Historiann

I got my copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom from the mail carrier just minutes ago.  I’ll let you know what I think about it once I’ve read it, since I know some of you are also FranzenFans.

Meanwhile, upon Mamie’s recommendation a few days ago in our discussion of Jennifer Weiner’s and Jodi Picoult’s critique of the American literary establishment , I’ve been reading Nina Baym’s classic essay, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood:  How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33: 2 (1981), 123-139.  Dandelion made the same point that Baym elaborates on in her essay about American literature:  “In my reading, it seems the bulk of American literature deals with main characters individuating and separating. Since it’s ’selfish’ for women to individuate and separate, the bulk of American literature doesn’t involve women. If women writers are writing stories about women’s lives, then, they are, by definition, not going to be writing literature.”

Baym writes about the rewriting of the literary history of the early Republic that will sound familiar to those of you who have followed my comments on American literary fiction and criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  (Which is to say that I’ve been influenced by Baym for decades, not the other way around, surely!)  In short, twentieth-century literary critics pushed aside the authors of the first wildly popular American novels like Susannah Rowson (Charlotte Temple, among others) and Hannah Foster (The Coquette) in order to crown Charles Brockden Brown the first real author of the American novel.  (Now, late eighteenth century novels aren’t the most readable relicts in all of literary history, but Charles Brockden Brown is widely known as the most unreadable of all early American novelists.)  Baym explains:

[I]n his lively and influential book of 1960, Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fielder describes women authors as creators of the “flagrantly bad best-seller” against which “our best fictionists”–all male–have had to struggle for “their integrity and their livelihoods.”  And, in a 1978 reader’s introduction to an edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Sydney J. Krause and S.W. Reid write as follows:

What it meant for Brown personally, and belles letters in America historically, that he should have decided to write professionally is a story unto itself.  Americans simply had no great appetite for serious literature in the early decades of the Republic—certainly nothing of the sort with which they devoured. . . the ubiquitous melodramas of beset womanhood, “tales of truth,” like [Rowson’s and Foster’s books.]

There you see what has happened to the woman writer.  She has entered literary history as the enemy.  The phrase “tales of truth” is put in quotes by the critics, as though to cast doubt on the very notion that a “melodrama of beset womanhood” could be either true or important.  Continue Reading »

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What the hell were we thinking in the1980s?

I was discussing this song with a young friend who missed the 1980s entirely, and this video left hir very confused.  I couldn’t explain it.  Did we think this was a daring or profound statement about–something?  Anything?  (Monkeys?)  WTF???

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Weepy demagogue Glenn Beck

Paying attention to weepy demagogue Glenn Beck is akin to giving oxygen to a house fire–no good will come of it, and you’ll probably make it worse.  I was cross enough about his appropriation of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 (and only in part because it was my birthday)–but his comments on President Barack Obama’s supposed “liberation theology” bear a little commentary.  I’m surprised that more people haven’t commented on this already–so here goes:

My theory is that this is Beck’s stealth strategy for calling Obama a Marxist or socialist.  Not that I think most of his followers get that–he’s dressing up his ideas in inteleckshual-sounding phrases that are designed more to deflect deep thought than inspire curiosity and further research.  Finally today, Tim Rutten in the L.A. Times tells us what liberation theology actually is, and why it’s so stupid to accuse Obama of being one of its acolytes: 

Liberation theology is a movement that took shape in the late 1950s and ’60s among Latin American Catholic thinkers, foremost among them the Peruvian Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez, who coined the term. The other “founders” were the Uruguayan Jesuit Juan Luis Segundo; the Spanish Jesuit Jon Sobrino, who has spent most of his career in El Salvador; and the Brazilian Franciscan Leonardo Boff. (These are hardly shadowy figures; Gutierrez, for example, is the O’Hara Professor of Theology at Notre Dame.)

