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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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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Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser has been found guilty of research misconduct in an internal review by the Standing Committee on Professional Conduct:

Hours later, Dr. Hauser, a rising star for his explorations into cognition and morality, made his first public statement since news of the inquiry emerged last week, telling The New York Times, “I acknowledge that I made some significant mistakes” and saying he was “deeply sorry for the problems this case had caused to my students, my colleagues and my university.”

Dr. Hauser is a leader in the field of animal and human cognition, and in 2006 wrote a well-received book, “Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.” Harvard’s findings against him, if sustained, may cast a shadow over the broad field of scientific research that depended on the particular research technique often used in his experiments.

I guess our universal sense of right and wrong doesn’t include research misconduct?  Whatever, a$$hole.  Hey–here’s another reason to close your lab to graduate students besides the craptastic job market: Continue Reading »

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I’m sure that if you care, you’ve already heard about the extremely strange racial tirade that has apparently ended (for now) Dr. Laura Schlessinger’s radio career.  This article by Mary Elizabeth Williams sums up Schlessinger’s angry outburst at a caller in which she screamed the N-word eleven times.  Joan Walsh at Salon writes that last night on Larry King, she announced that she’ll leave the airwaves when her contract ends at the end of this year because she wants to “regain [her] First Amendment rights.  (Check out those links–they include both audio and video richness for your full and complete understanding.  Go listen to the audio link in the Williams story–don’t miss the part where she says that it’s ironic that there are so many people complaining about racial discrimination when we have a black President!  Priceless.)

Walsh focuses on Schlessinger’s curious victimology and her willful misunderstanding of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and rightly so.  She writes,

Like a lot of right-wingers lately (see the so-called “ground zero mosque” demonizers), Schlessinger shows a poor grasp of what the First Amendment does. It protects us from government abridging our speech rights; it doesn’t protect us from other Americans deciding we’re racially divisive idiots when we use the word “n!&&er” 11 times in a a single exchange with one caller. . . .

Then there’s the claim [on King's show that] she can’t be “helpful and useful” under the current circumstances, which seems to indicate she can only be “helpful and useful” if she can use the word “nigger” 11 times in one of her rants without being criticized. Schlessinger has gotten away with being “helpful and useful” in all her homophobic, sexist, right-wing glory for almost three decades. It’s amazing this single run-in with American decency has finally made her retreat.

But this wasn’t Schlessinger’s first major on-air meltdown that p!$$ed people off– Continue Reading »

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Well, now that I have an i-pod and i-tunes, there’s a way to get Mad Men without subscribing to some expensive, crappy cable TV package I neither want nor need.  i-tunes sells a season pass for $20 ($30 for HD), which seems like a total bargain.  The only downside is that I have to watch the show on my computer, so Fratguy and I snuggle up in bed and balance it on our laps together.  (Too bad it’s such a completely un-sexy show!) 

Here are my thoughts so far (3 episodes in).  As the fankids say on the internets–spoiler alert: Continue Reading »

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Well, you’ve probably heard that “Senator” Wonderbread won his primary, which means that I can no longer refer to him as never having won a vote. And it wasn’t even close!  Andrew Romanoff called to offer his congratulations less than an hour after the polls closed.  Being able to outspend your opponent by nearly 4-1 has its advantages, kids!  Oh well–the guy who is liklier to beat him in November, GOP insurgent candidate Ken Buck, also won his primary narrowly against Jane Norton.  Possible lessons of the Colorado primary?  It looks like the GOPers are more likely to favor insurgencies, whereas there’s enough Dems satisfied with their incumbents (I know–go figure!) that they’re sticking with the status quo.  (Remember, the two sitting senators to lose their primaries were Republican Bob Bennett in Utah, and Democrat-turned-Republican-turned Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, so we’ll count him as a half-Republican who didn’t have the confidence of Penna. Dems, and for good reason.)  Continue Reading »

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• The Bennet campaign is stamping their tiny little feet in frustration at that New York Times story about “Senator” Michael Bennet’s advocacy for taking taxpayer money to the track with him, but the Times sticks by its story.  It published a correction and an addendum this morning, but only on two minor points:  on the history of Bennet’s relationship with Tom Boasberg, and to note that one of the sources is a supporter of Bennet’s primary challenger Andrew Romanoff.  (Apparently, it’s not worth mentioning that Boasberg has been sending out talking points from him office to distract from the NYT story, and is an open supporter and maxed-out donor to his former boss Bennet.)  Sorry, “Senator” Wonderbread:  if your bet had won and you had made money for the Denver Public Schools, you’d be tooting your own horn pretty loudly.  But since you bet on the wrong horse, it’s somehow dirty or wrong to point that out?  That’s not evidence of your poor judgment, somehow?  That’s politics, friends.  Can’t take the heat?  Get the f^&k out of the kitchen, “Senator.”  Big girls don’t cry–we pull up our panties and get $hit done.
• Tenured Radical asks for some advice in dealing with sexual and romantic revelations found in the personal papers of a Famous Feminist in the 1970s.  She asks:  “What to do with past life shockers? Would anyone be shocked by them really? What, if anything, do they contribute the history of radical feminism I am working on? Do they amplify the atmosphere for my reader that will better evoke the period? Do I risk losing the trust of second-wave feminists now collaborating with me if I seem to have bad judgment? (I’m thinking the answer to this is yes.) Should you publish any document about a person of interest that you wouldn’t want published about yourself? And yet, why did these women leave these love notes in their papers if they didn’t want me to know?”  Great questions–especially that last one.
• For-profit colleges and universities are clearly fraudulent peddlers of hope to people who have been ill-served by their public secondary educations and the current U.S. economy–but will anyone do anything about them?  Continue Reading »

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He's a fake and he doesn't know the territory!

NOTE:   Click here only if you’re interested in the latest developments in the Colorado Democratic U.S. Senate primary race between Andrew Romanoff and the Unelected Senator Michael Bennet.  The New York Times has a story that’s superbad for Bennet–some of you easterners may have seen this today shortly after the paper hit your doorsteps.  Otherwise, please read and respond to the previous post in which I ask for advice about how to free up some shelf space. Continue Reading »

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“Welcome to the Recovery!,” shouts Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.  (Yeah–you’re welcome to it, pal.)  Running a ponderous description of everything you think you’ve been doing in the New York Times–yeah, that’ll do it.  That’ll make of those jobless folks in the Rust Belt feel better and put money in the pocketbooks of all of those people whose unemployment benefits have run out nationwide.  Former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich has a better handle on, yes, feeling your pain, and acknowledging the gap between Wall Street profits and Main Street realities.

Meanwhile–the Unelected Senator from St. Alban’s Locust Valley Wall Street Colorado Michael Bennet has loaned his struggling primary campaign $300,000!  Yes, friends:  all of that business acumen learned at the feet of right-wing union-busting billionaire Phil Anschutz has led him to run the most expensive U.S. Senate campaign in Colorado history–and all he has to show for it is a 20-point reversal in the polls in six weeks.  I’ve said it before, and you know I’ll say it again:  what a tool.

That Bennet had to give himself cash a week before ballots are counted means his campaign has burned through almost $5.8 million. That figure exceeds all previous spending records in Colorado Senate primaries.

In July alone, the campaign spent $1 million.

How does this compare with what his primary opponent, ”career politician” Andrew Romanoff, has spent so far?  Continue Reading »

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