Summertime and the livin’ is easy. Bye everyone! I leave you with this year’s Grizzly@Adams Super Summer Classic: George and Ira Gershwin’s lullaby “Summertime,” from Porgy and Bess. To hear Billie Holiday sing this standard, click here. Ella Fitzgerald also has a fine version of the song. Amy Winehouse’s version is not quite in the same league, but still worth a listen. For an acid-rock version, try this one from Jim Morrison and the Doors. And for the 1959 film version, click here.

“Your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin.’” Now that’s poetry.

Previous Super Summer Classics include “Summersong” by the Decemberists and “Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly and the Family Stone. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Here are your final exam questions, everyone — right after the jump. Remember, the exam is 10-11:50 a.m. Thursday, May 7. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Sarah Joslin: You have written that “in a utopia…it’s absolutely necessary for one’s free will to be absolutely authentic, not some synthetic illusion pulled over the eyes by a manipulative government — this would indeed be an anti-utopia. Censorship lands smack in the middle of this conflict. It’s necessary for individuals to have free range for expression and development of identity, but it’s also necessary that these individuals don’t stomp all over their neighbors in the effort.”

So say we all. But censorship is not only a matter of what one is allowed to express; it’s also a matter of what is allowed to hear and read. And children in particular are typically prevented from hearing and reading a great deal, and this censorship exists precisely in order to limit the child’s free will. The most obvious example of this sort of thing is what we politely call a “religious upbringing.” I’ve never known of a religious parent going out of their way to expose their child to ideas that would undercut that child’s faith. Paradoxically (or nonsensically, or hypocritically), the parent wants the child to “freely” choose the faith even as the parent prevents the child from weighing the arguments against the faith or experiencing the potential spiritual joys of some other faith. In this sense I would say that every parent and every school and every church is a censor of the first order.

Would you agree? If not, why not? If so, is such censorship a problem? If it is a problem, what should we do about it?

Anthony Guerrero: You argue in one of your comments that “the degree in which Plato proposes censorship is disgusting, and would have the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves.” I agree. Plato’s Republic is not in any sense a liberal democracy. The Republic might well be a valuable exercise in philosophy, but as a blueprint for an actual society it can only be read as a dystopia.

My question concerns the nation we have today. Please think about the Constitution as it exists right now. Suppose that we do not change it a bit, and that we continue to abide by it faithfully. That is, we continue to have a First Amendment, a Fourth Amendment, etc., and our government actually does respect the rights guaranteed by them, and we continue to elect our representatives and senators and presidents as we do today, and so on. Is it possible that under those conditions the United States might turn into a dystopia? Explain.

Gregg Porter: In one of your comments you compared “Socrates’ idea of the ideal state” to what sounds very much like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: “Once the process of extra-uterine fetal development is perfected, society might indeed be able to raise legions of anonymously-parented children for its military, workforce, and general needs. All that without having to be pestered with troublesome emotional bonding….”

Sure. It’s easy enough to name some of the things we don’t want to use biotechnology for. It’s equally easy to name some of the things we do want to use it for (say, to cure cancer). What’s not so easy is to develop a set of bioethical guidelines to help us distinguish good from bad uses of biotechnology more generally. Not so easy — but that’s exactly what I want you to do for the final. Enjoy.

Lacie Paulson: You’ve written that “Socrates’s idea is anti-utopian,” in no small part because “[t]he women have no choice in who they marry.” Of course, marriage practices vary considerably from culture to culture, and to see how that might matter to our understanding of utopia, here’s what I want you to do. First, familiarize yourself with the myth of Shangri-La, one of the West’s most popular images of utopia. (Wikipedia describes Shangri-La as “a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains” and as “synonymous with any earthly paradise but particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia — a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world”).

Next, look into the actual marriage and family structure of the real Himalayan kingdom of Tibet, starting here. Describe Tibetan polyandry to the class in some detail, then address the question of whether such marriage practices are intrinsically inimical to human happiness, and then compare and contrast Tibet to The Republic.

Rob Warden: My question for you is easy to ask but (I hope) not so easy to answer. Do you think transhumanism would lead inevitably to dystopia? Why or why not?

