July 26, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: William Faulkner

[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125^th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On how a classic author’s struggles can be as illuminating as their triumphs.

In this blog post focused especially on August Wilson and his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle, I briefly made the case for William Faulkner’s ambitious, messy, amazing book Absalom, Absalom! (1936) as “America’s most morally powerful novel.” I stand by that case, also a central subject of my first academic article way back in the day, and would ask you to check out that post (or that article if you’re feeling as ambitious as Faulkner was!), and then come on back for some further thoughts on Faulkner’s successes and failures.

Welcome back! As I also argued in that article, one of the single most frustrating facts in American literary history is that Faulkner’s immediate follow-up to Absalom was The Unvanquished (1938), a Civil War-set novel that pretty consistently endorses Lost Cause and white supremacist narratives of the war and race in Southern and American history. (Although this 2015 article makes a more positive case for Unvanquished’s politics, so maybe I should give it another chance.) While Faulkner certainly didn’t write about those subjects across his career in ways that echo the worst of Thomas W. Dixon or Margaret Mitchell, it’s fair to say that his default wasn’t nearly as nuanced and powerful as Absalom either—I’d argue that a more apt reflection of Faulkner’s limited ability to write or even truly think about African American characters, for example, is his single-sentence description of Dilsey in the 1945 Appendix to The Sound and the Fury: “They endured.” Not blatantly discriminatory and not inaccurate, but, compared to the huge swaths of new text he creates about the other (white) Compson characters in that Appendix, an illustration of Faulkner’s relative lack of interest in the identity and life of a character like Dilsey—of whose family, not coincidentally, he also writes there, “These others were not Compsons. They were black.”

While no single author can or should write about everyone or everything, Faulkner’s failures when it comes to African American characters and stories, communities and histories, do to my mind mean that we can’t consider him one of our greatest novelists. But he was hugely talented and an important literary and cultural voice, and if we can include his struggles and failures along with his strengths and successes as complementary and interconnected parts of our reading and response, I’d argue that only makes an even more compelling case for teaching him and his works. To round off the whole of this week-long series, part of the problem with the canon as it developed was precisely that it treated authors and works as “classics” to be praised, rather than complex and multi-layered subjects worthy of our critiques along with every other form of engagement and analysis. We can’t read or teach everything, much as I wish we could; and when we’re making choices about what to engage, it’s not just (or to my mind even mostly) about what’s great, but also and especially about what’s most illuminating. I’d say that’s the case for every one of the authors I highlighted this week, and it’s most definitely the case for William Faulkner.

July Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 25, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: Mark Twain

[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125^th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

[NB. This post is obviously a repeat from the end of my Fall 2017 Twain course, but I think it also makes the case for continuing to engage this most-canonized American author as well as any could!]

On reading and thinking about a long-past author as a contemporary commentator.

I’m pretty sure I hadn’t thought at all yet about the syllabus or specifics for my Major Author: Mark Twain senior seminar when I gave last March’s talk at the Twain House on the topic of “Twain as Public Intellectual.” (Perhaps that’s a bit more inside baseball than you’d like if you’re a non-higher ed reader, but it’s a general truth, if not indeed a fact universally acknowledged, that as of March 3^rd we don’t often have any real sense of our Fall classes, beyond their basic existence.) I’d even go further, and say that when I put in my idea to focus this third iteration of mine for the course (after ones on Henry James and W.E.B. Du Bois) on Twain, I did so much more because of the breadth and diversity of his career and works than because of any particular thought about contemporary connections he might offer. I knew that toward the end of his career Twain wrote a number of pieces that engaged very fully with his contemporary society (in ways that would also resonate with our own), but generally saw that as one of many stages in that long and multi-faceted career.

Well, I was wrong—or at least severely understating the case—on two distinct but interconnected levels. For one thing, I discovered in one of those late-career texts, 1905’s “As Regards Patriotism” (that’s not the whole piece, which also includes some engagement with the U.S. occupation of the Philippines that had pushed Twain so fully into the political realm, but it gives you a good sense of it at least), perhaps the most relevant historical source for our contemporary debates over the NFL anthem protests that I’ve yet encountered. And for another, even more unexpected thing, I likewise discovered a very early-career piece of Twain’s, 1866’s “What Have the Police Been Doing?,” that resonates quite closely and stunningly with the current debates over police brutality that are so intimately linked to those anthem protests and many other contemporary conversations. Which is to say, across the whole arc of his long career Twain not only engaged with aspects of his contemporary society, but did so in ways that also offer specific and important contexts and lessons for ongoing issues and debates in 21^st century America.

