This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.
Volume 3
Date: Tue, 3 May 1994 12:49:42 -0400
Subject: JRNL: PUMPING FAULKNER
I must agree with the fact that As I Lay Dying is a hard book to read and that many tiems throughout the text you actually hate Faulkner for writing it. but it provides some insight as well. At least it wasn't written in the same style as Hemingway's novels. The characters would have had no depth. But these characters were believable, if a little crazy.
Any comments?
There are too many people
and too few human beings."
-Robert Zend
beggs@sci-ed.fit.edu
Michelle Emery
Mary-Ann Beggs
Palm Bay High School
#1 Pirate Lane
Melbourne, FL 32901
(407) 952- 5900
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A friend, semi-pro power lifter, saw Blair's comments on the analogy of weight lifting and our students's development of appreciation of literature.
His response: "Actually we lift weights for the endorphins, morphine-like substances created in the human brain when one lifts heavy weights over several hours' time."
In his own way, I think he may be on to something here: the inherent pleasure that comes from pushing oneself beyond one's ordinary limits, and the strengthening of self-esteem (pardon the jargon) that comes from success in such an enterprise. Does this sound like one kind of hook we could use to reel in our students--and then let them broaden their understanding without explicitly preaching them in that direction? (Also pardon the fishy metaphor I'm baiting you with--we leave a lot of lines dangling on our little island.)
Tom Johnson
Pelican Island Technical School
Galveston
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Dr. Thomas S. Johnson | User Name: Johnson_t
Texas A&M University at Galveston :internet: Johnson_t@tamug2.tamu.edu
General Academics: Literature | bitnet: Johnson_t@tamug.tamu.edu
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This is a follow-up to my contribution on Faulkner, and also a response to Blair Hemstock's interesting analogy between reading Faulkner and pumpin' iron. I had written my message just as we were beginning *As I Lay Dying* and you might like to know that after initially "hating" the novel, my students began to (grudgingly, I think) like it as we discussed the various motivations and values of the characters. They all seemed to "like" and "dislike" characters in a very personal way, but I'm all for that, since I think it's a good door into appreciating what a writer is doing. Greater critical distance comes later. Of course, they all had a great deal of sympathy for Cash and, to some extent, Jewel. By the end, they had developed what I would consider to be some fairly sophisticated perspectives on the novel. But I must say that teaching it was like weightlifting, too.
I followed up with O'Neill's *Long Day's Journey Into Night* and
though they had much the same reaction to it in the beginning as Faulkner,
the relevance of the play, particularly the look at chemical dependancy in
a family and its effects, really came home to them. Suddenly, they were
aware that these people, like the Bundren's, had gotten "under their skin,"
whether they liked it or not. More pumpin' iron, I suppose.
--Paul Johnson
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Date: Thu, 5 May 1994 17:39:15 -0400
Subject: JRNL: OF POETRY and TEACHING COOKBOOKS
Specifically, aren't the boundaries of the "literary" changing with the
field-wide shift to a study of rhetorics and discourses? At the
university level, especially, is there a clear distinction between the
extra-literary materials that help constitute literary artifacts and
reading those materials as artifacts themselves? Why, for example,
are certain political and religious documents "canonical" texts in the
17th and 18th centuries, but in the 20th century, you'd be hard
pressed to find a nontraditional "literary" text anthologized in any
standard anthology?
RBass
Limiting myself to what Carter C Revard wrote 24-APR-1994 that seems to me appropriate for public response . . .
> I wonder whether you think poetry is just poetry is just
> poetry, or whether you suspect it may vary considerably
> according to who is reading and teaching it?
That's a question you'd not ask if you'd read anything I've published recently. Your comments on William Herebert are interesting; on the other hand, there's the interview of WC Williams, reprinted in Paterson, where the guy says one of Williams's poems "sounds like a fashionable grocery list." To which Williams replies, "It is a fashionable grocery list." Yup. But I don't think that necessitates a unit on grocery lists in literature courses.
