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?

July 18, 2024: ElvisStudying: The Presidential Medal of Freedom

[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 the Medal of Freedom as a unifying occasion or a partisan instrument.

First things first: I’m on record, in this space and most everywhere else, as Bruce Springsteen’s biggest fan; and I’m also on record in this space as significantly less of a fan of Elvis Presley. On that latter point, Bruce and I disagree very fully—he famously jumped the wall at Graceland while on tour in 1976 in an attempt to meet his idol; and Bruce has recorded no less than (and probably many more than) a dozen covers of songs by the artist he has called one of his greatest inspirations since he first saw Elvis’s controversial performance on the Ed Sullivan show. I promise (Bruce, myself, you all) to keep an open mind and keep giving Elvis the old college try, but in any case this post isn’t about the two artists themselves; it’s about how Barack Obama’s 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom tribute to Bruce Springsteen and Donald Trump’s 2018 Medal tribute to Elvis Presley (posthumously, of course) reveal (as does most everything else about the two presidents) two distinct and fundamentally opposed visions of what something like the Medal of Freedom means, for the president and for the nation.

At the November 2016 ceremony honoring Springsteen and 20 others, President Obama said of the Medal that “it’s a tribute to the idea that all of us, no matter where we come from, have the opportunity to change this country for the better….These 21 individuals have helped push America forward, inspiring millions of people around the world along the way.” About Springsteen more specifically, he added, “The stories he has told, in lyrics and epic live concert performances, have helped shape American music and have challenged us to realize the American dream.” As has so often been the case with Obama’s speeches and public statements, his use of first-person plural pronouns here is crucial, establishing the medal and occasion as a collective expression and reflection (and amplification) of that communal experience and identity. That choice purposefully downplays both Obama’s own individual action (despite of course being the president giving the Presidential Medal) and the larger 21^st century narrative of a divided America whose citizens might or might not all celebrate such figures (while it boggles my mind that anyone wouldn’t celebrate Bruce, there’s no doubt he has become increasingly linked to progressive politicians and causes).

While Elvis Presley has at times been associated with the (overstated, I’ve argued) narrative of white artists capitalizing on black music, it would nonetheless be easy and appropriate to present him with a posthumous Medal of Freedom in much the same unifying terms. But it will come as no surprise to anyone who has been alive and awake for the last five years that President Trump did not talk about Elvis in that way shortly after awarding him that November 2018 medal. In contrast with Obama’s “we,” Trump linked Elvis to himself, claiming that he didn’t want to sound “very conceited” but noting that, “other than the blond hair, when I was growing up they said I looked like Elvis. Can you believe it? I always considered that a great compliment.” And he went on to connect Elvis to one of the moment’s most divisive issues, that of the so-called “migrant caravan” making its way to the Mexican American border; “They're not going to put in Elvis in there,” he stated, going out of his way to differentiate the iconic American artist from a community he sought time and again to define as a foreign threat to the U.S. There are literally countless ways we could trace the changes and gaps between 2016/Obama and 2018/Trump, but their frames for these two rock ‘n roll medals do the trick nicely.

Last ElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

July 17, 2024: ElvisStudying: Graceland

[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 mythic façades, the realities behind them, and a third way to look at Elvis’ historic home.

In her book Graceland: Going Home with Elvis (1996), scholar Karal Ann Marling writes that Graceland is “a Technicolor illusion. The façade is Gone with the Wind all the way. The den in the back is Mogambo with a hint of Blue Hawaii. Living in Graceland was like living on a Hollywood backlot, where patches of tropical scenery alternated with the blackened ruins of antebellum Atlanta.” I think it’s quite nicely telling that Marling references not actual Southern plantations and other interconnected settings (such as Mogambo’s Africa) but cultural representations of them, and specifically cinematic representations, including not just specific films but an overarching, mid-20^th century technological innovation like Technicolor. As I traced in yesterday’s post, Elvis had only just begun his film acting career when he purchased Graceland in March 1957, but it seems clear that he (or at least his designers and team, but likely with his input and perspective as well) worked hard from then on to turn the house into a cultural and cinematic text in its own right, one that echoed both Southern and global tropes that were equally famous and fraught.

While he may have and likely did make such changes (especially to interior spaces like the famous Jungle Room) during the two decades that he and his family lived in Graceland, however, Elvis did not in any sense build it from scratch—it was an existing home as well as property that he purchased. The property and the name Graceland both long predated the mansion—in the late 19^th century the land belonged to the well-known Memphis printer Stephen C. Toof, who named the site Graceland after his daughter. After Grace inherited it from him upon his 1894 death, in the early 20^th century her niece Ruth Moore inherited the land from Grace, and in 1939 Ruth and her husband Thomas Moore commissioned the architects Max Furbringer and Merrill Ehrman to build a 10,000 square foot Colonial Revival style mansion. That style alone reminds us that the Moores too were participating in a cultural project driven as much by narratives and nostalgia as by any contemporary realities, and thus that Graceland featured those layers already by the time Elvis acquired it. But nonetheless, it’s worth being clear that his $102,500 purchase was of an existing home in every sense, one that he built upon but (like every other part of his career) did not himself invent.