That last clause is a tricky one, though. The latest of these Twain pieces were written well more than 100 years ago, and the police piece more than 150. Obviously the whole of my public scholarly career is dedicated to the idea that learning about the past can and should affect us in the present in a variety of ways, but is it really possible—or desirable—to see particular pieces from 100 to 150 years ago as direct and relevant commentaries on our contemporary moment and society? Shouldn’t we instead take both them and their historical and social contexts on their own terms, complex as they already were? I would agree that that’s a primary move, and hope and believe that we began and dwelled in that specific analytical space for many of our class conversations. But it’s not either-or, and we also consistently (in our shared work and in individual student responses and papers) linked both specific pieces like the ones above and overarching aspects of Twain’s writing and genres, career and perspective, society and contexts, to debates, issues, cultural works, and ideas in 2017. Speaking for myself, I learned a great deal about both Twain and us through those contemporary links, and wish that many more Americans had the chance to read these pieces and consider what Twain can tell and offer us.

Last CanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 24, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: Nathaniel Hawthorne

[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125^th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On how two over-taught texts can still be under-appreciated.

Unlike yesterday’s subject James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne is an author about whom I’ve written a great deal in this space, including an entire week-long series inspired by The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and this post on The Blithedale Romance (1852) among others. Yet interestingly enough, I don’t think I’ve written much about the two Hawthorne texts with which American high school students are consistently confronted (and based on what I’ve heard from those students when they arrive in college literature courses, the encounter does feel very much like a confrontation to most of them): his short story “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) and his novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). I’m not sure Hawthorne’s very 19^th-century style can really speak to most 21^st century teenagers, so I’m not here to disagree with their frustrations with his ubiquitous classroom presence. But at the same time, I would argue that the frustrations can lead not only our high school students but also and more importantly for this point all of the rest of us (who might well carry such classroom challenges with us into later life) to miss just how much both those texts have to offer.

Part of what makes “Young Goodman Brown” well worth our time is connected with House of the Seven Gables, as both the story and the novel offer unique and thoughtful perspectives on one of our most frustrating and telling American histories: the Salem Witch Trials. As a descendent of a Witch Trials judge, Hawthorne was particularly horrified by what had happened in late 17^th century Salem, and in “Young Goodman Brown” that personal interest leads him to a nuanced engagement with how both individuals and communities can get to such extreme and destructive moments. But Hawthorne’s multi-layered story is just as interested in a profoundly universal theme, one also explored in Bruce Springsteen’s deeply personal Tunnel of Love (1987) album: whether and how we can ever really know another person, even (if not especially) the one to whom we’re married. The relationship and arc of Young Goodman Brown and his new wife Faith represents one of the most tragic yet also one of the most human depictions of marriage in all of American literature, making this a story with meanings far beyond its historical setting and subject.

The Scarlet Letter likewise features a pair of central romantic relationships, and I’d argue that both Hester Prynne’s marriage to Roger Chillingsworth and her affair with Arthur Dimmesdale are similarly thoughtful and illuminating about the dynamics, limits, and possibilities of such relationships in all of our lives. But while those two male characters take up a great deal of space in Hawthorne’s novel (and while their evolving relationship with each other is complex and crucial in its own right), at the end of the day this book is all about its female protagonist, and to my mind she’s one of the best in American literary history (both on her own terms and as a mother to the somewhat less well-developed but still fascinating character of her daughter Pearl). I don’t broadly disagree with the overarching argument of Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978), her thesis that much of canonical American literature reflects at best a limited male perspective on female identity. But I think Hawthorne’s most-canonized and best novel comprises a compelling alternative to that trend.

Next CanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 23, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: James Fenimore Cooper

[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125^th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On historical and literary reasons to revisit a challenging early bestseller.

Given the fact that my Dad’s first book was an extended analysis of James Fenimore Cooper’s career and life, it’s somewhat shameful how little I’ve written about Cooper in my nearly 14 years of blogging (although given that my Dad’s analysis was based on a psychoanalytical interpretation of Cooper’s relationship with his father, maybe the absence is also a telling one!). But I have to admit that when it comes to Cooper’s style, I tend to agree with Mark Twain (another of my Dad’s subjects—ah what a tangled web we AmericanStudiers weave!) and his thorough takedown in the satirical essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895). Style is always a matter of taste to some degree, but Cooper’s is nonetheless unquestionably clunky from a 21^st century perspective (even more so than it was to Twain’s late 19^th century one). And at the very least, Cooper’s ponderous prose makes it difficult for me to recommend him to either my students (I’ve occasionally in my first-half American Lit Survey taught the one chapter from Last of the Mohicans that’s included in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, but that’s it) or broader audiences.

