by adding some more voices and perspectives into the mix than by continuing to simply feature my own. So have at it! If you don’t want to log in to post a comment, email ‘em to me (brailton@fitchburgstate.edu)! Or Tweet ‘em (@AmericanStudier)! Final post in the series tomorrow,BenPS. You know what to do!11/8 Memory Day nominee: Dorothy Day!
November 7, 2012
November 7, 2012: Obama and America, Part Three
[I’m writing these posts ahead of time, as is my wont, so I can’t say whether this week’s series will be an epilogue on a four-year journey or a middle chapter in an evolving story. I sure hope the latter. But in any case, here are five posts through which I’ve tried to bring AmericanStudies to bear on our current president and some of the many national questions to which he connects. Your thoughts, on the election or the distant past or anything in between, will be very welcome for a special weekend post with my own new thoughts as well as yours.]
On the many frustrations and stakes of the Birther “debate.”In the analysis of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father , his parents’ cross-cultural transformations, and his own status as the deeply representative and symbolic 21st-century American descendent of those transformations with which I conclude my second book, I wrote of the Birther movement (whose perspectives on Obama’s un-Americanness I try to contrast very explicitly with that sense of mine that his family history and identity makes him profoundly American as I hope to define the term) that it constitutes a “small but very vocal minority” of Americans. Yet in the last couple years I’ve been forced to reconsider that phrase very fully, as a significant and growing body of evidence—from Donald Trump’s meteoric rise in presidential polls based solely, it seemed, on his newfound Birtherism; to the Drudge-report hyped release of Jerome Corsi (he of the Swift Boat nonsense)’s new book entitled Where’s the Birth Certificate?; to the polls in which between 55 and 60% of registered Republicans consistently express doubt about Obama’s birthplace—makes it hard to see Birtherism as anything other than a widely shared and deeply entrenched national narrative.Part of the problem here, to be sure, has been the mainstream media’s tolerance of Birther views as if they represent simply another political point of view, and one that deserves an equal hearing among all others. Reporter Amy Nelson, in an ESPN.com article on the Baltimore Orioles outfielder Luke Scott, who made headlines in the 2011-12 off-season with a rambling news conference in which he very fully endorsed Birtherism, writes of the response to Scott’s comments that “some bloggers” argued back that “the evidence Obama was born in Hawaii is overwhelming.” Unless Ms. Nelson is counting Hawaii’s Republican governor and the US Department of State (which treats the short-form birth certificate, the only one Hawaii normally releases or even allows to be photocopied, as entirely legal and grants passports based on it) and the two newspapers that published birth announcements in 1961 and etc. as “some bloggers,” she’s blatantly misrepresenting what that evidence entails and who has argued for its overwhelming and entirely incontrovertible nature. One of the potential downsides to a nuanced scholarly perspective is the fact that an emphasis on multiple narratives and perspectives can be bastardized in precisely this way; some American facts and events, past and present, are indeed outside of the realm of multiple interpretations, making the presence of competing ones a nonsensical and very revealing farce. [I first wrote this paragraph before Obama convinced Hawaii to release the long-form birth certificate, but sadly most if not all of it still rings just as true.]Yet as frustrating as this continued Birtherism is, I would argue that the real conversation here needs to happen at a deeper level. I also discuss in that concluding chapter an October 2008 Time cover story about Obama entitled “Is Barack Obama American Enough?”; while I refuse to grant that Birtherism itself stems from anything other than the rankest ignorance and bigotry, I can certainly recognize that aspects of Obama’s actual biography (the Kenyan immigrant father whom he knew for only a couple of years, the years in Indonesia with him Mom and step-father, the Kenyan Muslim grandfather whose first-name became Obama’s middle name, and so on) seem to challenge many of our most implicit but most widely held narratives about what “American” is and is not, includes and excludes. While I tried in the book, and will continue to try throughout my career, to argue for the opposite—and not only by defining someone like Obama as profoundly American, but by arguing that even the most “heartland non-passport white Americans” (as Andrew Sullivan once called them in a post on Birtherism) share this heritage of cross-cultural transformation—I know that changing such narratives and definitions is far from simple, particularly for older generations whose versions of those narratives have been held and set for many decades (and who, I believe or perhaps I hope, constitute the core of Birthers). Yet such change must come—not because of what it would mean for our contemporary politics or elections if it doesn’t, but because I do not believe that 21st-century America can truly survive, much less prosper, if we fall back on traditional and very exclusive definitions of who and what we are. It’s long past time to recognize that of all nations, America has always been the one most constituted out of the whole world, out of the combinations and transformations of peoples and cultures and nations and communities from Kenya to Kansas, Indonesia to Illinois. That’s not just Obama’s story, it’s all of ours—and the most disheartening effect of Birtherism will be if it allows so many Americans to turn their backs on this newest and most profound piece of evidence for that shared national heritage and identity. Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?11/7 Memory Day nominee: Herman Mankiewicz, in whose two best
On the many frustrations and stakes of the Birther “debate.”In the analysis of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father , his parents’ cross-cultural transformations, and his own status as the deeply representative and symbolic 21st-century American descendent of those transformations with which I conclude my second book, I wrote of the Birther movement (whose perspectives on Obama’s un-Americanness I try to contrast very explicitly with that sense of mine that his family history and identity makes him profoundly American as I hope to define the term) that it constitutes a “small but very vocal minority” of Americans. Yet in the last couple years I’ve been forced to reconsider that phrase very fully, as a significant and growing body of evidence—from Donald Trump’s meteoric rise in presidential polls based solely, it seemed, on his newfound Birtherism; to the Drudge-report hyped release of Jerome Corsi (he of the Swift Boat nonsense)’s new book entitled Where’s the Birth Certificate?; to the polls in which between 55 and 60% of registered Republicans consistently express doubt about Obama’s birthplace—makes it hard to see Birtherism as anything other than a widely shared and deeply entrenched national narrative.Part of the problem here, to be sure, has been the mainstream media’s tolerance of Birther views as if they represent simply another political point of view, and one that deserves an equal hearing among all others. Reporter Amy Nelson, in an ESPN.com article on the Baltimore Orioles outfielder Luke Scott, who made headlines in the 2011-12 off-season with a rambling news conference in which he very fully endorsed Birtherism, writes of the response to Scott’s comments that “some bloggers” argued back that “the evidence Obama was born in Hawaii is overwhelming.” Unless Ms. Nelson is counting Hawaii’s Republican governor and the US Department of State (which treats the short-form birth certificate, the only one Hawaii normally releases or even allows to be photocopied, as entirely legal and grants passports based on it) and the two newspapers that published birth announcements in 1961 and etc. as “some bloggers,” she’s blatantly misrepresenting what that evidence entails and who has argued for its overwhelming and entirely incontrovertible nature. One of the potential downsides to a nuanced scholarly perspective is the fact that an emphasis