May 8, 2012: American Studies Insights, Part Two

[With work on my current book project ramping up to a fever pitch, at precisely the same time that the end of semester grading pours in—thanks, universe!—this week’s series will be particularly quick hits: each day a single American Studies insight, not necessarily earth-shattering but on my mind, courtesy of one of my classes this semester. Your insights and responses very welcome in the comments!]

Today’s insight came in the course of the final unit (Post-modernism and the Late 20^th and Early 21^st Centuries) in my American Literature II survey course.

I base the units in my Am Lit II survey around a couple of main longer readings, and then shoehorn in shorter supplemental works (ones available online) by other authors I feel it’s important to present as well (if only briefly). The two longer readings I always hope will speak to each other—I call the units “Dialogues” for that reason—but with the shorter ones, it can be hard to bring them into the conversation in that same way. But this time, as we talked about Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” and “Lazy Lazarus” (both from the early 1960s) and then transitioned back to our first longer reading, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), I started to think about how much both Plath’s speakers and Silko’s protagonist Tayo are defined by the loss and absence, yet still significant presence, of a key parent: Plath’s father and Tayo’s mother. Many of these young Americans’ difficult and crucial identity issues stem from those absences and presences, and how they impact their self-images and choices (negative and positive).

Certainly such issues are not new to the late 20^th century, yet I’d say that they’re newly central to works like these—in our first long reading, Huck Finn, for example, Huck has no Mom and a largely absent (and horrible) Dad, but seems relatively unaffected, at least compared to Plath’s speaker and Tayo, by those absences. Moreover (slight spoiler alert ahead!), the titular protagonist of my last unit’s second longer reading, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), has his whole trajectory in the novel shifted by the loss of his father at the book’s halfway point. So it seems to me that this theme is at least somewhat specific to late 20^th and early 21^st century American literature and identity, and that it could be interesting to consider why, in the land of the “self-made man” and “rugged individualism” and the like, many of our current cultural works seem centrally concerned with the effects of an absent or lost parent on the identities of younger Americans.

Next insight tomorrow

Ben

PS. What do you think? And any insights to share from this semester (or any other time)?

5/8 Memory Day nominee: Harry Truman. I hesitate to put presidents and other already famous Americans on this list, but Truman assumed the presidency at a crucial time and (imperfectly but definitely) helped the U.S. end World War II and move into the years beyond, and then he desegrated the military. That’s enough for a Memory Day in my book!

May 7, 2012: American Studies Insights, Part One

[With work on my current book project ramping up to a fever pitch, at precisely the same time that the end of semester grading pours in—thanks, universe!—this week’s series will be particularly quick hits: each day a single American Studies insight, not necessarily earth-shattering but on my mind, courtesy of one of my classes this semester. Your insights and responses very welcome in the comments!]

Today’s insight came toward the end of the semester, as my American Novel to 1950 students discussed our different authors and texts from across the semester.

As we talked about two of our more interesting characters, Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier and Willa Cather’s Ántonia Shimerda, the link between literary elements like narration and perspective and American Studies questions of identity and community really hit home to me. Chopin’s conventional realistic narrator—who has the ability to give us many characters’ thoughts but also creates a great deal of ambiguity about how we read those characters—is hugely different from Cather’s more modernist and artistic one (who is consciously writing a novel about his memories). There are lots of potential reasons for those choices, and an equal number of important effects—but without question, these narrative choices drive our readings and responses to both key women, and to the many important issues (women’s rights, marriage, romance and reality, immigration, work, and more) to which they connect.

I could write a lot more on that topic, and unfortunately don’t have time at the moment. So for those who know the novels, I’ll just pose this thought experiment: what if Chopin’s novel were narrated by Robert LeBrun, highlighting the stages of his love for Edna? And what if Cather’s had an outside narrator who could both show us the complexities of Ántonia’s perspective and comment critically on her identity and live (even representing the critical perspective of Black Hawk, for example)? How different would both novels be as a result? And how much does this help us see the centrality of a choice of narrator to every other aspect of a novel?

Next insight tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? And any insights to share?

