Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 439

July 11, 2011: The Okay American Novel

I call my teaching philosophy student-centered, and while that means many more things that I can elucidate in this one post, it certainly includes the idea that it's more important to get students reading critically at all, rather than to worry about precisely what it is that they're reading. That differentiates me from colleagues who feel that it's vital to teach certain texts or authors, to make sure that a particular canon (however it's constituted) remains part of our understanding of American (or any other) literature; while I don't go nearly as far in the opposite direction as some other colleagues, particularly those in the cultural or pop culture studies camps who have been known to teach English classes in which no creative literature gets read, I would say that for the majority of my students (not the English majors, I hasten to add, but the non-majors who largely populate my survey courses), practicing the skill of critical reading (and other concurrent skills such as analysis, argumentation, and writing) is much more productive than learning about any particular figures or texts.Yet there's a difference between an emphasis and a sole focus, and while I do emphasize such student-focused practices, I definitely try to complement them with a group of texts that are to my mind important for them to read, both for their own sake and for the historical, cultural, and other contexts to which they can connect us. In my American Literature II survey, two of the texts we read—and certainly the two most famous and canonical—are Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). There are lots of reasons why I have those novels on the syllabus—and have kept them there through six years of teaching the course—but if I had to boil them down to one each, I might say: Twain's novel is narrated by one of the most complex and authentic voices in American fiction, that of Huck himself, an authenticity driven home by that youthful and mostly innocent voice's frequent and discomfiting expressions of racism; and Fitzgerald's novel represents one of the most poignant and compelling examinations and critiques of America's ideals and myths, a theme driven home by the lyrical and evocative prose style of its novelist-narrator Nick Carraway. Not coincidentally, those elements also provide many of our best starting points for discussions of the novels—what we make of Huck's perspective on and relationship with his runaway slave companion Jim; what we do with Nick's especially lyrical and poetic reflective passages, including the opening and closing ones.As most of you likely already know, given the prominence (at least for a couple days) that the story received, a well-known Twain scholar is working on an edition of Huck (and its companion text Tom Sawyer) which revises away at least a bit of that discomfiting racism, replacing the novel's 219 uses of "nigger" with "slave." Today I read, courtesy of Roger Ebert's always thought-provoking blog, about an even more aggressive and ridiculous bowdlerization, an edition of Fitzgerald's novel for basic (and perhaps ESL) readers that clocks in at 67 pages and substitutes for the novel's lyrical prose the most banal equivalents possible; for example, the novel's justifiably famous final lines, quoted in full on Ebert's blog, have been replaced with "Some unpleasant people became part of Gatsby's dream. But he cannot be blamed for that. Gatsby was a success, in the end, wasn't he?" Again, I think there's significant value in students reading at all, and I suppose it's possible to engage with Fitzgerald's themes and ideas despite such a drastic difference in language; but the bottom line is that the resulting text is not Fitzgerald's novel, just as a version of Huck without the word "nigger" does not represent the novel that Twain wrote and published. If we believe that students should read these texts, we should ask them to read them as they are and as their authors intended; otherwise, there are plenty of other choices.I suppose this might seem like shooting fish in a barrel, particularly with the Fitzgerald example; the Twain one is less extreme and so perhaps more open to debate, although I do see the two revisions as equally destructive to the original texts. But I think the larger questions, of why and what we ask students to read, and how we can wed a student-centered and practical goal with a sense of the value of particular (and often complicated) works, are far from simple, and get at the heart of much of what literature and teaching, and life, are about. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Ebert on the abbreviated Fitzgerald: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/07/_did_it_seem_to.html2)      An article on the Twain revision, which quotes my Dad: http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/40917583/ns/today-books/t/edition-removes-n-word-mark-twain-classics/3)      OPEN: What do you think?