Their common position was that social injustice is a form of violence arising from sin. They urged the poor — and those acting in solidarity with them — to reflect on Scripture from the perspective of the poor. To that end, some argued that certain facets of Marxist analysis, particularly those having to do with social class, could be helpful. None of this is particularly mysterious, nor does it have anything to do with Obama. In fact, it’s hard to imagine anyone touched by liberation theology proposing anything like his Wall Street bailout. 

Word.  But for the full-on Beck-a-palooza roundup, head on over to our friends at Religion in American History.  Continue Reading »

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Srsly?

Check out this protest by some writers of the coronation of Jonathan Franzen by the American literary establishment as the next Leo Tolstoy:

This time around a couple of best-selling female writers, Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, have tweeted their disdain for what they see as critical fawning over Franzen’s new novel, Freedom.

Weiner has even come up with a phrase to describe her feelings: Franzenfreude.

“Schadenfreude is taking pleasure in the pain of others,” Weiner says. “Franzenfreude is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.”

But her angst is not just about the book — or even about Franzen himself.

“It’s about the establishment choosing one writer and writing about him again and again and again,” Weiner says, “while they are ignoring a lot of other worthy writers and, in the case of The New York Times, entire genres of books.”

So why Franzen, and not (for example) Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, or Barbara Kingsolver?  Gee:  I wonder!

“It’s just interesting to sort of stack them up against a Lorrie Moore or against a Mona Simpson — who write books about families that are seen as excellent books about families,” Weiner says. “And then to look at a Jonathan Franzen who writes a book about a family but we are told this is a book about America.”

Now, I really liked Franzen’s The Corrections, and I asked for Freedom for my birthday this year.  But Picoult and Weiner are absolutely correct.  As I have argued here before American literary fiction has no room for women.  Continue Reading »

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Historiann's parking space

Hee-hee.  I love it.  Finally, I’m benefiting from the nice, shiny new classroom and counseling building they built behind the SpacePod that houses most of the Liberal Arts departments at Baa Ram U.  In the process, they did away with a whole parking lot but they also converted a few of the spaces in the adjacent lot to these spaces.  So although I’ll never get to teach in shiny new building, at least I get preferred parking closer to my building with these spots reserved for smug hybrid drivers.  (And for me, the unsmug hybrid driver who has to teach in unglamorous, un-smart, unrenovated classrooms.  Unbelieveable, isn’t it?)

This is for Sisyphus, who won a postdoc (yay!) and has moved to Postdoc City, only to find that the morning commute and parking is even more difficult than it was back in the Golden State.  Good luck, Sis!  We’re all rooting for you.

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Undine has some useful thoughts about paper and its irreplaceability.  She notes that there are some instances in our professional lives as academics when hard copies of documents are not just preferable, they’re irreplaceable:

Sometimes paper just works better, and we ought to be able to acknowledge that.

Example: An upcoming conference is making the program available either in e-form or in paper form. I applaud the decision on a conceptual level, but it left me in a dilemma. Since I felt guilty ordering the paper form because of all the green rhetoric surrounding the choice, I ordered the e-version, but who am I kidding? I’ve tried getting .pdfs on a Blackberry screen, and even if the document doesn’t fail to download and go into a holding pattern, which it does about 90% of the time, the print is too tiny to read.

What I’ll probably do is print some pages before I go, but I’d really rather have a booklet so that I can mark the sessions in case I change my mind later. I won’t know where I’m going at the conference, but at least I won’t have a conference program that pegs me as a Despoiler of the Earth.  Continue Reading »

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UPDATE, 8/29/10:  See Blake’s review of our Dinner at the Farm, including fire-breathers, fire dancers, and fireworks!  Plus cucumber and mint-infused G & Ts, a gorgeous view of the mountains at dusk, lots of friendly dogs, and much, much more.