on multiple narratives and perspectives can be bastardized in precisely this way; some American facts and events, past and present, are indeed outside of the realm of multiple interpretations, making the presence of competing ones a nonsensical and very revealing farce. [I first wrote this paragraph before Obama convinced Hawaii to release the long-form birth certificate, but sadly most if not all of it still rings just as true.]Yet as frustrating as this continued Birtherism is, I would argue that the real conversation here needs to happen at a deeper level. I also discuss in that concluding chapter an October 2008 Time cover story about Obama entitled “Is Barack Obama American Enough?”; while I refuse to grant that Birtherism itself stems from anything other than the rankest ignorance and bigotry, I can certainly recognize that aspects of Obama’s actual biography (the Kenyan immigrant father whom he knew for only a couple of years, the years in Indonesia with him Mom and step-father, the Kenyan Muslim grandfather whose first-name became Obama’s middle name, and so on) seem to challenge many of our most implicit but most widely held narratives about what “American” is and is not, includes and excludes. While I tried in the book, and will continue to try throughout my career, to argue for the opposite—and not only by defining someone like Obama as profoundly American, but by arguing that even the most “heartland non-passport white Americans” (as Andrew Sullivan once called them in a post on Birtherism) share this heritage of cross-cultural transformation—I know that changing such narratives and definitions is far from simple, particularly for older generations whose versions of those narratives have been held and set for many decades (and who, I believe or perhaps I hope, constitute the core of Birthers). Yet such change must come—not because of what it would mean for our contemporary politics or elections if it doesn’t, but because I do not believe that 21st-century America can truly survive, much less prosper, if we fall back on traditional and very exclusive definitions of who and what we are. It’s long past time to recognize that of all nations, America has always been the one most constituted out of the whole world, out of the combinations and transformations of peoples and cultures and nations and communities from Kenya to Kansas, Indonesia to Illinois. That’s not just Obama’s story, it’s all of ours—and the most disheartening effect of Birtherism will be if it allows so many Americans to turn their backs on this newest and most profound piece of evidence for that shared national heritage and identity. Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?11/7 Memory Day nominee: Herman Mankiewicz, in whose two best
November 6, 2012
November 6, 2012: Obama and America, Part Two
[I’m writing these posts ahead of time, as is my wont, so I can’t say whether this week’s series will be an epilogue on a four-year journey or a middle chapter in an evolving story. I sure hope the latter. But in any case, here are five posts through which I’ve tried to bring AmericanStudies to bear on our current president and some of the many national questions to which he connects. Your thoughts, on the election or the distant past or anything in between, will be very welcome for a special weekend post with my own new thoughts as well as yours.]
On the book of Obama’s that every American, regardless of political party, should read.I’ve tried in many posts in this space to highlight some of the best works of AmericanStudies scholarship I know, but I begin today with a quick mention of one of the very worst: Dinesh D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010). D’Souza’s book, which seeks to explain much of Obama’s perspective and emphases (as D’Souza falsifies, I mean defines, them) through an “analysis” of his father Barack Obama’s “Kenyan anti-colonialism” (one of those times I’m using actual quotation marks and the other time they’re scare quotes, I’ll let you figure out which is which), is so chock-full of lies and nonsense that it beggars description, and I’m going to stop writing about in one more sentence and hopefully never mention or even think about it again (although the recent “documentary” that builds upon the book has forced me to do so). But of all the reasons why it’s such a horrifically awful work, perhaps the most frustrating is that it allegedly builds upon one of the most impressive and engaging American personal narratives I’ve ever read: Obama’s own first book, Dreams from My Father (1995).Autobiographies by political figures tend to fall into one of two categories: quickies published during campaigns, mostly to sell the candidate’s platform and identity to prospective voters; and massive tomes published after the person has left office, both to cement certain hoped-for legacies and to admit to things that would have cost him or her votes at the time. Obama has written at least a couple of books in the former category, but I would argue that Dreams is very much not one of them: it was published while he was an attorney and law professor in Chicago, a year before he first ran for the Illinois State Senate and five years before he first ran for Congress; and while of course he likely had political ambitions at that point, the book is profoundly honest about some of the darkest and most potentially controversial aspects of his life and identity, including drug use in college, his complex perspectives on the young African American men with whom he worked as a community organizer, and his experiences and relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church. While conspiracy theorists like to argue that we know little about who Obama really is, the truth is that for fifteen years now the reading public has had more intimate access to his life and identity and perspective than has been possible for any other president.But the reason why I’m writing about Obama’s book here—which very much parallels the reasons why it’s the focus of the Conclusion of my second book—is that it includes and analyzes such a wide and interesting range of essentially American lives and identities. That would include of course Obama himself, born to a Kenyan immigrant father and a Scotch-Irish mother in Hawaii, raised there by his mom and by grandparents who had transplanted their family from Kansas, and married to a woman who is the descendent of slaves (among other crucial details); would certainly include both of his parents and all of those other family members and generations; but also includes a number of other pivotal figures in the book, most especially his half-sister Auma (herself a Kenyan American immigrant) and half-brother Roy (likewise). Obama’s ability and willingness to cede significant portions of the book over to these other voices and lives helps create this narrative of a multi-part American community; when Roy reappears at Obama’s wedding in the book’s Epilogue, for example, having embraced his Kenyan heritage more fully and renamed himself Obongo, yet also gaining two “honorary mothers” in Obama’s mother and grandmother at that ceremony, we can truly see just how much his own American story and identity have continued to evolve and deepen, and how much Obama’s sense of who he is likewise evolves and deepens through his conversations and encounters with these other American voices and lives.As with everything I write about in this space, my ultimate message here is a simple but significant one: I think all Americans should read and engage with this text and history and story. Of course in this context it is perhaps impossible that said message could ever be disentangled from many other and more troublingly divisive narratives—according to many polls upwards of 60% of GOP voters would have to read the section about Obama’s parents and his birth in Hawaii and believe that he’s lying, for example. But I have to believe that a substantial part of the strength of those divisive narratives is that many Americans don’t read into our history and culture and literature at all, relying instead solely on what they hear about them from less nuanced and analytical sources than (I certainly hope) this one. So, in the words of Levar Burton one more time, “Read the book!” Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?11/6 Memory Day nominees: A tie between John Philip Sousa, whose compositionsdefine Americaas much as any single musical voice and genrecould; and Derrick Bell.