To write on Paterson I read thousands of pages on the city's history (political, economic, social), landscape, its strikes, anything I could get my hands on. On Sister Carrie and Social Engineering I immersed myself in the literature of the emerging social sciences, the engineering professional associations, theories of economic cycles, the trust and anti- trust movements. It was ALL important.
But, Carter, that was not the matter to which I was responding. At issue was the question of teaching cookbooks and gardening manuals in literature classes. And, no, I don't think it should happen, any more than I'd assign the materials I read for undergraduate seminars in which Paterson or Carrie are discussed. *Some* of that material will make it into the seminar, but I don't think that in an American literature seminar (as opposed to American Studies), the other materials are appropriate.
Why not? It's been my experience that undergraduates (in the U of CA, not exactly bad schools) have precious few skills to call upon for reading literature, for understanding tropes and generic conventions (which themselves may be troped) and they are not going to get that ability reading cookbooks, except perhaps Murder in the Kitchen. Not even a very interesting article in PMLA (late-80s) on the changes in the rhetoric of The Joy of Cooking, among other culinary literature changed my mind. I'm not sure what you're saying? That poetry doesn't exist? That your poems are no different from cookbooks? That medieval charters and lyrics share the same structure and function, that being able to read gardening books gives one the tools for reading Whitman? That there's no reason for learning to read poetry?
I do believe that poetry exists, though it is wondrously diverse. A Donne isn't a Stein, isn't a Revard, but poetry they are, and that is my subject when I teach poetry. That sort of teaching is particularly an issue in the CR because the educational system is still digging itself out from 45 years of Marxist positivism and a fear of reading that still boggles my mind. Poetry and class struggle did little for either as they were practiced over here, though condemnation of literature that is "elite" has indeed made it interesting to many people, made it something they want to read. Of course, people here take their novelists, poets, and playwrights a hell of a lot more seriously than y'all do back in the US. Local marxism itself has so well preserved the powers of literature now so widely questioned in the US that explaining the arguments on this and some of the other lists has been a greater challenge than teaching poetry.
As for your question:
> Do you all happen to have in your library there books like
> the Beaty/Hunter NEW WORLDS OF LITERATURE (Norton, 2nd ed
> 1994), or Alan Velie's AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE (U of
> Oklahoma 2nd ed 1990 or so), or Kenneth Rosen's VOICES OF
> THE RAINBOW (Viking 1975)?
You're kidding, right? The book situation is a mess over here, as it is through most of East Europe because of the censorship policies in force until only recently. At present the Department is attempting with virtually no money to create collections of literature and criticism from scratch. When I arrived, the criticism collection consisted of American Renaissance, The Cycle of American Literature, and the 1917 Cambridge Literary History of the US. The lit. collection's in keeping with the criticism. That's changing slowly.
We'd be more than happy to receive anything you or anyone else in Internet-land would like to donate. The MLA was recently very good to us, for which my heartfelt public thanks!
Send what you'd like (c/o me) to:
Department of English and American Studies
Univerzita Palackeho
Krizkovskeho 10
771 80 Olomouc
Czech Republic.
As for the rest of your note, Carter, if you're serious, let's explore it privately. I'm out of town for a week, back next Monday.
Kevin McNamara
KAA FF-UP
Olomouc, CR
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Date: Thu, 12 May 1994 23:04:35 -0400
Subject: JRNL: LITERARY vs. CULTURAL STUDIES
Yet, the blurring...fusion...synthesis of literary and cultural
studies is irrevocably implied in a truly expanded American literature,
is it not?
RBass
After reading Kevin McNamara's considered response on gardening, cookbooks, and assorted esoterica, I caught myself wondering for a moment on the genres that dance about the fringes of acceptability. For example, while no one would consider a tome on auto mechanics as suitable for literary study--did I say no one? well . . .--virtually no one would do so, but it would be quite suitable to study the literature of, say, fly fishing. Nature Writing is quite in vogue today. What is it that makes Annie Dillard or even Teddy Roosevelt (writing about hunting) more literary than Van Wolverton writing about MS-DOS?