As I imagine every post in this series will exemplify in its own ways, though, there’s nothing in Elvis’ life nor his legacy that isn’t intertwined with the development of the collective mythos around the man, and that’s unquestionably the case when it comes to Graceland as well. Perhaps the most striking example of turning Graceland into a holy site for this sanctified American icon is the literal pilgrimage to the place, an annual procession known as Elvis Week that takes its pilgrims to and through the home and past his grave (along with other sites such as the Elvis Mass at the city’s St. Paul’s Church). And no artist or text has summed up this collective phenomenon better than Paul Simon in the chorus of his song “Graceland” (1986): “I’m going to Graceland, Graceland/Memphis, Tennessee/I’m going to Graceland/Poor boys and pilgrims with families/And we are going to Graceland.” In the song’s final verse, he adds, “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe/We all will be received/in Graceland,” and I would use this idea to link the collective vision of the place to Elvis’ own—that is, perhaps his own mythic reimaginings likewise sought to turn a real place into a sacred shrine, to the ideas of America that he was also always seeking.

Next ElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

July 16, 2024: ElvisStudying: Elvis Films

[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 AmericanStudies takeaways from three stages in Presley’s iconic film career.

1)      Love Me Tender (1956): Just two years after his first single dropped, and a couple months before the famously scandalous Ed Sullivan Show performance, Presley made his film debut in this musical Western. Although the film was named after Presley’s ballad (which had been released in August 1956, and a performance of which was included in the film), he didn’t receive top billing, reflecting his far-from-established connection to the movie business in this very early moment. But by far the most prominent aspect of the film (SPOILERS) was that Presley’s character is killed in its climactic shootout, a storytelling choice that literally led to a fan protest at the film’s premiere and a subsequent re-release with an alternate ending. Even in his film debut, Elvis was causing a commotion.

2)      A Billion 1960s Films: Okay, not a billion, but: every year between 1962 and 1969 Presley starred in three films, for a total of 24 films released in that period (with another two each in 1960 and 1961, so 28 total in the decade). I know there were a lot more films being made and released in general in that era than in our 21^st century moment (and that they took much shorter to make than do today’s), but it’s hard for me to believe any major performer appeared in more 1960s films than that. And as you might expect, quantity did not necessarily lead to quality, to the point that, according to his wife Priscilla’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, Elvis was quite miserable with his film career’s dimishing returns, believing for example that 1967’s Clambake represented a career low.

3)      Charro! and Change of Habit (both 1969): Fortunately, Elvis was a big enough star that we had able to help change that narrative, and he did so especially with two of his final three dramatic film performances (along with the still-more-perfunctory The Trouble with Girls from the same year). Charro! was another Western and not dramatically different from any of his others in that genre, but importantly was the only film in which Elvis did not sing on screen, reflecting his desire to develop his acting talents and career (as, perhaps, does his character’s beard, the only in his entire filmography). And he did so even more overtly and successfully in his final dramatic role in Change of Habit, in which Elvis plays inner-city doctor (!) John Carpenter alongside Mary Tyler Moore (!!) as a nun who becomes his love interest (!!!). As with so many things Elvis Presley, it would have been very interesting to see where film career might have gone from here if not for his tragic death a few years later.

Next ElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

July 15, 2024: ElvisStudying: Elvis and Sinatra

[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 the differences between influential and interesting, and why even the former can be problematic.

It seems to me that you can’t tell the story of American popular music in the 20^th century—and thus the story of American popular music period—without including Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley in prominent roles. Indeed, given each man’s forays into acting, entrepreneurship, and other cultural and social arenas, I’m not sure you could leave them out of a broader 20^th century history of America either. In their own ways, and in their own particular, most successful periods (Sinatra’s career extended well into Presley’s, of course, but he was at his most successful in its first couple decades, between 1935 and about 1955; Presley rose to prominence in the mid-1950s and was at his peak from then until about 1970), the two artists dominated their respective musical genres time and again, leaving legacies that extend well beyond record sales or awards (although both are among the most successful artists of all time as measured in those ways as well).