July 9-10, 2011 [Tribute post 18]: Web Feat

In regard to my two principal academic roles (as a scholar and a teacher), I generally have two pretty significantly opposed perspectives on the net worth of the worldwide web. For scholars, especially those of us for whom family and finances make extensive or frequent travel next to impossible (ie, almost all  of us!), the web has quickly become an indispensable resource: just the number of primary texts that are now archived and easily searched online is an incredible boon, but it's similarly so much easier to find and read a high percentage of the work by our fellow scholars (at least for those of us affiliated with institutions and thus with free access to databases), among other benefits. And that's to say nothing of the new forms of scholarship and community that have sprung up online, including, duh, blogs; whatever the worth of this blog itself (and hey, I'm trying), the daily links are a great indication of the breadth and depth of what we can now find and engage with online.All of those materials are likewise present and accessible for students, of course, but I'd still have to argue that for teachers the web has been at least as much (and to my mind more) of a curse than a blessing. I have pretty much no meaningful experience with having taught prior to the advent of the web (although my high school years as a student certainly qualify, and would second this point), but it seems likely to me that in the pre-web era plagiarism was nearly always a conscious and extremely premeditated act, one that required finding hard copy sources from which to plagiarize, writing out the plagiarized materials again in one's own paper, and so on. Now, on the other hand, a brief moment of panic about a paper can lead to a quick Google search which leads to that perfect paragraph on The Great Gatsby which is so easily cut and pasted into that existing paper, making plagiarism an easy and momentary (but hugely damaging) mistake. As hard I have worked and will continue to work to get students to use online materials and resources in positive and productive ways, both individually and in our communal conversations, at times I feel certain that the web's classroom presence will always remain first and foremost a deeply troubling and potentially destructive one.But I'm an optimist by nature, and if and when I need a reason to feel more optimistic about what the web can mean for students—as well as a reaffirmation of its incredible value for scholars and all interested AmericanStudiers –I've got a particularly exemplary one right in the family. My Dad, University of Virginia English Professor Stephen (Steve) Railton, has spent the past couple of decades developing two incredible scholarly websites: Mark Twain in His Times and Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture (links below). The sites are literally the pitch-perfect combination of old-school scholarship (including tons of primary sources, clear and helpful framing essays and materials by my Dad throughout, pieces by other scholars, bibliographies, and so on) and new-school technology (including ever-expanding use of images, sound, video, search technology, and so on). I can't imagine anybody who won't find something of significant interest in both, and that includes people with no explicit interest in the authors and texts in question. (Case in point 1: like to play board games? Did you know that Mark Twain invented one? My Dad's site does. Case in point 2: collect figurines? Did you know that the characters of Uncle Tom have been turned into hundreds of such figures? Ditto.) But apropos of this post, and perhaps most impressively, I know that numerous educators and classes have made great use of the sites, and that the feedback my Dad has gotten from such users has been among the most deserved and meaningful support he's gotten for any of his career's worth of great work.As with most anything in our world, it's easy to despair at times of what the web and other modern technologies have meant and done; similarly, it's easy to wonder if the benefits tend to accrue more to the haves (such as scholars at and institutions of higher education, in this case) and less to the less fortunate (such as students and non-affiliated folks, in this case). But if you need reminders of the incredible potential in the web—and ones that anybody and everybody can access fully and freely—just check out those web feats below. They come with my higher recommendation. More next week,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The Twain site: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/index2.html2)      The Tom site: http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/3)      OPEN: Any great scholarly websites you'd highlight?

July 8, 2011: Deadly Personal (Repeat)