Sheth LaRue: You note in one of your comments that “eugenicism is still occurring today, maybe not as blatantly as it once was, but still occurring nonetheless. A quick search will find a number of dating websites for ‘perfect’ genes - although now it’s more about brains than brawn. There are even sites where you are judged before you can join…. Was Socrates all that insane in suggesting genetics be used as a starting point for choosing a mate?” At your suggestion I checked out BeautifulPeople.com and was suitably appalled — and jealous. But why are we appalled with this sort of thing? Is there really anything wrong — ethically, morally, religiously — with people systematically seeking out what they consider the most attractive mate possible? Isn’t BeautifulPeople.com right when it says that “it may not be politically correct, but it’s honest”? Finally, would a ChristianBeautifulPeople.com be possible without being an oxymoron? Why or why not?

Beth Tantanella: After commenting on the utopian family structure proposed in The Republic, you note rather archly that Socrates “is just thinking about the good of the community” and ask, “What is wrong with that?” Well, what is wrong with that? More specifically, what’s the best way to balance the good of the individual against the good of the community? If you haven’t done so already, please read Ursula Le Guin’s utopian story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and come to class prepared to summarize it and explain its significance in the utopian tradition.

Ashley Pacheco: In one of your comments you insisted that for a utopia to be a utopia it must be utopian for “all society.” At least for us today that makes sense: true utopia cannot rest upon an exploitative social hierarchy. The society must be ideal for all its members. But what if a society were to achieve that ideal not by accommodating everyone but simply by getting rid of those it doesn’t want? What if Hitler had succeeded in making Germany into his planned judenfrei utopia — I mean, what if post-Holocaust Germany really were utopian, at least in its own eyes, but only because there were no Jews left there for it to oppress? Or what if Israel were to succeed in creating its ideal Jewish state by excluding all the Palestinians? Getting rid of the “others” with whom part of a society is in conflict obviously simplifies the task of achieving utopian perfection.

I trust we can see the problem with predicating utopia on ethnic cleansing. But isn’t that in a sense what Charlotte Perkins Gilman does in Herland — create a feminist utopia by getting rid of all the men? Sure, it’s not as if the Herlanders killed the men themselves, or even wanted to. The men are eliminated by other, fully acceptable means, but the result is the same: a society free to perfect itself because it no longer has to deal with a “troublesome” element.

How can Gilman be defended against the charge that she takes too easy a way out, creating her utopian society by means of what might be called “gender cleansing”? Read more!

American Studies. Here you go, folks: final exam questions after the jump. Remember, the exam is 3-4:50 p.m. Thursday, May 7. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Gregg Porter: In one of your comments you cited Mount Rushmore as a particularly obvious instance of the cultural construction of nature. After directing us to this clip of Superman II’s General Zod doing to the United States what the United States did to the Sioux, you reminded us of the Crazy Horse Memorial, which, in the words of Chief Henry Standing Bear, aims to remind “the white man…that the red man has great heroes, too.”

That got me to thinking about the 1990s controversy over the placement of a large Christian cross just outside of Auschwitz. Please read this excerpt from Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll. Then compare and contrast the cross at Auschwitz to the sculptures on Mount Rushmore as examples of the geographical inscription of cultural hegemony.

Matt Felton: In one of your posts you lamented that kids today seem “disconnected from nature.” But why is that disconnection a problem, exactly? Given that most forms of outdoor recreation cause at least some harm to nature, isn’t it better if people just connect with nature via the Discovery Channel?

Erin Throckmorton: You’ve written that “consumers will never be able to be green completely.” Sure, not completely green — but there are plenty of people who believe consumers should at least try to be more green. Please read up a bit on consumerism, anti-consumerism, green consumerism, and Green America and report back to us on the current prospects of saving the planet by harnessing the powers of the marketplace.

Dorothy Medina: In one of your comments you described the beauty of the “pristine, rugged mountain country” surrounding the San Luis Valley. You wrote also of the local shepherds who graze their flocks here every summer. Please draw on your own experience and compare and contrast local sheepherding today to that described 150 years ago by John Muir in My First Summer in the Sierra. Pay particular attention to Muir’s description of the shepherd Billy — does that description strike you as accurate and fair?