And regarding political and religious works of the 20th century that might be considered canonical, I believe that time might look favorably on some of our century's examples. The religious work of C.S. Lewis or T.S. Eliot (this is an AmLit discussion, isn't it!) might be possibilities. I'll give some thought to the political possibilities.
This is a meditation coming off the exchange between Carter Revard and Kevin McNamara.
My subject line makes dichotemous two things which need not be dichotemous. Literary studies is a form of cultural studies, and no cultural studies project that neglects literary methodology altogether is likely to get that far. In spite of this, I see the tension between Revard's and McNamara's posts with regard to pedagogy as being, somehow, about whether to "teach literature" or to "teach culture".
Clearly it would be silly to argue that, in general, a cookbook is a poem. (Immediately I feel the need to backstep--of course, under some circumstances, a cookbook might be a poem. I'm even thinking of Nora Dauenhauer's "How To Cook Fresh Salmon From the River" when I say that. But we would want to investigate the specific circumstances by which this can happen, rather than simply conflate the two categories.) For those of us who are more interested in the category "culture" than the category "literature", however, the fact that they are not the same would not, therefore, lead us to imagine that poetry is a more reasonable "beginning point", where we should *start* teaching people to do close readings (as McNamara indicates), than cookbooks. Indeed, depending on exactly what we were trying to do, it might be a great deal less sensible to start with literature. For example, because literature has the tendency to create a world that appears radically apart from the context of its production, actually choosing to begin a cultural studies course with various "practical" resources (say, since *The Joy of Cooking* purports to being the second largest selling book in U.S. history, after the bible, we might well choose to teach about 20th century American culture by asking people what can be learned from a close reading of that book, after all) and moving from there to poetry could be a more sensible strategy.
It so happens that my personal choice, in the four classes I have taught to date, has been a great mixture of journalism, academic articles, fiction and poetry, and a particular emphasis on autobiography since that strikes me as the genre which in its form most explicitly connects literary studies with cultural studies. But I am not writing this as someone who feels set on a particular style of teaching--far from it. My point is less to provide a solution than to point out that you may take different things as fundamental if you imagine yourself as a teacher of "literature", as Kevin McNamara clearly does, or of "cultural studies", as I do and, if I read him right, Carter Revard probably does.
Kenny Mostern
UC-Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Group
Against: racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, militarism
For: the truth--and the funk!
ADDENDUM TO KENNY's POST:
Stupidly, after I was the one who requested context from everyone who posts, I failed to put mine in my post, sent two days ago.
The classes I was referring to are university writing requirements in the Ethnic Studies department, course numbers 2A or 2B--so they're definitely introductory. And the large majority of the students are students of color, though I am white.
Kenny Mostern
UC-Berkeley Ethnic Studies Graduate Group
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Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 21:41:21 -0400
Subject: JRNL: LITERARY vs. CULTURAL STUDIES (I)
If I may correct a couple of somewhat minor points in Kenny Mostern's posting (points that heve to do with the construction of me),
he writes:
> would not, therefore, lead us to imagine that poetry is a more reasonable
> "beginning point", where we should *start* teaching people to do close
> readings (as McNamara indicates), than cookbooks.
Well, not exactly Kenny. It's a terrible place to start a close reading of, say, the shaping of public opinion by news reporting or advertising. But it is an excellent place to begin the close reading of literature--especially poetry. Are you saying that the skills for reading both are interchangable.
> someone who feels set on a particular style of teaching--far from it. My
> point is less to provide a solution than to point out that you may take
> different things as fundamental if you imagine yourself as a teacher of
> "literature", as Kevin McNamara clearly does,
Well, Kenny, the students in my American Studies class on post-war LA this quarter would be surprised to say it's a literature class. I'm not sure why it is so difficult in a multi-interest world for folks to understand that poetry is ONE of my interests, that learning to read poetic discourse does not preclude broader cultural approaches--NOT EVEN IN MY CLASSES on modern and postwar poetry. Poetry happens in the world, but not the way the newspaper does.
What concerns me, though, is the way these other approaches overdetermine the practice of reading poetry in ways that make unnecessary the reading of the poems because we already know by school, or other cues where the poet "winds up" on other issues.
