[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125th 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 3rd 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 21st 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?
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