On the book of Obama’s that every American, regardless of political party, should read.I’ve tried in many posts in this space to highlight some of the best works of AmericanStudies scholarship I know, but I begin today with a quick mention of one of the very worst: Dinesh D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage (2010). D’Souza’s book, which seeks to explain much of Obama’s perspective and emphases (as D’Souza falsifies, I mean defines, them) through an “analysis” of his father Barack Obama’s “Kenyan anti-colonialism” (one of those times I’m using actual quotation marks and the other time they’re scare quotes, I’ll let you figure out which is which), is so chock-full of lies and nonsense that it beggars description, and I’m going to stop writing about in one more sentence and hopefully never mention or even think about it again (although the recent “documentary” that builds upon the book has forced me to do so). But of all the reasons why it’s such a horrifically awful work, perhaps the most frustrating is that it allegedly builds upon one of the most impressive and engaging American personal narratives I’ve ever read: Obama’s own first book, Dreams from My Father (1995).Autobiographies by political figures tend to fall into one of two categories: quickies published during campaigns, mostly to sell the candidate’s platform and identity to prospective voters; and massive tomes published after the person has left office, both to cement certain hoped-for legacies and to admit to things that would have cost him or her votes at the time. Obama has written at least a couple of books in the former category, but I would argue that Dreams is very much not one of them: it was published while he was an attorney and law professor in Chicago, a year before he first ran for the Illinois State Senate and five years before he first ran for Congress; and while of course he likely had political ambitions at that point, the book is profoundly honest about some of the darkest and most potentially controversial aspects of his life and identity, including drug use in college, his complex perspectives on the young African American men with whom he worked as a community organizer, and his experiences and relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity Church. While conspiracy theorists like to argue that we know little about who Obama really is, the truth is that for fifteen years now the reading public has had more intimate access to his life and identity and perspective than has been possible for any other president.But the reason why I’m writing about Obama’s book here—which very much parallels the reasons why it’s the focus of the Conclusion of my second book—is that it includes and analyzes such a wide and interesting range of essentially American lives and identities. That would include of course Obama himself, born to a Kenyan immigrant father and a Scotch-Irish mother in Hawaii, raised there by his mom and by grandparents who had transplanted their family from Kansas, and married to a woman who is the descendent of slaves (among other crucial details); would certainly include both of his parents and all of those other family members and generations; but also includes a number of other pivotal figures in the book, most especially his half-sister Auma (herself a Kenyan American immigrant) and half-brother Roy (likewise). Obama’s ability and willingness to cede significant portions of the book over to these other voices and lives helps create this narrative of a multi-part American community; when Roy reappears at Obama’s wedding in the book’s Epilogue, for example, having embraced his Kenyan heritage more fully and renamed himself Obongo, yet also gaining two “honorary mothers” in Obama’s mother and grandmother at that ceremony, we can truly see just how much his own American story and identity have continued to evolve and deepen, and how much Obama’s sense of who he is likewise evolves and deepens through his conversations and encounters with these other American voices and lives.As with everything I write about in this space, my ultimate message here is a simple but significant one: I think all Americans should read and engage with this text and history and story. Of course in this context it is perhaps impossible that said message could ever be disentangled from many other and more troublingly divisive narratives—according to many polls upwards of 60% of GOP voters would have to read the section about Obama’s parents and his birth in Hawaii and believe that he’s lying, for example. But I have to believe that a substantial part of the strength of those divisive narratives is that many Americans don’t read into our history and culture and literature at all, relying instead solely on what they hear about them from less nuanced and analytical sources than (I certainly hope) this one. So, in the words of Levar Burton one more time, “Read the book!” Next post tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?11/6 Memory Day nominees: A tie between John Philip Sousa, whose compositionsdefine Americaas much as any single musical voice and genrecould; and Derrick Bell.
November 5, 2012
November 5, 2012: Obama and America, Part One
[I’m writing these posts ahead of time, as is my wont, so I can’t say whether this week’s series will be an epilogue on a four-year journey or a middle chapter in an evolving story. I sure hope the latter. But in any case, here are five posts through which I’ve tried to bring AmericanStudies to bear on our current president and some of the many national questions to which he connects. Your thoughts, on the election or the distant past or anything in between, will be very welcome for a special weekend post with my own new thoughts as well as yours.]
On the stakes of 2012 for an American issue that can seem abstract but has plenty of very concrete and crucial effects.Anyone who has read this blog for a while, or who has read my second book, or who has ever talked with me about anything American Studies-related, knows how centrally interested I am in the question of how we define “American,” of what that idea, that identity, that community, means. As I argue at length in that book’s Conclusion, I believe that the debates over Barack Obama’s “American-ness,” over the question (to quote a Time cover story from just before the 2008 election) “Is Barack Obama American Enough?,” have been central to our political culture for the last four years. You can see those debates in the Birther movement, in the Tea Party cry of “I want my country back,” and in so many other moments and issues in contemporary America. And Mitt Romney has been a part of those debates for just as long, dating back at least to his statement, during the 2008 presidential campaign, that “Barack Obama looks toward Europe for a lot of his inspiration; John McCain is going to make sure that America stays America.” It’s easy to see this issue as less significant than many in this election year, and I’m not going to argue that it has nearly the immediate and practical relevance that they do. Certainly the question of where Obama was born, while incredibly frustrating to those of us in the reality-based community, would only be practically significant if one of the many Birther lawsuits managed to actually keep him off of a state’s ballot or the like. But I think there are any number of immediate and significant effects to each possible definition of America, from the most to the least inclusive; is there any doubt, to cite one ongoing current event, that the debate over a possible mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, depends entirely on whether we see Muslim Americans as part of “America” or somehow outside of it? Isn’t it clear, as Obama acknowledged in the speech with which he announced his DREAM Act executive order, that seeing its young beneficiaries as “Americans in their hearts, in their minds” is crucial to supporting that policy change? The second of those examples is without doubt more complex than the first, includes legal and governmental factors much more centrally; but both nonetheless hinge on precisely who and what we mean (and don’t mean) by “American.”Yet there’s another, and to my mind even more meaningful, effect to these debates: what they mean for the identities and perspectives of each individual American. I’ve expressed before my admiration for Colin Powell’s answer, during his 2008 endorsement of Obama, to lies about Obama’s Muslim identity, his statement that while the correct answer is that Obama is not a Muslim, the “more correct” answer is: “Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president?” If I had to express most succinctly why I think these debates over the meaning of “American” are so crucial, I would ask precisely the same question, writ large: how do you think it feels for a young kid—a Muslim American kid, or the child of undocumented immigrants, or a kid realizing he or she is gay—to be told, implicitly but often explicitly as well, that he or she is outside of “American” identity, is an other within his or her homeland? That’s the stake of these debates—and, I believe, one of the most fundamental stakes of the 2012 election, and many of our ongoing political arguments beyond it.Next Obama post tomorrow (tomorrow!),BenPS. What do you think?11/5 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two controversial and inspiring Americans who came to embody much of their respective eras: Benjamin Butler, the Civil War General, Reconstruction leader, and civil rights activist; and Ida Tarbell, the Gilded Age and Progressive-eramuckraker par excellence.