5/7 Memory Day nominee: Archibald MacLeish, the World War I veteran and poet whose career included some of the most innovative Modernist poems, important tenures at the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Library of Congress, and an impressive willingness to evolve and grow with the twentieth century.

May 5-6, 2012: Great Historical Fiction, Part 5

[Fifth and final entry in the week’s series on great American historical fiction! But I’m always thinking about this genre, so continued nominations, feedback, and other responses still very welcome as always!]

For the fifth post, quick hits on five more nominees for amazing American historical novels (all of which I’ll probably write more about in future posts!):

1)      E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971)

2)      Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974)

3)      David Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981)

4)      Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996)

5)      Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex (2002)

Next series this coming week,

Ben

PS. Any historical novels or novelists you’d highlight?

5/5 Memory Day nominee: Nellie Bly, the pioneering and hugely talented investigative reporter and muckraking journalist who changed American media, writing, and narratives of gender and identity.

5/6 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two titanic 20^th century Americans who need no introduction, Orson Welles and Willie Mays.

May 4, 2012: Great Historical Fiction, Part 4

[Fourth in the week’s series on great American historical fiction! Nominations, feedback, and other responses very welcome as always!]

Today’s nominee for an amazing American historical novel is James Michener’s

Hawaii (1959).

It’s fair to say, using the categories for which I argued in Tuesday’s post, that Michener’s best-selling historical epics are more period fiction than historical fiction—he’s certainly most interested in human experiences and relationships, rather than in thorny questions of American history per se. But on the other hand, his novels are multi­-period, tracing centuries of community and identity in each of his focal places, and that makes them both unique and in and of themselves historically grounded (and researched) in every effective ways. Most any of those epics could have been my focus here, but Hawaii was really his first in this category, and exemplifies his talents and successes for sure.

Final nominee tomorrow,

Ben

PS. You know the question!

5/4 Memory Day nominees: A tie between two pioneering 19^th century American thinkers and writers, both born in 1796: Horace Mann, considered “The Father of American Public Education” for his innovative and seminal ideas about public education, teacher training, and other key educational questions; and William H. Prescott, considered the first scientifically analytical American historian and one of the most significant pioneers in writing the history of the Americas.

May 3, 2012: Great Historical Fiction, Part 3

[Third in the week’s series on great American historical fiction! Nominations, feedback, and other responses very welcome as always!]

Today’s nominee for an amazing American historical novel is Russell Banks’s

Cloudsplitter (1998).

I’ll admit it, for a long time I hated Banks’ novel; not because of anything really about it, but because my fallback plan had always been to write a historical novel about John Brown from the point of view of one of his sons, and then Banks went ahead and did that and did it amazingly well. But you can only hold onto your hate for so long before you realize that an amazing historical novel about fathers and sons, family and nation, violence and spirituality, the coming of the Civil War, and heroism and villainy in American identity is worth celebrating. Even if it did crush your dreams a bit.

Next nominee tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any novelists or novels you’d highlight?

5/3 Memory Day nominee: Jacob Riis, who remains, more than a century later, one of the most complex and important voices to engage with American poverty in our history.

May 2, 2012: Great Historical Fiction, Part 2

[Second in the week’s series on great American historical fiction! Nominations, feedback, and other responses very welcome as always!]

Today’s nominee for an amazing American historical novel is Octavia Butler’s

Kindred (1979).

The premise of Butler’s science fiction historical novel is simple enough: a 1970s African American woman suddenly finds herself time traveling back into the antebellum South, where she becomes (or rather, is) a slave. But without spoiling the many amazing places where Butler takes her story from there, I’ll just say that she is centrally concerned with some of the most genuinely historical and American themes: family and legacies, race and its continuous yet shifting presence and meanings, love and hope and hatred and death, community and identity in our past, present, and (it is science fiction after all!) future. One of our most unique, significant, and compelling American novels, historical or otherwise.

Next nominee tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Any nominations?

5/2 Memory Day nominee: Albion Tourgée, who’s on my short list of most inspiring Americans, for all the reasons detailed in that post and more.