(And, by the way, I have published on pre-1800 American ornithology in the William and Mary Quarterly (4 or 5 years ago) and did not engage in any sort of close reading of William Wood's poem about birds.
Kevin McNamara
English and American STUDIES
Univerzita Palackeho
Olomouc, Czech Republic
IF we would not consider a book on auto mechanics worthy of literary study as a primary text, categorically, then we must, I fear, in the interests of minuscule critical consistency, dismiss the Georgics. And Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Cookbooks differ from poetry about cooking in style and in the vision they generate, and the new lenses they offers us rather than their substance. Any meat will stew in the poet's pot. I suspect. Cheer'o
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Adolph L. Soens
University of Notre Dame
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About the ostensible non-literariness of writing about auto mechanics-- cuidado!-- remember Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And then there's Ashbery's poem "The Instruction Manual," about not writing one, which becomes a kind of instruction manual for writing or at least reading a certain kind of poem...
John Slatin
University of Texas, Austin
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Date: Mon, 16 May 1994 21:51:18 -0400
Subject: JRNL: LITERARY vs. CULTURAL STUDIES (II)
This latter point is one of the fierce questions for all of us who
see literary becoming cultural studies: where is our new
epistemological center? That is, beyond reaction to old paradigms?
RBass
Well, I AM bogged down by the end of the semester so I NEED to escape a bit. As the editor/compiler/author(?) of AMERICAN PROLETARIAN CULTURE: THE TWENTIES AND THE THIRTIES (Gale: Detroit, 1993), I've had occasion to think about this lit/culture dichotomy recently, if only because the book started life as "American Prolet. Literature...." and soon escaped its bounds.
I tend to say that I work with things that have grammars and so have as one function the making of meaning: What Kenny means, I think, when he talks about the stuff "in" culture. The job varies; sometimes to find meanings, sometimes to discover the grammars. For instance, right now I'm working on a book about the relationships between law and African- American literature and I'm really looking at the grammars of these two text-making enterprises. I'm puzzling over the influence, in the 19th century, of romanticism on each. This is cultural study and I'm a professor of English. I like to work this way for a number of reasons, one of which is that it obviates the necessity of asking the question of whether any particular text you are working with is sufficiently "great" or really "literature." The fact that "it" exists as a systematic representation of the structure and potential meaning of a phenomenon is, in general, enough for me. I think it is important to look at all such attempts and to work comparatively and intertextually with them.
Jon-Christian (Chris) Suggs
jcsjj@cunyvm.cuny.edu
English, John Jay College/CUNY
Postnote: I teach this way, too. Trial transcripts, rock videos, poetry, novel, bills-of-sale for slaves, Stanley Fish essays (real esoterica). The comparative understanding of grammars is as important as that of meanings to students and perhaps more liberating.
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Date: Wed, 25 May 1994 23:03:04 -0400
Subject: JRNL: LITERARY VS CULTURAL STUDIES (cont.)
Certainly, even the contribution of Nemerov's "Eggs Maledict" (in
the 2nd post below) is not meant to diminish the kinds of concerns
raised by Michelle Trusty-Murphy in the first post. The issues raised
there are interesting ones for us all. The assertion of cultural and
social contexts into the center of literature teaching is deeply
connected to a multicultural canon, for sure. Yet, I wonder if there
isn't an entire, additional side to this issue we haven't even touched
on: that is, whether or not the "new American literary or
cultural studies" includes the "rigorous" reading of cultural
documents that are not conventionally literary. Not whether cookbooks
are poetry, but whether the McCone Commission Report on the Watts
Riots is the kind of "thick" text WE are trained to teach and read?
RBASS
Although the conversation between your venerable critics has, in the past few installments at least, been very interesting, I think this is a much more serious subject than the difference between how-to books about auto mechanics and novels incorporating auto mechanics.
In the field of American ethnic literatures, for example, it is impossible to truly understand the concepts and the subtleties of the literature without understanding, in fairly great detail, the culture behind the literature.