On the stakes of 2012 for an American issue that can seem abstract but has plenty of very concrete and crucial effects.Anyone who has read this blog for a while, or who has read my second book, or who has ever talked with me about anything American Studies-related, knows how centrally interested I am in the question of how we define “American,” of what that idea, that identity, that community, means. As I argue at length in that book’s Conclusion, I believe that the debates over Barack Obama’s “American-ness,” over the question (to quote a Time cover story from just before the 2008 election) “Is Barack Obama American Enough?,” have been central to our political culture for the last four years. You can see those debates in the Birther movement, in the Tea Party cry of “I want my country back,” and in so many other moments and issues in contemporary America. And Mitt Romney has been a part of those debates for just as long, dating back at least to his statement, during the 2008 presidential campaign, that “Barack Obama looks toward Europe for a lot of his inspiration; John McCain is going to make sure that America stays America.” It’s easy to see this issue as less significant than many in this election year, and I’m not going to argue that it has nearly the immediate and practical relevance that they do. Certainly the question of where Obama was born, while incredibly frustrating to those of us in the reality-based community, would only be practically significant if one of the many Birther lawsuits managed to actually keep him off of a state’s ballot or the like. But I think there are any number of immediate and significant effects to each possible definition of America, from the most to the least inclusive; is there any doubt, to cite one ongoing current event, that the debate over a possible mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, depends entirely on whether we see Muslim Americans as part of “America” or somehow outside of it? Isn’t it clear, as Obama acknowledged in the speech with which he announced his DREAM Act executive order, that seeing its young beneficiaries as “Americans in their hearts, in their minds” is crucial to supporting that policy change? The second of those examples is without doubt more complex than the first, includes legal and governmental factors much more centrally; but both nonetheless hinge on precisely who and what we mean (and don’t mean) by “American.”Yet there’s another, and to my mind even more meaningful, effect to these debates: what they mean for the identities and perspectives of each individual American. I’ve expressed before my admiration for Colin Powell’s answer, during his 2008 endorsement of Obama, to lies about Obama’s Muslim identity, his statement that while the correct answer is that Obama is not a Muslim, the “more correct” answer is: “Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no. That's not America. Is there something wrong with a seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing he or she could be president?” If I had to express most succinctly why I think these debates over the meaning of “American” are so crucial, I would ask precisely the same question, writ large: how do you think it feels for a young kid—a Muslim American kid, or the child of undocumented immigrants, or a kid realizing he or she is gay—to be told, implicitly but often explicitly as well, that he or she is outside of “American” identity, is an other within his or her homeland? That’s the stake of these debates—and, I believe, one of the most fundamental stakes of the 2012 election, and many of our ongoing political arguments beyond it.Next Obama post tomorrow (tomorrow!),BenPS. What do you think?11/5 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two controversial and inspiring Americans who came to embody much of their respective eras: Benjamin Butler, the Civil War General, Reconstruction leader, and civil rights activist; and Ida Tarbell, the Gilded Age and Progressive-eramuckraker par excellence.
November 3, 2012
November 3-4, 2012: Crowd-sourcing American Scares
[This week’s series has been, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—have helped me assemble a weekend post that’s all treats and no tricks. Boo!]
Vince Kling reminds us not to forget M.R. James, and Jeff Renye mentions James’s “Casting the Runes” and follows up by highlighting R.W. Chambers’s collection The King in Yellow (1895).Kisha Tracy reminds us of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds scare, which aired on Halloween eve in 1938.Rob Gosselin points to one of America’s scariest real-life stories, the case of Lizzie Borden.On Twitter, @VendettaStudieshighlights the supernatural works of Washington Irving, especially “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”and “Rip Van Winkle.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What would you add to these ideas?11/3 Memory Day nominees: A tie between William Cullen Bryant, whose poems and journalism helped establish and define American literature and identity in the Early Republic; and Walker Evans, whose photographs helped chart the worst and best of Depression-era America.11/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two 20th century figures who heavily influenced American culture and society, if in profoundly different ways, Will Rogers and Ruth Handler.
Vince Kling reminds us not to forget M.R. James, and Jeff Renye mentions James’s “Casting the Runes” and follows up by highlighting R.W. Chambers’s collection The King in Yellow (1895).Kisha Tracy reminds us of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds scare, which aired on Halloween eve in 1938.Rob Gosselin points to one of America’s scariest real-life stories, the case of Lizzie Borden.On Twitter, @VendettaStudieshighlights the supernatural works of Washington Irving, especially “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”and “Rip Van Winkle.”Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What would you add to these ideas?11/3 Memory Day nominees: A tie between William Cullen Bryant, whose poems and journalism helped establish and define American literature and identity in the Early Republic; and Walker Evans, whose photographs helped chart the worst and best of Depression-era America.11/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two 20th century figures who heavily influenced American culture and society, if in profoundly different ways, Will Rogers and Ruth Handler.
November 2, 2012
November 2, 2012: AmericanSpooking, Part 4
[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—will help me assemble a weekend post that’s all treats and no tricks. Boo!]
On what we can make of the two opposed endings to the novel and film versions of the same scary story.I don’t like losing readers, even for the best of reasons; but if you either haven’t read Steven King’s The Shining (1977) or haven’t seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version (1980) of the novel, and are interested in checking them out sometime, you should probably skip this post, as I’m gonna spoil the heck out of the endings to both. Because while there are definitely stylistic and even thematic differences between the two versions throughout, it’s really the endings where they become not only distinct but starkly contrasting and opposed. I won’t spoil every single detail, but suffice it to say that King’s novel ends hopefully, with notes of redemption for its protagonist Jack Torrance and especially for his relationship to his son and family; whereas Kubrick’s film ends with Torrance murderously pursuing that same son with an axe and, thwarted, freezing to death, more evil in his final moments than he has been at any earlier moment in the film. There are various ways we could read this striking distinction, including connecting it to the profoundly different worldviews of the two artists (at least as represented in their collected works): King, despite his penchant for horror, is to my mind a big ol’ softie who almost always finds his way to a happy ending; Kubrick has a far more bleak and cynical perspective and tended to end his films on at best ambiguous and often explicitly disturbing notes. Those different worldviews could also be connected to two longstanding American traditions and genres, what we might call the sentimental vs. the pessimistic romance (in that Hawthornean sense I discussed yesterday): in the former, such as in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the darkest supernatural qualities give way by the story’s end to more rational and far happier worlds and events; in the latter, such as in his contemporary Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (also 1851), the darkness is only amplified and deepened by concluding events, leaving us adrift (literally and figuratively) in an eternally scary world.King’s and Kubrick’s texts, and more exactly their respective conclusions, certainly fit into those traditions. But given that both create similarly horrifying worlds and events right up until those endings, I would also connect their distinct final images to the dueling yet interconnected ideas at the heart of my current book project: dark histories and hope. Where the two versions differ most overtly, that is, is in whether they offer their audiences any hope: in King’s novel, Torrance finds a way through his darkest histories and to final moments of hope for his family’s future (achieved at great personal sacrifice); in Kubrick’s film, hope has abandoned Torrance as fully as has sanity, and both his family and the audience can only hope that they can survive and escape his entirely dark world. Obviously you know which I prefer; but I would also argue that, whatever the appeal of horror for its own sake, without the possibility of hope and redemption it’d be a pretty bleak and terrible genre.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So what do you think? Responses to the week’s topics? Thoughts on other American scary stories, of any type? Add ‘em for the weekend post!11/2 Memory Day nominee: Conrad Weiser, the farmer, soldier, tanner, judge, and monk (they did a lot back in the 18th century) who also served as Pennsylvania’s chief diplomatic emissary to Native Americans for many decades of complex but important cross-cultural encounters.