At the same time, no early 19^th century author reads like one of our contemporaries, and of course I’d still make the case for the value of reading literary texts from that period. A significant part of that value is what these works and authors can help us see in our histories, and Cooper in particular has a great deal to tell us about how our national myths developed in the decades after the Revolution and how those collective American stories engaged with Native American histories and communities. All of the so-called “Leatherstocking Tales” in particular—the five novels that, taken together and read in story rather than publication order, follow protagonist Natty Bumppo from the 1740s through his death in the early 19^th century—offer a strikingly broad and deep window into those historical themes, as Bumppo is both instrumental in the development of the American frontier (before, during, and after the Revolution) and closely tied to the Native American communities for whom that “frontier” was much more of a slow-moving invasion. While Cooper never fully captures the Native American perspective on those themes, as I’ve argued his contemporary novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick briefly but importantly managed to, his books unquestionably represent a significant literary and cultural layer to those fraught histories.

We’ve got a name for works of fiction that represent histories, of course, and for one of the preeminent scholars of that genre Cooper was a truly towering figure: the Russian critic Georg Lukács writes about Cooper a great deal (far more than he does any other American writer, in fact) in his groundbreaking work The Historical Novel (1955). Lukács traces the genre’s origins to the English novelist Sir Walter Scott, and sees Cooper (as Cooper likewise saw himself) as Scott’s American heir and Natty Bumppo as a close parallel to Scott’s most famous protagonist Edward Waverly. And even for folks who aren’t the slightest bit interested in either Georg Lukács or Walter Scott, I’d argue that we all remain fascinated by the genre of historical fiction, as illustrated for example by two of the year’s most popular TV shows, Shōgun and Bridgerton. No American author from any period has been more interested in exploring how fiction can represent histories than was James Fenimore Cooper, and so for literary and cultural as well as historical reasons I believe it’s well worth wading into that challenging prose.

Next CanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 22, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: Ernest Hemingway

[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125^th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

Three Hemingway short stories that remind us of both his genius and his relevance.

1)      “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933): I said most of what I’d want to say about this stunning story in this post more than a decade ago. Here I’ll add that the publication date is telling—by 1933 the success of novels like The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) had fully established Hemingway’s literary cred, but he was still crafting some of the era’s most perfect short stories.

2)      “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925): Before those novels, Hemingway began his career with the masterful short story cycle In Our Time (1925), a book that grapples with the effects of war and its traumas just as potently as does the more famous (and also great) The Things They Carried. “Big Two-Hearted River,” the book’s concluding story, works best as part of that cycle; but even on its own terms, it’s a strikingly beautiful story that exemplifies Hemingway’s “iceberg theory.”

3)      “Hills like White Elephants” (1927): “Hills” is the Hemingway story that really puts this post and week’s thesis to the test, as it’s so thoroughly canonized that virtually every high school student reads it at some point (it’s one of the couple texts I teach that I can assume almost every student of mine has previously encountered). But here’s the thing—I’ve read literally hundreds of papers on “Hills” over the years, and I’m still seeing new layers thanks to that student work. It’s a formally unique work that challenges our understanding of what a short story is and does, yet at the same time opens up some of our most familiar and shared themes of relationships, communication, identity, and more. I don’t know that short stories get better, and I don’t think there’s a better case for still reading Hemingway’s.

Next CanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

July 20-21, 2024: ElvisStudying: Representing the King

[July 19^th was a doubly significant day for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single was released; and on July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading up to this special post on cultural representations of Presley!]

On quick takeaways from just a handful of the literally countless cultural depictions of Elvis.

1)      Andy Warhol: It can be difficult, from our 2024 vantage point, to really understand the cultural significance of Warhol and his pop art. But in the 1960s no single figure shaped American popular culture—or at the very least its representations of and relationship to celebrity—more than Warhol, and he painted no less than ten “silkscreens” of Elvis, with 1963’s Double Elvis perhaps the most iconic.

2)      The Twilight Zone: “The Once and Future King,” the first episode of the second (1986-87) season of the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone, tells the story of an Elvis impersonator who travels back in time to meet the real King. By far the most interesting thing about this episode from a 2024 perspective is that it was written by none other than George R.R. Martin! But it also reflects the King’s towering cultural presence a decade after his death.