[Crunched for time today, but in the light of Texas's controversial execution yesterday, I thought this was a valuable repeat.]It took having my boys to make me understand the death penalty. The arguments against it had just always seemed so overwhelming—from the exorbitant costs to the racial and economic imbalances, the failures as a deterrent to, most especially, the constant and very real possibility of executing innocent men and women—that it just seemed to me that any support for it had to come purely from an emotional standpoint, purely from the desire on the part of victims' families and advocates for revenge for what they have suffered and lost. I still think that's true, but now I suppose I just get that desire much more fully than I ever had; if someone killed one of the boys, you're damn right I'd want that person to die. That doesn't mean that it should be legal—in fact, you could make the case that it is precisely my emotional investment that is the strongest argument against having it be part of our law—but it means that I get how personal this political issue can be and usually is.It's precisely that deeply personal side that made the film Dead Man Walking a success, for me—because the film wasn't trying to embody a particular political opinion or stance, but instead simply created a handful of extremely complex and realistic people (most especially Sean Penn's death row convict, but certainly also Susan Sarandon as Sister Helen Prejean, the nun working on his behalf, and an Raymond Barry as the father of one of Penn's victims, among other standout characters) and gave them room to live and breathe and grow over the course of the film. Even in the final scenes it's not only possible but, I would argue, likely for a viewer to both cry for and curse Penn's character, and that range of reactions means that watching his death scene (spoiler alert? Well, it is in the title) feels like watching a person (rather than a character, much less a political symbol) die. Which is exactly the point, of course—however you feel about the death penalty, it's personal in that way too, the state-sanctioned taking of a person's life. And the incredibly diverse and talented group of artists recruited for the film's pitch-perfect soundtrack do, by and large, a similarly impressive job of creating the voices and perspectives and stories of realistic people affected by the death penalty in all sorts of ways.There are lots of candidates for the best song on that soundtrack, but for my money it's Steve Earle's "Ellis Unit One." Earle's song is, as I wrote yesterday, barely a whisper, both in its nasally voice and minimalist music and in its seemingly insignificant speaker, a second-generation death row guard narrating the story of how he ended up on Ellis Unit One and of his experiences there. The first clue that Earle is creating something much more powerful is the chorus, the superficially unrelated "Swing low/Swing low/Swing low and carry me home." The hints in those lines are entirely borne out in the song's two final and most gut-wrenching sections: first the final verse, where the speaker awakens from a dream in which he is the one being executed, "something cold and black pumped through my lungs/And Jesus could not save me/Though I know he tried his best/But Jesus doesn't live on Ellis Unit One"; and then the final chorus, with one small but crucial change: "Swing low/Don't let go/Swing low and carry me home." Suddenly his job and world have become as personal and powerful as they can get—and if the moment doesn't take your breath away too, well, maybe you've already been euthanized.I'm not trying to sway any opinions on the death penalty—if and when I engage more directly with a political topic like this one, it won't be to proselytize, I promise—but just to highlight an amazing film and an even more amazing (and certainly less well-known) song, texts that engage with this controversial and hugely complex issue with sensitivity, humanity, and deep power. Doesn't get any more worth our attention and response than that. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Great live version of the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tc700Yi8KQ2)      An interesting article on Sister Helen Prejean and the film: http://www.americancatholic.org/messenger/Apr1996/feature1.asp3)      OPEN: What do you think?

July 7, 2011 [Scholarly Review 1]: A Good Deal

[I mentioned a while back that I was planning to dedicate an occasional, somewhat briefer but hopefully still interesting and informative post to highlight a particularly exemplary scholarly work; this is the first such post.]Given both my general interest in crossing disciplinary boundaries and my specific focus on that topic in the Abraham Cahan post from a couple days ago, it's only fitting that the first work of scholarship I'll highlight in this new type of post be a similarly boundary-busting text. Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990) doesn't just use a wide variety of media and sources—from memoirs and letters to popular and material culture, music and movies, government documents and journalism, and others—to trace and analyze her themes; she also pushes beyond one of the most accepted but false dichotomies of our national narratives: the division between "the average person" and "the government." That dichotomy is often particularly present in discussions of the Great Depression, which can tend to focus either on government policies and programs (like those comprised in the New Deal) or communal experiences (of poverty, unemployment, hunger, etc). Yet as the time frame of Cohen's book highlights, she argues instead that many of the New Deal's programs and changes were foreshadowed and influenced by earlier and ongoing communal perspectives and shifts, by changes happening at the ground level across a range of ethnic, racial, class, and other communities. This distinct emphasis and argument make Cohen's book important, but it's her writing style—accessible yet analytical, engaging yet sophisticated—that makes the book one I'm willing to highlight in this, not-just-academic, space. Cohen is a serious historian but not (just) an academic one; she recognizes that her topic is one to which all Americans connect, both in terms of the lasting effects of her time period and topics and in terms of how much they parallel many ongoing issues and crises (a context that's even more relevant in our own 21st century Great Recession). I know that many subsequent historians have taken issue with one or another of Cohen's claims or ideas, and that's as it should be; none of the books I recommend in this space are perfect, and my goal for all reading, with these other works as with my own, would be that you read them in a dialogic way, analyzing and responding and adding your own voice to the mix as you go. But for anybody who's interested in work, the city, the Depression, community life and organization, or even just some of the defining moments and issues of the 20th century, Cohen's book is a great one to add to your list.More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      Excellent review/analysis of Cohen's book: http://www.kevincmurphy.com/cohen.html2)      Cohen's follow up, A Consumer's Republic: http://books.google.com/books?id=YuZPy6JqutIC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false3)      OPEN: Any exemplary works of scholarship you'd highlight? And/or ones you'd like me to include in future posts?