On what we can make of the two opposed endings to the novel and film versions of the same scary story.I don’t like losing readers, even for the best of reasons; but if you either haven’t read Steven King’s The Shining (1977) or haven’t seen Stanley Kubrick’s film version (1980) of the novel, and are interested in checking them out sometime, you should probably skip this post, as I’m gonna spoil the heck out of the endings to both. Because while there are definitely stylistic and even thematic differences between the two versions throughout, it’s really the endings where they become not only distinct but starkly contrasting and opposed. I won’t spoil every single detail, but suffice it to say that King’s novel ends hopefully, with notes of redemption for its protagonist Jack Torrance and especially for his relationship to his son and family; whereas Kubrick’s film ends with Torrance murderously pursuing that same son with an axe and, thwarted, freezing to death, more evil in his final moments than he has been at any earlier moment in the film. There are various ways we could read this striking distinction, including connecting it to the profoundly different worldviews of the two artists (at least as represented in their collected works): King, despite his penchant for horror, is to my mind a big ol’ softie who almost always finds his way to a happy ending; Kubrick has a far more bleak and cynical perspective and tended to end his films on at best ambiguous and often explicitly disturbing notes. Those different worldviews could also be connected to two longstanding American traditions and genres, what we might call the sentimental vs. the pessimistic romance (in that Hawthornean sense I discussed yesterday): in the former, such as in Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the darkest supernatural qualities give way by the story’s end to more rational and far happier worlds and events; in the latter, such as in his contemporary Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (also 1851), the darkness is only amplified and deepened by concluding events, leaving us adrift (literally and figuratively) in an eternally scary world.King’s and Kubrick’s texts, and more exactly their respective conclusions, certainly fit into those traditions. But given that both create similarly horrifying worlds and events right up until those endings, I would also connect their distinct final images to the dueling yet interconnected ideas at the heart of my current book project: dark histories and hope. Where the two versions differ most overtly, that is, is in whether they offer their audiences any hope: in King’s novel, Torrance finds a way through his darkest histories and to final moments of hope for his family’s future (achieved at great personal sacrifice); in Kubrick’s film, hope has abandoned Torrance as fully as has sanity, and both his family and the audience can only hope that they can survive and escape his entirely dark world. Obviously you know which I prefer; but I would also argue that, whatever the appeal of horror for its own sake, without the possibility of hope and redemption it’d be a pretty bleak and terrible genre.Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So what do you think? Responses to the week’s topics? Thoughts on other American scary stories, of any type? Add ‘em for the weekend post!11/2 Memory Day nominee: Conrad Weiser, the farmer, soldier, tanner, judge, and monk (they did a lot back in the 18th century) who also served as Pennsylvania’s chief diplomatic emissary to Native Americans for many decades of complex but important cross-cultural encounters.
November 1, 2012
November 1, 2012: AmericanSpooking, Part 3
[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—will help me assemble a weekend post that’s all treats and no tricks. Boo!]
On whether America can have home-grown horror—and where we might find it.Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously complained (in the Preface to The Marble Faun) about “the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong … Romances need ruin to make them grow.” Given what he and his era meant by “the Romance,” it’s possible to paraphrase his point this way: America was, at least in the early 19th century but perhaps remains, too young, too devoid of a distant past and the ancient castles and ruins that come with it, to produce a Gothic literary tradition in the same way as Europe. Even Edgar Allan Poe, the Hawthorne contemporary and American Gothic writer who would seem so clearly to disprove this idea, set his most Gothic stories either abroad or (as in “The Fall of the House of Usher”) in an undefined place that could be anywhere (and feels more European than American to be sure). So it might indeed be fair to ask whether there can be a homegrown American Gothic.It was of course in implied response to such a question that Grant Wood painted American Gothic (1930), one of the most famous and most ambiguous works of American art. Using his sister and the family dentist as his models for the iconic farmer and his wife, Wood created what seemed to be a simple and realistic portrait of two average (and somewhat unhappy and stiff, but not particularly mysterious) people. But then he gave it that title, and the whole thing suddenly became a great deal more complex and challenging. Is the title sarcastic, contrasting the simplicity and even boring-ness with those much more mysterious and compelling qualities Hawthorne had listed? Is it genuine, attempting to draw attention to the horrors that can lurk in quiet farmyards or families? Or is it an ironic combination of the two, recognizing that America does not have the overtly gothic qualities but might in its apparent simplicity and ordinariness possess a more subtle and very different but ultimately no less horrifying quality?Your mileage may vary, of course, and Wood’s painting will always remain open to those and many other possible interpretations. But I would argue for the ironic interpretation, not least because it fits with the painting’s own two contrasted yet interconnected levels (what’s on the canvas and what’s in the title). And I would connect it to our contemporary popular culture by noting the echoes of Wood’s title in the recent hit TV show American Horror Story. At least in its first season (apparently the show will change settings and characters yearly), Story could be seen as an extended and far more explicit (this is 2012, and they had a full season of episodes to fill) representation of the idea that average American families and homes contain within them great and gothic horrors, that the scariest thing of all might not be a ruined castle full of vengeful ghosts and supernatural terrors, but a sunlit suburban home full of, well, those same things. I’d like to think that Hawthorne would be entirely on that board with that idea.Next spoooooky post tomorrow,BenPS. American scary stories to highlight for the weekend post? Don’t be scared to share!11/1 Memory Day nominee: Parker David Robbins, the North Carolinian and US Colored Troops Civil War veteran who went on to an inspiring career as a politican, inventor, businessman, and exemplary late 20th century Renaissance Man.
