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.  At the same time, ironically, they are proposing for our serious consideration, as a candidate for intellectually engaging literature, a highly melodramatic novel with an improbable plot, inconsistent characterizations, and excesses of style that have posed tremendous problems for all students of Charles Brockden Brown.  But, by this strategy it becomes possible to begin major American fiction historically with male rather than female authors.  The certainty here that stories about women could not contain the essence of American culture means that the matter of American experience is inherently male.  And this makes it highly unlikely that American women would write fiction encompassing such experience.  I would suggest that the theoretical model of a story which may become the vehicle of cultural essence is:  “a melodrama of beset manhood.”  This melodrama is presented in a fiction which, as we’ll later see, can be taken as representative of the author’s literary experience, his struggle for integrity and livelihood against flagrantly bad best-sellers written by women.  Personally beset in a way that epitomizes the tensions of our culture, the male author produces his melodramatic testimony to our culture’s essence–so the theory goes.

So the theory goes. How sad is it that Baym’s claims may seem more radical now than they were nearly 30 years ago?  (It’s that old devil patriarchal equilibrium again!)  Thanks to all of you for your insights and recommendations in the earlier discussion.

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???

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.  Paul Harvey has links to lots of posts and articles by actual inteleckshuals and their analyses of Beck:

• Messiah College Professor and Blogger John Fea in the New York Daily News, on “How Glenn Beck distorts the Christian Teachings that Inspired MLK, Jr.”  He writes today that “I’ve been taking a little bit of heat from Glenn Beck supporters who have been writing in the comments section of my New York Daily News op-ed.”  Ya think?  No one ever said fighting the crazzy was easy work, John!
• Joanna Brooks, on “America’s First Mormon Televangelist.”
• Alex McNeill, “‘Me’ The People:  A Day with the Tea Party”
• Andrew Murphy, “Beck Plays Prophet”

American history doesn’t disappoint, does it, friends?  Just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse–it finds a way!  Never say we’re not a can-do kind of people.

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.  I have assumed that I like Franzen’s work because I too am a white, Protestant midwesterner who grew up in a particular kind of family and neighborhood at a particular moment in the twentieth century, and I thought The Corrections captured that very well, in addition to offering a lengthy sub-plot that was a hilarious academic comedy of errors.  I don’t have any illusions that his subjectivity is the only “Great American” subjectivity, like a lot of the reviewers of certain clever men novelists seem to think.  (Take David Foster Wallace, for example–please.  Now he wrote some clever and entertaining things, but was anyone else annoyed by his writerly tics of returning to tennis and Illinois all of the time?  Who the frack cares about tennis or Illinois?  How are they such universal concerns?)

It’s like John Updike’s blurb on the book jacket of the Joyce Carol Oates novel I took with me on vacation a few weeks ago said:  “If there were such a term as a woman of letters, Oates would deserve it.”  That’s the view of the inbred, talking-only-to-themselves New York-based American literary establishment of The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.  “If there were such a term as woman of letters”–but of course, there isn’t, and our literary tastemakers who are nearly all the same age, sex, regional background, and race will make sure it never happens!

Good for Picoult and Weiner.  Their courageous stand will win them nothing, and will probably cost them a lot.  I guess they can kiss their hopes for future reviews in the New York Times goodbye!

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.

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. 

This is a great example.  Bound copies of conference programs easier to use and encourage actual conference panel attendance.  How many of you go to every panel you preselect in advance, and how many of you (like me and Undine) change your mind on the fly and go to different sessions entirely?  That can’t happen without a full program.  Why put on a conference if you’re not interested in making sure audiences can find the panels they want to see?  With all of the petroleum burned for travel by conference attendees, worrying about the paper used for printing a conference program seems like an almost pointless gesture.  (Let’s face it:  the greenest of all possible conferences isn’t as green as everyone staying home and skipping the meeting.)  I think it’s smart to ask your membership or registered participants if they want a hard copy of the program–that would be frugal and responsible without depriving the interested membership of a printed program.

Besides, moves like not printing conference programs don’t actually save paper, they just shift the paper use to somewhere else.  (Undine notes this too, and complains about administrators expecting meeting attendees to print up their own copies of documents.  “Uh, no. That’s not part of the deal. My home printer is not at your service. In these cases, I exercise my Thoreau-given right to civil disobedience and bring the laptop with me to the meeting with the documents loaded on it.”)  I’ve tried printing a few pages from a conference program and found that I used nearly as much paper as a printed program would have, just to print up a day’s worth of panel descriptions.

She concludes her musings on paper as a viable technology with this:

Another thing about administrators and technology: even though I like technology, it seems wrong to me that administrators are so dead keen on it that they care less about how it’s used than if it’s used. Faculty are now evaluated in part on whether they use technology or not (see The Chronicle for tsk-tsking about the sad sacks who don’t), and I think it’s because administrators are entranced by the shiny and in love with anything they can name and count. Good teaching = can’t be counted except by student evals. Teaching with technology = something to count.

Back to paper. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there are all kinds of technologies that we can choose from, and we shouldn’t shy away from paper if it’s the best one.