Jacob McClure: You’ve indicated that you think “[c]onservatism, in its true meaning, would seem to be the most congenial to environmentalism.” Please read up on the political philosophies of conservatism and green conservatism, then check out Republicans for Environmental Protection, and then come to the final prepared to discuss the prospects for a conservative environmental politics in America. Why do you think environmentalism has for so long been seen almost exclusively as a “liberal” concern? Is there something intrinsic to American conservatism or the Republican Party that prevents them from going green? Read more!

American Lit II: As promised, here are your final exam questions. Remember, the exam is 1-2:50 p.m. Tuesday, May 5. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about the questions.

Kenneth Babcock: You have observed that “[o]ne of the main differences between The Age of Innocence and O Pioneers! is the difference in how the authors give women power. In O Pioneers!, Cather gives Alexandra power by making her a strong and smart individual…. [I]n The Age of Innocence, Wharton’s female character is powerful by deceit. May is subtle and very smart about getting the things that she wants. She plays Newland Archer for a fool. She even has May sarcastically tell Newland, “It did go off beautifully, didn’t it?”

Please continue what you’ve started here by comparing and contrasting May Archer and Alexandra Bergson in more detail, paying particular attention to how they do or do not exercise power. Then do the same for May Archer and Ellen Olenska. Finally, let us know what, if anything, you conclude from these comparisons.

Melissa Slemp: After pointing out that O Pioneers! and The Age of Innocence are both “stories of families who are struggling” and that both “involve romance on some level,” you claim that “The Age of Innocence is a better novel simply because it captures the conflict between men and women. It really shows the games that we play with one another and the lengths we will go to to find and receive love.”

I think you’re right that O Pioneers! does not turn on a “conflict between men and women.” But what is the central conflict driving Cather’s novel? And why is the conflict between men and women so special that you would cite it as the key to the superiority of The Age of Innocence?

Night Hawk: In one of your comments you wrote that you “like The Age of Innocence because it relates a little more to what I have seen in lives of people today. Many people today put on acts to please other people even though it isn’t really who they are. In O Pioneers! people are struggling to get what they want and to improve their lives, which is also what people do these days, but I haven’t noticed it as much as people putting on acts to please other people.”

Your comment got me thinking about the idea of authenticity. Consider Henry James’s characters Frederick Winterbourne (who seems to be one of those who “put on acts to please other people even though it isn’t really who they are”) and Daisy Miller, who is always just herself. It seems to me that Daisy Miller, at least in this one respect, is like Alexandra Bergson. Then there’s Alice Walker’s character Dee Johnson, aka Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo, from “Everyday Use,” who seems about as fake as they come. And then there’s the (authentic) Gracie Mae Still and the (inauthentic) Traynor or “1955.”

Given the frequency of this type of character pairing — authentic vs. inauthentic — in American literature, and given the current popularity of expressions like “Keep it real,” I’m thinking maybe Americans are obsessed with authenticity. But is authenticity even possible in America today? Is anyone truly authentic any more? What is authenticity, anyway?

Jerry Montoya: You wrote that “[o]verall Wharton's novel is not as great as O Pioneers!” Fair enough. You go on to note that Newland Archer and Alexandra Bergson “both seem to be thrust into a life that they didn't choose for themselves.” But hey, aren’t we all? You add, “the main characters share a longing they have to be more intimate with the people they truly love.” Again, don’t we all?

It’s the first of these two ideas — the idea that we find ourselves thrown into circumstances we didn’t choose — that I want you to explore in your answer. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger uses the term thrownness to describe something like what you’re talking about. Read up a bit on “thrownness,” explain the concept to the class, and then let us know how you think it might help us understand some of the more memorable characters we’ve encountered this semester.

Lifeguard: You’ve written that Roxana of Pudd’nhead Wilson “is truly an interesting character. She seems so real…. I really felt for her. I [was] always wondering what and how she will come back into each setting.” I think you’re onto something important here — namely, the way our personal investment in Roxana carries us through the story. We don’t care all that much whether Tom is brought to justice for his crimes. We don’t much care what becomes of the Italians or whether the townspeople ever understand the true intelligence ov Dave Wilson. We care about what happens to Roxana. Without her, Pudd’nhead Wilson is just a clever satire. Whatever power the novel has is almost all due to her.

Would you agree? If so, do you think the novel is weakened by the fact that the ending has so little to do with Roxana? Explain.