On whether America can have home-grown horror—and where we might find it.Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously complained (in the Preface to The Marble Faun) about “the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong … Romances need ruin to make them grow.” Given what he and his era meant by “the Romance,” it’s possible to paraphrase his point this way: America was, at least in the early 19th century but perhaps remains, too young, too devoid of a distant past and the ancient castles and ruins that come with it, to produce a Gothic literary tradition in the same way as Europe. Even Edgar Allan Poe, the Hawthorne contemporary and American Gothic writer who would seem so clearly to disprove this idea, set his most Gothic stories either abroad or (as in “The Fall of the House of Usher”) in an undefined place that could be anywhere (and feels more European than American to be sure). So it might indeed be fair to ask whether there can be a homegrown American Gothic.It was of course in implied response to such a question that Grant Wood painted American Gothic (1930), one of the most famous and most ambiguous works of American art. Using his sister and the family dentist as his models for the iconic farmer and his wife, Wood created what seemed to be a simple and realistic portrait of two average (and somewhat unhappy and stiff, but not particularly mysterious) people. But then he gave it that title, and the whole thing suddenly became a great deal more complex and challenging. Is the title sarcastic, contrasting the simplicity and even boring-ness with those much more mysterious and compelling qualities Hawthorne had listed? Is it genuine, attempting to draw attention to the horrors that can lurk in quiet farmyards or families? Or is it an ironic combination of the two, recognizing that America does not have the overtly gothic qualities but might in its apparent simplicity and ordinariness possess a more subtle and very different but ultimately no less horrifying quality?Your mileage may vary, of course, and Wood’s painting will always remain open to those and many other possible interpretations. But I would argue for the ironic interpretation, not least because it fits with the painting’s own two contrasted yet interconnected levels (what’s on the canvas and what’s in the title). And I would connect it to our contemporary popular culture by noting the echoes of Wood’s title in the recent hit TV show American Horror Story. At least in its first season (apparently the show will change settings and characters yearly), Story could be seen as an extended and far more explicit (this is 2012, and they had a full season of episodes to fill) representation of the idea that average American families and homes contain within them great and gothic horrors, that the scariest thing of all might not be a ruined castle full of vengeful ghosts and supernatural terrors, but a sunlit suburban home full of, well, those same things. I’d like to think that Hawthorne would be entirely on that board with that idea.Next spoooooky post tomorrow,BenPS. American scary stories to highlight for the weekend post? Don’t be scared to share!11/1 Memory Day nominee: Parker David Robbins, the North Carolinian and US Colored Troops Civil War veteran who went on to an inspiring career as a politican, inventor, businessman, and exemplary late 20th century Renaissance Man.
October 31, 2012
October 31, 2012: October 2012 Recap
[The spooooky posts resume tomorrow, but first, this recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]
October 1: Up in the Air, Part One: First in a series inspired by articles in the US Airways magazine, this one on a Charlotte, North Carolina, Museum.October 2: Up in the Air, Part Two: Next in the series, on the varied and inspiring efforts of country star Zac Brown.October 3: Up in the Air, Part Three: The series continues with a post on Asheville, North Carolina’s forgotten son, Thomas Wolfe.October 4: Up in the Air, Part Four: On the complex, challenging, and very American history of Puerto Rico’s Vieques island.October 5: Up in the Air, Part Five: The series concludes with a post on the appeals and downsides of American nostalgia.October 6-7: Brother Ali: A tribute post to a very unique and talented young American musician.October 8: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part One: First in a series of nominations for a Cross-Cultural Day alternative to Columbus Day, this one on images of the arrival and exploration era.October 9: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part Two: The series continues with a post on the cross-cultural and inspiring life of Ely Parker.October 10: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part Three: Next in the series, on two distinct but equally cross-cultural late 19th century literary works.October 11: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part Four: On the voice, writings, and identity of Zitkala-Sa.October 12: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part Five: Last in the series, on some important and inspiring cross-cultural work being done right now.October 13-14: Crowd-sourcing Columbus Day Alternatives: A crowd-sourced post, drawn from responses to the week’s series and topics.October 15: Guest Post on Margaret Weis Brown: A series on children’s literature begins with Ilene Railton’s post on Brown and Goodnight Moon.October 16: Ezra Jack Keats: The series continues with a tribute to a particularly progressive children’s book and author.October 17: Mike Mulligan and His America: Next in the series, on the complex historical and cultural themes of Virginia Lee Burton’s classic.October 18: Maurice Sendak: A tribute to the William Faulkner of children’s lit.October 19: Frustrating George: The series concludes with a post on the most appalling and more inspiring sides to H.A. Rey’s mega-hit.October 20-21: Crowd-sourcing Children’s Books: Another crowd-sourced post, following up the week’s series with lots of other voices and ideas.October 22: Adverse Reactions, Part One: A series on inspiring responses to horrible situations begins with a post on the voices and texts of Angel Island.October 23: Adverse Reactions, Part Two: On Trayvon Martin’s parents, Jim and Sue Brady, and turning tragedy to activism.October 24: Adverse Reactions, Part Three: On the multiple layers of inspiration in Helen Keller’s life, work, and perspsective.October 25: Adverse Reactions, Part Four: On two recent, very different, but equally impressive memoirs about loss and its aftermaths.October 26: Adverse Reactions, Part Five: The series concludes with just a few of the reasons why Abraham Lincoln exemplifies my week’s theme.October 27-28: Crowd-sourcing American Adversity: Other AmericanStudiers reflect on the week’s questions and topics.October 29: AmericanSpooking, Part One: The Halloween-inspired series begins with a post on Poe, Danielewski, and horror.October 30: AmericanSpooking, Part Two: Next in the series, on five exemplary American scary stories.Back to the scares tomorrow,BenPS. Topics, themes, texts, or thoughts you’d like to see in this space in the coming months? Guest posts you’d like to write? Let me know!10/31 Memory Day nominee: Juliette Gordon Low, the Southern belle turned world traveler and children’s advocate whose 1912 founding of the Girl Scouts (known first as the American Girl Guides) has impacted millions of young Americans (and American sweet teeth).