Right on.  Administrators love technology, because people think it’s doing something magically special for education so they buy it and want professors to use it regardless of its actual strengths and powers.  I refused to use PowerPoint in my lectures for a number of years, because all I saw was that it was being used badly without adding anything beyond what an overhead projector could accomplish.  At my former university in the late 1990s, I sat through countless meetings run by administrators in which we were subjected to bad PowerPoint lectures in which the administrators did nothing more than read the words on the slide and give us a Xeroxed stack of meeting slides so we could follow along ourselves.  Now, that was a stupid waste of paper.

Paper has stood the test of time.  Microfilm?  Microform?  Microfiche?  Faxes?  MS Word ca. 1986?  Your BASIC programming homework on 5-1/2 inch truly floppy “floppy discs?”  Your college emails on a VAX system?  The PDFs of articles you downloaded last week?  Not so much.

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.

I love the 40s!

I just wish a$$holes would stop giving speeches and holding rallies on my birthday. It used to be a pretty classy day.  Then two years ago I couldn’t go out to dinner in Denver because The Precious was giving The Speech, and now this.  (Thank goodness I haven’t lived anywhere near the Lincoln Memorial for fourteen years.)

More reporting on my birthday dinner to follow on this blog.

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. Desperate to find a new boyfriend. Desperate to get the perfect job. Desperate to get rid of this terrible relationship with this bad new boyfriend. Desperate to have a Kate Moss body (I spent part of my 20s in the ’90s).

If I have one wish for this birthday, it is that 35 is the end of desperation and the beginning of acceptance. And part of that is believing that if I’m meant to give birth, I will. And if I’m not, I’ll forgive my ovaries their stubbornness and do something else.

35 is as good a time as any to accept yourself and lose the desperation.  I don’t think this advice applies to Dr. Crazy, who seems as content as her cats now that she’s settled into her new home, which she bought on her own with her very own money.  I think Klein’s article is just good advice for women everywhere.

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. We encourage proposals for papers that introduce new research agendas and/or reflect on the current practice of women’s history. Where are women at the centers and on the margins of early America, whether familial, geographic, legal, political, or sexual? How do women’s experiences intersect with ideas of class, race, and status? In what ways does the range of women’s experiences shape global, borderlands, and local perspectives? What theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches best frame early American women’s history today? What are the future directions for early American women’s history?

Don’t forget:  Mexico and Central America are in fact in North America.  The Caribbean is North America.  All of Canada is North America.  Colorado, New Mexico, California, Wisconsin, Michigan, and all of the other 45 U.S. states are in North America.  (I think Hawai’i counts here for the purposes of this conference.)  They’re not just looking for Anglo-American goodwives on the Atlantic littoral, friends.

Here are the directions for application:

The WMQ-EMSI workshop is intended to encourage the work of midcareer scholars working on second or subsequent research projects, though we will consider exceptional proposals from post-Ph.D. junior scholars. Proposals for workshop presentations should include a brief abstract (250 words) describing the applicant’s current research project, an equally brief discussion of the particular methodological or historiographical issues they are engaging (which will be circulated to all participants along with the chapter or essay), and a short c.v. The organizers especially encourage proposals from midcareer scholars. Proposals may be submitted online at the conference Web site (http://oieahc.wm.edu/conferences/workshops/cfp/index.cfm) or by email to Kelly Crawford (kscraw<AT>wm.edu) by October 15, 2010. All submissions will be acknowledged by email.  Questions may be directed to Christopher Grasso, Editor, William and Mary Quarterly, at cdgras<AT>wm.edu.

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.

School was just one room 7 miles away, and the teacher wasn’t from one of your fancy normal colleges–just an Eighth Grade graduate, and that only if we were lucky.  But our teachers were really demanding and strict, and they got excellent results.  I was translating Catullus in the third grade, at least the poems without the dirty parts, and my brother was doing trigonometry in fourth grade.  That was probably because we knew teachers could administer fatal beatings to us if they wanted to.  Yes, teachers got results back then–they didn’t need a fancy normal college degree, and they knew that parents would back them up if they administered a fatal beating.  Unlike today.

Because we couldn’t afford flour or flour sacks, we kids used to amuse ourselves making newspaper dresses for each other.  Instead of stickball, we just played “stick” because we couldn’t afford a ball.  In the summers, we’d pretend we’d swing from a rope and plunge into the river for a swim, because our swimming costumes were made of newspaper, too.  (Besides, we didn’t have a rope.)  But, we had such fun!  Fun such as you’ll never, ever know, because it was a simpler time.  A time when a lot of what we had was made out of newspaper by our own two hands, before all of the pool parlors, the filthy comic books, the lemonade stands, and crystal radio sets ruined American childhood.  Where is the imagination in opening a comic book and reading a story?  Where is the creativity in just turning a dial to hear music?  Who couldn’t make a tasty drink sweetened with sugar?  We used to make our own fun.  Now they just buy it like it’s for sale, like something cheap made in Occupied Japan. 

Lord, I don’t know.

Leave your reminiscences of the “good old days” (real or fictional) in the comments below.