So I wouldn’t necessarily argue with definitions of Sinatra and Elvis as among the most influential musical artists of all time (although I might, in a moment, argue that point too). But influential isn’t the same as interesting, and on that score both artists fall short for me. Partly that’s just about taste and how there’s, y’know, no accounting for it (de gustibus, non est disputandum, as our Roman friends knew); I’m not a big fan of either crooners or rockabilly, and thus likely outside of the ideal audience for either man’s biggest hits or signature styles. But my point here isn’t simply about my personal tastes, which I don’t expect are hugely interesting either—I’m thinking as well about the nature of the men’s mainstream popularity and prominence. Despite the unquestionable (if, in retrospect, very silly) controversy over Presley’s hips, that is, I would argue that both men succeeded as consistently as they did because they were largely unobjectionable, hitting cultural sweet spots with regularity in a way that doesn’t seem as interesting as artists who push the envelope or challenge norms.

Moreover, I’m not sure that describing these two artists as influential is entirely justified either. After all, a significant percentage of both men’s songs were written by other songwriters or were covers of other artists; clearly their stunning voices and signature styles played a prominent role in making the songs as successful as they were, but I don’t know that simply singing and performing someone else’s songs qualifies an artist as influential. To be clear, I’m not trying to rehash the old argument about Presley exploiting African American music; that issue is part of the Elvis story to be sure, but the truth (as I argued at length in Monday’s post) is that a great deal of early rock and roll, if not indeed the entire genre, crossed racial and cultural boundaries. Instead, I’m simply trying to differentiate between what we might call performers and artists, and to argue that those whom we would locate in the former category (such as two men whose most consistent successes were as performers singing others’ words, or similarly as actors reciting others’ lines) might be more important than they were influential or interesting.

Next ElvisStudying tomorrow,

Ben

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

July 13-14, 2024: Found Footage Stories: The Blair Witch Project

[25 years ago this weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of such examples, leading up to this weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On the groundbreaking film’s most obvious legacy, and two other compelling ways it foreshadowed our moment.

As I hope this week’s series has proven quite definitively, the found footage genre was a very longstanding and well-established one in American culture by the late 20^th century. Yet at the same time, there’s no arguing with the ways in which the hugely successful film The Blair Witch Project (1999) revitalized that genre and created an entire subgenre of horror films (about which I wrote in yesterday’s post). For an indie (to put it mildly) film with a $60,000 budget (I didn’t forget any 0s, that’s really sixty thousand) to become the 10^th highest-grossing release of 1999 (grossing nearly $250 million worldwide) was a cinematic Cinderella story the likes of which we rarely see, and that striking success led not just to a plethora of imitators but also, again, an entirely new subgenre within the already broad and deep genre of film horror. If that subgenre has perhaps run its course to a degree 25 years later, that shouldn’t lead us to minimize Blair Witch’s transformative effects.

Like most any cultural work, of course, Blair Witch has multiple things going on, and I would say in at least two other ways it likewise foreshadowed the quarter-century since its release (perhaps more as a reflection than a direct influence, but nonetheless). The more obvious one has to do with the viral marketing campaign that helped make Blair Witch such a hit, and that depended entirely on a thoroughgoing blurring of the lines between fiction and reality. The filmmakers went to extreme lengths to convince audiences that their found footage was documentary rather than fiction, including keeping their three main actors hidden to suggest that they really had died at the hands of the titular witch. Obviously they planned to reveal the truth at some point (and did so not long after the film’s release); but at the same time, the campaign depended on genuinely fooling as much of the audience as possible for as long as possible, and thus on making it as difficult as possible for folks to distinguish fact from fiction. I’m not sure any trend has become more dominant in our 21^st century moment than such confusion—“alternative facts,” anyone?—nor that any late 20^th century moment foreshadowed it more than Blair Witch’s marketing campign.

That’s a bit of a downer point, I know, so I’ll end this post and series on a different and hopefully more inspiring note. By the late 20^th century, it would have been easy to say that a great deal of the mystery and magic of the world was disappearing, or at the very least that ongoing and deepening trends like the rise of the internet and the ubiquity of cell phones were making it harder and harder not to feel like we knew what was out there, and thus to feel cynical and even jaded about the possibility of finding wonder in our world (rather than, for example, in escaping into fantastical stories). There are various ways that cultural works can challenge such trends, and certainly many of them are less dark or disturbing than horror films about murderous creatures haunting the most ordinary of woods. But any work and genre that can portray those weird and supernatural layers to our world—and that can even convince audiences that they are genuinely present in their own world—offers a compelling reminder that mystery and magic remain with us.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?

July 12, 2024: Found Footage Stories: Horror Films

[25 years ago this coming weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On the longstanding appeal, and the limits, of faux-realism.