July 6, 2011: Trial and Error

I've written a good deal in this space, including in my March 11th post on the Treaty of Tripoli, about what I consider to be the most radical and impressive feature of America's founding documents and national government: not only the separation of church and state and the protection of religious freedom (including to be sure the freedom from religion), but also the complete absence of religion (including even the word God) from the Constitution's language and ideas. As I wrote in that earlier post, it can be easy to forget that every existing nation and government in that late 18th century moment still featured an official, state religion, and wedded church to government in a variety of key and seemingly inevitable ways; so for the framers to go out of their way to create a government with absolutely no such connections, to emphasize instead solely and centrally the right to religious freedom, was without question a bold and striking choice, and constitutes to my mind the most unique aspect of the new nation as it was founded.Less unique, but just as strikingly central to the rights guaranteed by the framers (particularly in the Bill of Rights), were two legal concepts inherited by the colonies from English common law: habeas corpus, the right not to be detained unlawfully or without charges; and trial by jury, the right to a free and fair trial by one's peers. The Constitution's version of the latter was particularly similar to existing practice: in England and in the colonies the writs of habeas corpus had legally needed the authority of the monarchy or its representatives, while the American version extended that legal right to any and every individual; trial by jury, on the other hand, looked pretty similar in post-Revolutionary America to both the pre-Revolutionary colonies and the mother country across the Atlantic. Yet it's also important to note that more amendments in the Bill of Rights served to extend and strengthen the rights of the accused than to address any other issue—as the first link below demonstrates, the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th amendments all highlight and reaffirm such rights (and the 8th's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment certainly connects as well). Because of those affirmations, it seems clear to me (although I'm far from a legal scholar) that the American version of trial by jury did go further to protect explicitly the presumption of innocence, and make explicitly difficult the task of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, than the concept's existing legal practices.Winston Churchill famously (and perhaps apocryphally, but it's a great quote) noted that "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried." The same, I believe, could be said about trial by fury as a mechanism of redressing criminal actions; there's no question that such trials allow for the possibility that criminals will get away with their crimes, and in fact they make inevitable (particularly, again, given the lengths to which the American system has always gone to protect the rights of the accused, lengths that have been extended further in the centuries since the founding with the addition of Miranda rights and other practices) that some will do so. No matter what percentage of the accused are convicted—and given that, according to some statistics, 90% of all criminal cases result in a conviction by plea bargain without going to trial, that percentage is certainly extremely high—society will always focus on those few instances when a seemingly guilty person is (outrageously, the public outcry notes) acquitted by his or her peers. It's no coincidence that three of the most popular television heroes (or anti-heroes) of the past decade can be read as direct responses to such outrages: Vic Mackey of The Shield, a corrupt policeman who feels free to go outside the law to bring criminals to justice; Jack Bauer of 24, a more idealized counter-terrorism agent who frequently does likewise; and Dexter Morgan of Dexter, a former cop who has become a serial killer in order to target other killers who have escaped justice.I'm thinking of all of this today because of Casey Anthony; I had made a valiant effort to avoid any stories or details about the case and trial throughout these months of media frenzy, but have since yesterday's not guilty verdict given in and learned a bit. It certainly seems as if Anthony did escape justice; speaking solely as a parent, I can't imagine one of my children drowning and not immediately calling 911, much less duct taping her and hiding the body, and then partying a few days later (which is Anthony's story of what she did after her daughter's death). If so, the verdict is indeed an outrageous error. But it's one that our system and nation require. More tomorrow,BenPS. Three links to start with:1)      The Bill of Rights (most readable by clicking "Read Transcript"): http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights.html2)      A story on the many Twitter links of Anthony to none other than Dexter Morgan: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2011/07/05/twitter_calls_upon_dexter_morgan_to_redress_the_casey_anthony_ve.html3)      OPEN: What do you think?