[For this year’s
installment of my annual
Beach Reads series, I wanted to revisit favorites from different stages of
my life, all of which would make for fun additions to your summer bookbag.
Share your nominations for Beach Reads for a crowd-sourced weekend post that
doesn’t mind some sand between the pages!]
On a book
that reminds me how excitingly far I still have to go.
From the
names for the degrees—Master of Arts, Doctor of Philosophy—to the purpose of
the PhD dissertation (and its accompanying oral “defense”), and certainly
through the last few decades’ evolving emphasis on hyper-specialization within
academia, the demonstrated purpose of grad school (at least in English and the
humanities; this may be less true for the sciences) would seem to be to achieve
a significant level of mastery over one’s particular subject and focus. There’s
obviously good reason for that, especially since graduate students are
professors in training and it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a professor to
have some significant mastery of his or her field (particularly in an era when
students and their families are paying so much to be educated by those
professors). But at the same time, this perspective on grad school can make it
seem like the key to being a successful scholar is to have all the answers, to
know just how you would analyze any given text or event or question, to never
admit that you don’t know or are still trying to figure out what to make of
something.
If I were
ever tempted to feel that way—although of course I’m far too humble, not to
mention talented and good-looking, to do so—I had the good fortune during grad
school to encounter plenty of correctives, in the form of works that left me at
a loss and forced me to recognize how much American Studying is a lifelong
learning kind of pursuit. At the top of that list would have to be Nathanael West’s novella The
Day of the Locust (1939), a work that within its 150 pages
manages to be a bildungsroman about a young arrival to Los Angeles, a funny and
biting satire of Hollywood, a gritty socially realistic novel of the
Depression, a psychological study of gender and sex, and an apocalyptic
cautionary tale in which religion, celebrity, popular culture, and violence
yield the titular plague—among other things. In the conclusion to my weekly
analytical post about the novel in the grad class where I first encountered it,
I was simply left reciting the eternal question, voiced so eloquently by Marvin Gaye and slightly
less eloquently by the Four Non-Blondes: “What’s
going on?” Can’t say I have any more definitive of an answer today than I did
then.
Does that
mean I should have failed my defense, been laughed out of grad school, am now outing
myself as the phoniest AmericanStudier this side of David
Barton? I don’t think so. First of all, I’m not giving up on analyzing
West’s novel—quite the opposite, I’m excited to keep figuring out what I want to
say about it, and in particular to get the chance at some point to teach it and
participate in some communal such analyses. Second, and more broadly and
importantly still, the day I pretend like I’ve got this whole AmericanStudying
thing figured out will be the day you all should reach through your computers
and slap some sense into me, Cher in Moonstruck style. Both AmericanStudies and public AmericanStudies
scholarship are, it seems to me, not about having all the answers—they’re about
learning as much as we can to be sure, from our
sources and our texts and our histories but also from each other; and then
about continuing to ask the questions that allow us all to keep learning, to
build a communal perspective on our national identity and history, culture and
community, that are as complex and evolving as America itself. Works like
West’s have helped me to do that for sure, and I’m very appreciative.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other Beach Reads you’d nominate?
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