I'm not saying one must understand all of African American culture to understand African American literature, that would be impossible due to the great variation in locales, political positions, time periods, classes, and sexual orientations exhibited through the literature, but I am saying that one must understand and study a great body of African American cultural and historical background before teaching any African American literary work.
Literature has never been and will never be a "universal," and scholars and teachers must understand the complexities of each cultural group they study through literature in order to share that understanding with their students. To teach Maxine Hong Kingston's WOMAN WARRIOR without understanding the history and the culture of first and second generation Chinese Americans, for example, would be as useless as teaching Shakespeare without any background in the history and culture of England. Literature grounded in any culture or history which is unknown, ignored, erased, or misunderstood by our students cannot and should not be taught without context. Cultural studies is significantly important to literature as a whole, culture is essential to and understanding of not only the author's place and time, but the reader's place and time. They cannot be separated--especially in the field of American ethnic literatures.
However, cultural studies is just one part of that literary understanding--it cannot replace it or usurp it. To suggest a cultural understanding is all you need for a literary analysis would be to ignore the author's role as artist.
So, although this conversation about cookbooks and auto mechanics seems a small diversion--it is at the heart of a critical and pedagogical challenge to American literary studies. No longer can we be complacent and calm scholars of literature, we must also be historians, sociologists, political scientists, linguists, and pop culture experts. As the concept of literature grows, so must our knowledge! (Shouldn't we get paid more?)
Michelle Trusty-Murphy
English Department
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, OH
MTRUSTY@ANDY.BGSU.EDU
I hate to inflame the situation any more than it already is, but check this recipe out:
Eggs Maledict
Howard Nemerov
Instead of English muffins,
Wonder Bread
Instead of ham, Spam
Instead of hollandaise,
Kraft mayonnaise
Eggs fried instead of coddled
(Please excuse the incorrect spacing. It is due to limitations in the program.)
For brevity's sake, that's the shortest piece I could find in The Iowa Writer's Workshop Cookbook, Ed. Connie Brothers, 1986, but the rest of the book is full of recipes many of which could easily be termed "poetry." There's even some good eating to be found. Keep away from T.C. Boyle's recipe for Stuffed Camel, though. Hard on the system!
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Date: Sat, 28 May 1994 22:54:57 -0400
Subject: JRNL: HOLOCAUST RESISTANCE
I'm new to the net, and have been reading the T-AMLIT files with interest. I'm a poet, teaching Native American poetry on the undergraduate level, to mostly juniors and seniors. The texts I use include 'That's What She Said", ed. by Rayna Green; "Songs From This Earth on Turtle's Back," ed by Joseph Bruchac; The Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Writers, ed by Duane Niatum; as poetry texts, and "Survival This Way," ed by Joseph Bruchac, a collection of interviews of Native poets; and "I Tell You Now," ed by Swann and Krupat, a collection of autobioigraphical essays. I also bring in handouts by poets such as Chrystos, Sherman Alexie, and occasionally an essay relevant to the poems we are reading. I agree with Carter Revard, that "if the course does not change their lives, then the course has failed, I have failed, and they have failed to see its point."
My question concerns the resistance of some (non-Native) students to taking in the devastating information about the holocaust in the americas, the continuing genocidal policies, realities of reservation life, etc. etc. I've had a few students who have shown strong resistance to the material - one student who basically said the poets should "shut up and stop whining" and described their anger as "reverse racism." As we were involved in a discussion of the poet as witness, my response was to throw the question back to the class - "is this whining?" In general, the class felt the poems were strong witnessing poems, though sometimes difficult to take in. Several expressed anger at the version of history they'd been taught, as well as the fact that they hadn't encountered a single Native voice in four years of college until taking this course. Still, the student quoted above is one whose life was not changed, who did not get the point. I want to be prepared for the next student with a similar response.
Have other teachers of Native literature or other difficult or controversial material (gay and lesbian studies, for example) found strategies for teaching that can get through this type of resistance?
note to carter: Good to find you here. Hope to see moccasin tracks all over
the net soon. Looking forward to seeing NEL. Hope you are well and writing.
Cheryl Savageau
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This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.