In Monday’s post on Washington Irving’s History of New York (1809), I noted how interestingly Irving’s book foreshadows (in form, although clearly not in genre or tone) early 21^st century found footage texts such as tomorrow’s focus, The Blair Witch Project (1999), and Wednesday’s text, Mark Danielewksi’s House of Leaves (2000). There are obviously just universal and longstanding appeals of such works, among which I would include the possibility that we are encountering something genuine (always a challenge to find anywhere, including in creative art), the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction (and the resulting discomfort, in the most provocative sense of the term, that such blurring produces), and the undeniable thrill of following along in the processes of making and finding such texts (ie, of putting ourselves in the shoes of both those who filmed and those who “found” Blair Witch’s footage, of both House’s creators and its initial readers, and so on).

If found footage has been an artistic element for centuries, though, it has nonetheless reached new levels of popularity and ubiquity in recent years. In film alone we have seen found footage monster movies, found footage superhero films, found footage alien invasion dramas, and, most consistently and most relevantly for a series inspired by Blair Witch, the exploding genre of found footage horror films. The latter category includes, to name only a fraction of the entrants (and only some of those that have thus far spawned sequels), the Paranormal Activity series, the [Rec] series, the Grave Encounters series, and the Last Exorcism series. Each of those series fits into a different sub-genre or niche within the horror genre, but all rely on the same found footage trope, and thus all to my mind tap into some of those same aforementioned appeals. (With, perhaps, the added bonus of being able to yell at stupid horror movie characters whom we can imagine are actual people.)

When it’s done well, as I would argue it most definitely was in Blair Witch, found footage undoubtedly and potently taps into all those appealing qualities. But I think it has a significant limitation, and not just that it’s become far too frequently used (and certainly not the blurring of fact and fiction, for which I’m entirely on board). To me, the central problem with found footage works of art is that they too often tend, by design, to eschew artistic choices and complexity—after all, their amateur filmmaker characters likely weren’t concerned with such artistic elements (especially not once the crap starting hitting the fan), and so their actual filmmakers often seem not to be either. But while we might well look to works of art for the kinds of appealing elements that found footage features, we also look to them to be artistic, to be carefully and effectively designed as something more than—or at least something other than—the reality with which we’re surrounded. Great found footage works, that is, help us escape into their artistic alternate reality—they don’t simply remind us of our own.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?

July 11, 2024: Found Footage Stories: Illuminae

[25 years ago this coming weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

On two ways to contextualize a bestselling dystopian YA series.

I try always to be honest with y’all, dear readers, and so I have to start this post by noting that I have not yet had the chance to read Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s Illuminae (2015), nor its two sequels Gemina (2016) and Obsidio (2018). (My younger son is a huge fan of dystopian YA stories, so I promise we will try to rectify this oversight ASAP.) In lieu of pretending to have more knowledge about the book’s and series’ specifics than I do, I’ll ask you to learn a bit more just as I did, through this Wikipedia entry, and then come on back for some further AmericanStudying thoughts.

Welcome back! Even if you don’t have the same level of expertise about YA dystopias that being a Dad to an obsessed son has granted me, you’re likely aware that a focus on both teenage protagonists generally (often, although not always, teenage girl protagonists) and their teenage romances specifically is pretty ubiquitous in the genre, and so the least surprising clause in that Wikipedia description is likely “the collective story of teenage colonist Kady Grant and her boyfriend Ezra Mason.” By 2015 those character types and tropes had already been so well established that any author entering the genre would need to find a variation in order to stand out from the Hunger Games and Divergents and Maze Runners of the world, and it seems that Kaufman and Kristoff hit on found footage as their twist, using (again quoting Wikipedia) “classified reports, censored emails, camera transcriptions, and interviews” to fill in the story of Kady and Ezra and their journey through a sci fi dystopian world.

To me the most interesting clause in that particular Wikipedia sentence is actually the final one, right after that list of found footage types: “all of which were curated for a court case against the main antagonist company, BeiTech.” Another prominent subgenre of dystopian stories features nefarious corporations and their destructive effects on their worlds, with the Weyland-Yutani corporation from the Alien franchise as a particularly clear case in point. But I’m not familiar with any other cultural works that tell that story through found footage that documents the corporation’s effects after the fact, and certainly not one that creates such a logical rationale for the existence of the found footage as evidence for a trial. As all of this week’s posts illustrate, the question of how and why the audience has access to the found footage is a consistent conundrum faced by the genre, and Kaufman and Kristoff found a strikingly successful and elegant answer in their found footage trilogy.

Last found footage studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?

July 10, 2024: Found Footage Stories: House of Leaves

[25 years ago this coming weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]

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 earliest posts 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 six times now (including the latest section this past semester). 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 kinds 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’s postmodern 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 found footage studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?