October 1: Up in the Air, Part One: First in a series inspired by articles in the US Airways magazine, this one on a Charlotte, North Carolina, Museum.October 2: Up in the Air, Part Two: Next in the series, on the varied and inspiring efforts of country star Zac Brown.October 3: Up in the Air, Part Three: The series continues with a post on Asheville, North Carolina’s forgotten son, Thomas Wolfe.October 4: Up in the Air, Part Four: On the complex, challenging, and very American history of Puerto Rico’s Vieques island.October 5: Up in the Air, Part Five: The series concludes with a post on the appeals and downsides of American nostalgia.October 6-7: Brother Ali: A tribute post to a very unique and talented young American musician.October 8: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part One: First in a series of nominations for a Cross-Cultural Day alternative to Columbus Day, this one on images of the arrival and exploration era.October 9: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part Two: The series continues with a post on the cross-cultural and inspiring life of Ely Parker.October 10: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part Three: Next in the series, on two distinct but equally cross-cultural late 19th century literary works.October 11: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part Four: On the voice, writings, and identity of Zitkala-Sa.October 12: Columbus Day Alternatives, Part Five: Last in the series, on some important and inspiring cross-cultural work being done right now.October 13-14: Crowd-sourcing Columbus Day Alternatives: A crowd-sourced post, drawn from responses to the week’s series and topics.October 15: Guest Post on Margaret Weis Brown: A series on children’s literature begins with Ilene Railton’s post on Brown and Goodnight Moon.October 16: Ezra Jack Keats: The series continues with a tribute to a particularly progressive children’s book and author.October 17: Mike Mulligan and His America: Next in the series, on the complex historical and cultural themes of Virginia Lee Burton’s classic.October 18: Maurice Sendak: A tribute to the William Faulkner of children’s lit.October 19: Frustrating George: The series concludes with a post on the most appalling and more inspiring sides to H.A. Rey’s mega-hit.October 20-21: Crowd-sourcing Children’s Books: Another crowd-sourced post, following up the week’s series with lots of other voices and ideas.October 22: Adverse Reactions, Part One: A series on inspiring responses to horrible situations begins with a post on the voices and texts of Angel Island.October 23: Adverse Reactions, Part Two: On Trayvon Martin’s parents, Jim and Sue Brady, and turning tragedy to activism.October 24: Adverse Reactions, Part Three: On the multiple layers of inspiration in Helen Keller’s life, work, and perspsective.October 25: Adverse Reactions, Part Four: On two recent, very different, but equally impressive memoirs about loss and its aftermaths.October 26: Adverse Reactions, Part Five: The series concludes with just a few of the reasons why Abraham Lincoln exemplifies my week’s theme.October 27-28: Crowd-sourcing American Adversity: Other AmericanStudiers reflect on the week’s questions and topics.October 29: AmericanSpooking, Part One: The Halloween-inspired series begins with a post on Poe, Danielewski, and horror.October 30: AmericanSpooking, Part Two: Next in the series, on five exemplary American scary stories.Back to the scares tomorrow,BenPS. Topics, themes, texts, or thoughts you’d like to see in this space in the coming months? Guest posts you’d like to write? Let me know!10/31 Memory Day nominee: Juliette Gordon Low, the Southern belle turned world traveler and children’s advocate whose 1912 founding of the Girl Scouts (known first as the American Girl Guides) has impacted millions of young Americans (and American sweet teeth).
October 30, 2012
October 30, 2012: AmericanSpooking, Part 2
[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—will help me assemble a weekend post that’s all treats and no tricks. Boo!]
My nominees for five of the scariest works of or moments in American literature (in chronological order):1) Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation (1798): Brown’s novel suffers from some seriously over-wrought prose, and it can be hard to take its narrator seriously as a result; the pseudo-scientific resolution of its central mystery also leaves a good bit to be desired. But since that central mystery involves a husband and father who turns into a murderous psychopath bent on destroying his own idyllic home and family, well, none of those flaws can entirely take away the spookiness.
2) Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839): Just about any Poe story would fit in this space. But given how fully this story’s scares depend precisely on the idea of what reading and art can do to the human imagination and psyche of their susceptible audiences, it seems like a good choice.
3) Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948): I don’t think there’s anything scarier, in the world or in the imagination, than what people are capable of doing to each other. And Jackson’s story is probably the most concise and perfect exemplification of that idea in American literary history. I’ve read arguments that connect it to the Holocaust, which makes sense timing-wise; but I’d say the story is purposefully, and terrifyingly, more universal than that.
4) Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt”(1950; don’t know why the font is so small in that online version, but you can always copy and paste and then enlarge—it’s worth it!): The less I give away about Bradbury’s story, the better. Suffice it to say it’s a pretty good argument for not having kids, or at least for only letting them play with very basic and non-technological toys. Ah well, that ship has sailed for me.
5) Mark Danielewksi, House of Leaves (2000; that’s the companion website): As I wrote in yesterday’s post, Danielewksi’s novel is thoroughly post-modern and yet entirely terrifying at the same time. Don’t believe it’s possible? Read the book—but try to keep some lights on, or maybe just read outside, while you do.October recap tomorrow, back to the spoooooky posts Thursday,BenPS. American scary stories to highlight for the weekend post? Don’t be scared to share!10/30 Memory Day nominee: Elizabeth Madox Roberts, the far-too-forgotten early 20th century novelistand poetwho portrayed her beloved Kentucky with both sensitive realism and modernist innovation.
My nominees for five of the scariest works of or moments in American literature (in chronological order):1) Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation (1798): Brown’s novel suffers from some seriously over-wrought prose, and it can be hard to take its narrator seriously as a result; the pseudo-scientific resolution of its central mystery also leaves a good bit to be desired. But since that central mystery involves a husband and father who turns into a murderous psychopath bent on destroying his own idyllic home and family, well, none of those flaws can entirely take away the spookiness.
2) Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839): Just about any Poe story would fit in this space. But given how fully this story’s scares depend precisely on the idea of what reading and art can do to the human imagination and psyche of their susceptible audiences, it seems like a good choice.
3) Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” (1948): I don’t think there’s anything scarier, in the world or in the imagination, than what people are capable of doing to each other. And Jackson’s story is probably the most concise and perfect exemplification of that idea in American literary history. I’ve read arguments that connect it to the Holocaust, which makes sense timing-wise; but I’d say the story is purposefully, and terrifyingly, more universal than that.
4) Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt”(1950; don’t know why the font is so small in that online version, but you can always copy and paste and then enlarge—it’s worth it!): The less I give away about Bradbury’s story, the better. Suffice it to say it’s a pretty good argument for not having kids, or at least for only letting them play with very basic and non-technological toys. Ah well, that ship has sailed for me.
5) Mark Danielewksi, House of Leaves (2000; that’s the companion website): As I wrote in yesterday’s post, Danielewksi’s novel is thoroughly post-modern and yet entirely terrifying at the same time. Don’t believe it’s possible? Read the book—but try to keep some lights on, or maybe just read outside, while you do.October recap tomorrow, back to the spoooooky posts Thursday,BenPS. American scary stories to highlight for the weekend post? Don’t be scared to share!10/30 Memory Day nominee: Elizabeth Madox Roberts, the far-too-forgotten early 20th century novelistand poetwho portrayed her beloved Kentucky with both sensitive realism and modernist innovation.
October 29, 2012
October 29, 2012: AmericanSpooking, Part 1
[This week’s series is, well, obvious. Your thoughts on American scary stories—real or fictional, artistic or historical, fun or horrifying, and anything else you can think of—will help me assemble a weekend post that’s all treats and no tricks. Boo!]