It seems like almost everyone I know and love has a late summer birthday–ej, Mark, Kathleen, Blake, and Dad. Consider this a lazy, lazy happy birthday wish for us all!  (And it was coincidentally recorded last year on my birthday.)  For those of you who remember the 80s (and I know that all of you listed above do!), Comrade PhysioProf posted this birthday classic by Altered Images earlier this month.

Continue Reading »

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Happy Birthday, Dr. Crazy!

This cake is for Dr. Crazy, whose birthday I missed a few weeks back.  Since she’s 36 now, and I thought I’d share with her this article by Jessi Klein about declining her gynecologist’s suggestion that she consider freezing her eggs on the eve of her 35th birthday this year.  I met Crazy in person last summer and really enjoyed our brief lunch–and Klein’s article reminded me of Crazy’s personality and sense of humor.  Klein writes:

My doctor, who I adore, asked if I wanted to take home some “literature” about the procedure. (I never understand why these medical pamphlets are called literature, as if Faulkner was up all night feverishly writing about NuvaRing.) And in that moment, I made a decision. A decision about how I’m going to handle the fact that I’m thirty five (today!) and I don’t have kids and a kid-making partner isn’t currently on the scene. I decided I didn’t want the literature. And I don’t ever want the literature about anything related to the world of Fertility. It’s my big thirty-fifth birthday present to myself.

What–you missed The Loestrin and the Fury, too?  She continues:

I hate the fossilized fear of desperation. I know it well. My 20s were all about feeling desperate. Continue Reading »

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Big, big news:  my pal Terri Snyder at Cal State Fullerton is convening a workshop on “Women in Early America” next spring.  This is the sixth annual workshop at the Huntington Library jointly sponsored by the William and Mary Quarterly and the University of Southern California-Huntington Library Early Modern Studies Institute.  I can say from my experience at the “Territorial Crossings:  Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas” workshop in May of 2009 that participants are wined, dined, and put up in style.  From the call for papers:

Participants will attend a two-day meeting at the Huntington Library on May 27–28, 2011, to discuss a precirculated chapter-length portion of their current work in progress along with the work of other participants. Subsequently, the convener will write an essay elaborating on the issues raised in the workshop for publication in the William and Mary Quarterly. . . .

As the work of a new generation of women’s historians surged to the forefront of the historical profession in the 1970s, studies on planters’ wives, republican mothers, and female slaves, to give only three examples, reshaped fundamental assumptions and practices of early American history. In the ensuing decades, research on women has multiplied, focusing on politics, legalities, and religion among the factors governing women’s lives, on the textures of their roles in families, and on the systems of race, class, and labor that shaped women’s experiences from the beginning of the colonial era to ca. 1820. Simultaneously, the study of early American women evolved into the analysis of gender and sexuality. In the process, an explicit analytic and even topical focus on women has seemed to fade. To reflect on the current state of the field, we wish, to paraphrase Mary Ritter Beard, to return to the question of women as a force in early American history.

The organizers invite proposals from scholars who focus on the study of women in early North America. Continue Reading »

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In the spirit of all of the complaints about young people today, I present you with a guest post by Mrs. Norbert Thrummox (nee Delphine Brumley), my entirely fictional great grandmother.

We didn’t have anything, get anything, or expect anything.  Christmas was pretty much like every other day of the year, only colder.  Our parents didn’t even know our birthdays, let alone celebrate them with cake and presents!  We never heard of such luxuries.

Breakfast was weevily cornmeal sprinkled on a half-sheet of newspaper, lunch was what we could forage on the playground at school, and supper was what we could beg from the bar we’d have to drag our daddy from at closing time.  (Mostly pickled eggs, or sliced radishes in summer.)  This was difficult, as we’d have to get up at 5 a.m. to make it to school by 8, but we were usually good and hungry for our suppers by 1 a.m. or so.  But we didn’t mind!  We were free.  Most things were free, because we didn’t have any money.  Theft was non-existent in our community.  I’d like to say that we never locked our doors, but that would imply that we had doors.  Most of us didn’t. Continue Reading »

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