3)      Bubba Ho-Tep: In this 2002 comic horror film, Bruce Campbell plays a nursing home resident who claims to be Elvis Presley, having in this telling switched places with an Elvis impersonator who was in the one who died in 1977. And that’s about the fifth least-weird thing in this film, which also stars Ossie Davis as a Black man who claims to be John F. Kennedy and which eventually teams the two up to fight an undead Egyptian mummy. By the 21^st century, that is, all things Elvis were getting pretty strange.

4)      Fallout: New Vegas: I don’t want to overstate the presence of Elvis in this post-apocalyptic 2010 video game, but on the other hand: the game features a group of roving bandits known as “The Kings” because they found an abandoned Elvis Impersonator school and make its costumes and other materials their own. But apparently Presley’s name has been lost to the ravages of time, so they only know him as “The King,” a striking commentary on how a real figure can become his iconic image.

5)      Recent Biopics: I didn’t see Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film Elvis, so I can’t say too much about its depiction of Presley, but it’s interesting to note that Austin Butler dedicated himself so fully to his own impersonation of the King that he found himself unable to stop talking like him when filming was complete. But more interesting still, for this not-yet-viewer, is Sofia Coppola’s 2023 film Priscilla, perhaps the first cultural work to focus on Presley’s wife (played by Cailee Spaeny, with Jacob Elordi’s performance as Elvis as a supporting character). If we’re going to keep Elvis present in our pop culture going forward, it’s long past time to broaden who as well as how we think about him.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other takes on Elvis?

July 19, 2024: ElvisStudying: First and Last

[July 19^th was a doubly significant day for Elvis Presley: on July 19, 1954, his debut single was released; and on July 19, 1977, what would be his final album dropped. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of layers to the Elvis mythos, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of Presley!]

On how we can understand the profound changes Elvis underwent, and why they’re not the whole story.

It’s obviously coincidental but still quite striking that July 19^th so clearly marks both the beginning and the end of Elvis Presley’s recording career. By July 1954 the 19-year-old Presley had been unsuccessfully trying to release records with Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service (the predecessor to his hugely influential Sun Records label) for about six months; but when his version of Arthur Crudup’s 1946 blues song “That’s All Right” drew the attention of local radio DJ Dewey Phillips (no relation to Sam), Presley was finally able to put out a single on July 19^th, with the slightly retitled “That’s Alright (Mama)” on the A-side and Presley’s cover of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the B-side. And in July 1977, Presley put out his final album, Moody Blue, a compilation of live tracks and various recordings from his final studio sessions in February and October 1976 (including the hit title track which had been first recorded at Graceland in February 1976); less than a month after the album’s release Presley would pass away at the tragically young age of 42, and the album would go on to be certified Gold and then Platinum by September.

It takes nothing away from the genuine tragedy of that very early passing to note just how much had changed for Elvis between these two July 19ths just over two decades apart. When Dewey Phillips interviewed Presley in July 1954, he had to ask him what high school he attended in order to communicate to the radio audience that this young artist whom they obviously could not see and knew less than nothing about was white; when Elvis died in July 1977, he was arguably one of the most recognizable as well as one of the most famous people in the world. That fame had begun to develop relatively quickly—Presley bought his first home in Memphis in 1956, but fans began to congregate outside it so consistently that the neighbors became annoyed and he purchased the more isolated and difficult to access Graceland mansion less than a year later. His fame only grew from there, and would remain an inescapable presence until the literal last hours of his life, as illustrated by a famous paparazzi photo taken upon Presley’s return to Graceland after midnight on the day he died, August 16^th, 1977. (And of course his fame endured long after his passing, as reflected by the persistent rumors of Elvis sightings across the subsequent decades.)

Yet despite those unquestionable and in some ways unfathomable changes between 1954 and 1977, I believe these two July 19^th releases can also remind us of some unchanging aspects of Presley’s career in music (which, as Tuesday’s post on his films illustrates, was not his only career, but was by far his most influential one). While he apparently contributed some ideas to the production of a few songs here and there (getting the occasional and controversial collaboration credits as a result), Presley never truly wrote a song, meaning that all of his releases were at least performances of others’ songs if not outright covers (as was the case with both his first single and a number of songs from his last album). To be clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean he “stole” others’ music (as recent narratives have sometimes put it)—as I’ve written multiple times in this space, covers were a ubiquitous if not indeed defining presence in the early decades of rock ‘n roll. But it does mean that Elvis was always first and foremost a performer, gaining popularity and success and fame for his iconic such performances and all the layers of identity that they embodied (literally and otherwise), rather than for his own creative output. Indeed, he may well have been the 20^th century’s most successful performer, a title for which he was at least competitive from his first release to his last.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other takes on Elvis?