On the limitations and the possibilities of scary stories.I don’t have any problem thinking of genre fiction and scholarly conversations about literature in the same ballpark, or even on the same base—I’m the guy who wrote one of my early entries here about Ross MacDonald’s hardboiled detective novels, and am also the guy who created an Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy class and has had an unabashedly good time teaching it twice now. When you get right down to it, it can be pretty difficult to parse out what qualifies as genre fiction and what doesn’t in any case—Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) owes a lot to detective fiction , Twain’s Connecticut Yankee (1889) is in many ways a Jules Verne-esque time travel sci fi novel, and, as critic David Reynolds has convincingly argued, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850) has a great deal in common with contemporary potboiler works of religion, romance, and scandal. So while I’m not averse to making judgment calls about whether a particular text is worth extended attention (in a class, in scholarly work, etc), I try not to base those calls on whether it’s been put in a particular generic box or not.And yet, I’ll admit that I have a bit of an analytical prejudice against works whose primary purpose—or one of them at least—is to scare their audiences. I suppose it has always seemed to me that a desire to frighten, while very much a valid and complex formal and stylistic goal—and one brought to the height of perfection I’d say by Edgar Allan Poe, whose every choice and detail in a story like “The Fall of the House of Usher”(1839) contributes to its scariness, making it a perfect example of his theory of the unity of effect—, is nonetheless a desire that requires an audience to turn off their analytical skills, to give in entirely to primal responses that, while not insignificant, are to my mind a bit more passive than ideal. (I’d compare this for example to humor, which certainly does tap into primal responses as well but which nonetheless can still ask an audience to think as well as laugh.) This isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to weird tale kind of scares, ones that connect an audience to deeply unfamiliar worlds and force them to imagine what they might entail and affect; but the more mainstream horror, tales of vampires and zombies and ghosts and the like, does often ask an audience mainly to react in terror to the artist’s and text’s manipulations.But like any reasonable person who recognizes his or her prejudices, I’d like to challenge and eventually undermine this perspective of mine, and a text that has very much helped me to begin doing so in this case is Mark Danielewski’spostmodern horror novel House of Leaves (2000). Postmodern is a must-use adjective in any description of Danielewski’s novel, which features, among other things, at least three distinct narrations and narrators (one of whom does much of his narrating in footnotes, and another who does the majority of his narrating in footnotes on those footnotes); pages with only a single word, located in a random location; elaborate use of colored type to signal and signify different (if vague and shifting) emphases; and a large number of invented scholarly works, fully and accurately cited both parenthetically and in the aforementioned footnotes (alongside some actual works). Yet—and I know that scariness is a very subjective thing, which is perhaps another reason why I have a hard time analyzing it, but nonetheless—the novel is also deeply, powerfully, successfully scary. And moving, for that matter—certainly to my mind the best horror (and Poe would qualify here for sure) reveals and sympathizes with humanity even as it threatens and destroys many of its human characters, and Danielewski’s novel does each of those things, to each character at each level of story and narration, very fully and impressively. Yet I believe that the book’s principal purpose, first and last, is to scare its readers, and for me, at least, it has done so, not only the first time I read it but the second and third as well (another mark of the best horror I’d say).So what?, you might ask. Well, for starters, you should check out House of Leaves, perhaps beginning with this fun and, yes, scary companion website. But for me, I suppose the ultimate lesson here is that the more I’m open to the potential power and impressiveness of any work of literature (and art in any medium), both emotionally and analytically, the more I can find the greatest works, of our moment and every other one. Nothing scary about that! Next spoooooky post tomorrow,BenPS. American scary stories to highlight for the weekend post? Don’t be scared to share!10/29 Memory Day nominee: Henry George, the writer, economist, and political activist whose Progress and Poverty, despite some outdated theories, remains one of the most prescient and salientworks on inequality published in America.
On the limitations and the possibilities of scary stories.I don’t have any problem thinking of genre fiction and scholarly conversations about literature in the same ballpark, or even on the same base—I’m the guy who wrote one of my early entries here about Ross MacDonald’s hardboiled detective novels, and am also the guy who created an Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy class and has had an unabashedly good time teaching it twice now. When you get right down to it, it can be pretty difficult to parse out what qualifies as genre fiction and what doesn’t in any case—Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) owes a lot to detective fiction , Twain’s Connecticut Yankee (1889) is in many ways a Jules Verne-esque time travel sci fi novel, and, as critic David Reynolds has convincingly argued, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850) has a great deal in common with contemporary potboiler works of religion, romance, and scandal. So while I’m not averse to making judgment calls about whether a particular text is worth extended attention (in a class, in scholarly work, etc), I try not to base those calls on whether it’s been put in a particular generic box or not.And yet, I’ll admit that I have a bit of an analytical prejudice against works whose primary purpose—or one of them at least—is to scare their audiences. I suppose it has always seemed to me that a desire to frighten, while very much a valid and complex formal and stylistic goal—and one brought to the height of perfection I’d say by Edgar Allan Poe, whose every choice and detail in a story like “The Fall of the House of Usher”(1839) contributes to its scariness, making it a perfect example of his theory of the unity of effect—, is nonetheless a desire that requires an audience to turn off their analytical skills, to give in entirely to primal responses that, while not insignificant, are to my mind a bit more passive than ideal. (I’d compare this for example to humor, which certainly does tap into primal responses as well but which nonetheless can still ask an audience to think as well as laugh.) This isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to weird tale kind of scares, ones that connect an audience to deeply unfamiliar worlds and force them to imagine what they might entail and affect; but the more mainstream horror, tales of vampires and zombies and ghosts and the like, does often ask an audience mainly to react in terror to the artist’s and text’s manipulations.But like any reasonable person who recognizes his or her prejudices, I’d like to challenge and eventually undermine this perspective of mine, and a text that has very much helped me to begin doing so in this case is Mark Danielewski’spostmodern horror novel House of Leaves (2000). Postmodern is a must-use adjective in any description of Danielewski’s novel, which features, among other things, at least three distinct narrations and narrators (one of whom does much of his narrating in footnotes, and another who does the majority of his narrating in footnotes on those footnotes); pages with only a single word, located in a random location; elaborate use of colored type to signal and signify different (if vague and shifting) emphases; and a large number of invented scholarly works, fully and accurately cited both parenthetically and in the aforementioned footnotes (alongside some actual works). Yet—and I know that scariness is a very subjective thing, which is perhaps another reason why I have a hard time analyzing it, but nonetheless—the novel is also deeply, powerfully, successfully scary. And moving, for that matter—certainly to my mind the best horror (and Poe would qualify here for sure) reveals and sympathizes with humanity even as it threatens and destroys many of its human characters, and Danielewski’s novel does each of those things, to each character at each level of story and narration, very fully and impressively. Yet I believe that the book’s principal purpose, first and last, is to scare its readers, and for me, at least, it has done so, not only the first time I read it but the second and third as well (another mark of the best horror I’d say).So what?, you might ask. Well, for starters, you should check out House of Leaves, perhaps beginning with this fun and, yes, scary companion website. But for me, I suppose the ultimate lesson here is that the more I’m open to the potential power and impressiveness of any work of literature (and art in any medium), both emotionally and analytically, the more I can find the greatest works, of our moment and every other one. Nothing scary about that! Next spoooooky post tomorrow,BenPS. American scary stories to highlight for the weekend post? Don’t be scared to share!10/29 Memory Day nominee: Henry George, the writer, economist, and political activist whose Progress and Poverty, despite some outdated theories, remains one of the most prescient and salientworks on inequality published in America.
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