May 1, 2012: Great Historical Fiction, Part I

[Starting a week’s series on great American historical fiction! Nominations, feedback, and other responses very welcome as always!]

One of the central questions with which any scholar or reader (or even any writer) of historical fiction has to engage is what works in the genre hope to accomplish. There are lots of potential answers to that question, but the fundamental divide is, it seems to me, between accuracy or authenticity on the one hand and effectiveness or readability on the other; between, that is, doing justice to the historical details and periods and events on which a particular novel focuses and doing right by the readers who have picked up said novel. Obviously the choice is not an either/or, but I would argue that as a matter of emphasis and priority these are two very different starting points; and I would go further and argue that much of what we have called historical fiction over the years has chosen very fully to focus on creating entertaining novels for which the history is a backdrop, rather than on creating historical worlds for which the novel is a foreground.

If that has been the emphasis much of the time, it’s an entirely understandable one; readers who seek historical accuracy can always turn to works of historical narrative and scholarship, after all, and a historical novelist who does not connect to his or her readers is likely to produce few sales and a short career. So long as the historical focus is not being explicitly falsified or mythologized, as I have elsewhere argued that the historical details surrounding Reconstruction explicitly and destructively (to the book’s contemporary moment and for our overarching national narratives) are in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a historical novelist focusing mostly on creating compelling characters and story rather than on exploring all of the nuances of that historical world. But if and when a novelist makes that choice, I think it would be very useful for us to have a separate generic category in which we could place the resulting work: not historical fiction but, perhaps, period fiction? If we were to employ that second category in that way, it would allow the term “historical fiction” to be used solely for those novels that do work to create historical worlds first and foremost—and would hopefully likewise allow us to make clear that many such novels and novelists have been able to do so without sacrificing any of their engaging and entertaining qualities in the process.

At or near the top of that list, for me, are the novels in Gore Vidal’s American Chronicle, a series which Vidal has been writing since the late 1960s and which now includes at least six novels (which I will list in chronological rather than publication order; not included here is the recent The Golden Age [2000], only because I haven’t read it and so don’t feel able to comment on whether it’s really part of the series or not): Burr (1973); Lincoln (1984); 1876 (1976); Empire (1987); Hollywood (1990); and Washington, DC (1967). The novels certainly vary in quality, and the more recent novels in the series seem somewhat more explicitly driven by Vidal’s own contemporary political agenda and purposes (a charge that, from what I can tell, applies even more directly to Golden Age); it’s fair to say that a decent percentage of even the kind of genuinely historical fiction about which I’m writing here does feature such central political purposes, and while they don’t necessarily diminish the texts’ success at creating historical worlds, they do often provide the lenses through which we view those worlds. But the earlier books in Vidal’s series, and most especially Burr, are among America’s most fully realized and successful historical novels: both because of how richly they construct their historical worlds (Burr imagines no fewer than three such worlds: the Revolution, the turn of the 19^th century, and the 1830s); and because of how immensely readable and fun they are. To coin a phrase, Burr made me laugh, made me cry, and made me think long and hard about—and in fact even do further research into—its historical and national subjects and stories, and that’s a pretty successful historical novel if you ask me.

Next nominee tomorrow.

Ben

PS. Two more links:

1)      Empire, one of the few in the series that you can preview through Google books: http://books.google.com/books?id=RiYadJIIy80C&printsec=frontcover&dq=gore+vidal&hl=en&ei=cLOHTfG3CozUgQfsq5jVCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=book-preview-link&resnum=9&ved=0CFgQuwUwCA#v=onepage&q&f=false

2)      One of the more interesting books on historical fiction, in which scholars write about historical novels and the novelists write back (two excerpts included through this site): http://books.simonandschuster.com/Novel-History/Mark-C-Carnes/9780684857664/excerpt_with_id/5185

PPS. Any historical novels or novelists you’d recommend?

5/1 Memory Day nominee: Joseph Heller, who never equaled the scathing satire and bite of his great Catch-22 (although few other American authors have equaled it either), but whose later novels reflect an evolving and complex satirical and humanistic perspective for sure.