Jonathan Andujar: I liked your observation that, despite their many differences, Beyonce and Roxanna have at least one thing in common, namely the way they both wind up “commanding the attention of the white men in the audience.” There is, of course, a long and tortured history of, shall we say, problematic relations between white men and black women. What is suggested about that history and those relations by some of the other works we’ve read this semester?

Erin Throckmorton: In one comment you wrote that Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Roxana is “the best part of the book. Very strong and you have to admire her indeed!” I would say much the same about Aunt Rachel in “A True Story.” Please compare and contrast these two memorable characters, and let us know what, if anything, you conclude from these comparisons.

Diedre Mark: In a comment about Allen Ginsberg’s “A Supermarket in California,” you wrote that “Ginsberg is asking America where she is going and asking Whitman what he thinks of it all.” Okay, but why Whitman? What’s the significance of the fact that Ginsberg appeals to Walt Whitman in this poem rather than, say, Henry David Thoreau or Benjamin Franklin?

James Williams: In your essay on James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” you noted one critic’s claim that the story is a “cautionary tale about the dangers of ‘hip culture’ and addiction.” In response you compare Sonny’s heroin addiction to “a Cuban refugee making a raft out of empty soda cans and attempting to make it to Florida.” I understood you to be saying not that using heroin is good, but that Sonny’s heroin use tells us something good about him. It signifies the fierceness of his desire for something better than the ghetto offers him. As you put it, “It’s about paying whatever price is necessary to create light in a dark place.”

Yes: to create light in a dark place. Baldwin of course uses light and dark metaphorically throughout the story, right on up to the final paragraph, where we read that the nightclub patrons sit “[i]n the dark,” that Sonny sits “in the indigo light” of the stage, and that the drink the narrator has bought for his brother “glowed and shook above [Sonny’s] head.” What do you suppose Baldwin is trying to accomplish with this light/dark imagery? Read more!

American Studies. Dave Foreman is not your stereotypical treehugger. Wikipedia introduces him as follows:

The son of a US Air Force career officer, as a young man Foreman supported the Vietnam War. He received the highest honor of the Boy Scouts of America, the rank of Eagle Scout. Foreman first became involved in political activism as a college student, supporting Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964 and founding the New Mexico branch of the conservative youth organization Young Americans for Freedom. After graduating from college in 1968, and attending the Officers Candidate School of the US Marine Corps, Foreman’s radicalism began to take shape.

Nowadays environmentalism is so completely associated with the left that it surprises us to learn of Foreman’s conservative roots. But are environmentalism and conservatism really at odds? Which political philosophy — liberalism, conservatism, socialism, libertarianism, anarchism — seems most congenial to environmentalism? While we’re at it, which religion seems most congenial to environmentalism? Read more!

Senior Seminar. The concluding chapter of We gives us a chilling description of the interrogation of I-330 and other suspected members of the Mephi. Here’s the key passage:

In the evening of that day I sat at one table with Him, with the Benefactor (for the first time) in the famous Gas Room. They brought in that woman. In my presence she was supposed to give her testimony. This woman stubbornly said nothing and was smiling. I noticed that she had sharp and very white teeth and that this was beautiful.

Then they led her under the Bell Jar. Her face became very white and since her eyes were dark and big, this was very beautiful. When they started to pump air out from under the Bell Jar, she threw back her head, half-closed her eyes, and squeezed her lips — this reminded me of something. She was looking at me, strongly gripping the armrests of the chair and looking, until her eyes closed completely. Then they dragged her out, quickly brought her back to her senses with the help of electrodes, and then put her back under the Bell Jar. They repeated this three times and she still didn’t say a word. Others, who had been brought in together with this woman, turned out to be more honorable: many of them started to talk after the first time.

This description is not particularly graphic. What makes it so powerful? I would argue that its horror is deepened by the matter-of-fact tone in which it is described, which is to say, by the failure of the recently lobotomized narrator to recognize it for the torture that it is and to be revolted by it.

OK. You all know what an America-hating knee-jerk liberal I am, and you probably recognize the photo above as one taken at Abu Ghraib prison, so you can probably guess where I’m going with this. What horrifies and disgusts me most about my own country’s barbaric treatment of “enemy combatants” is not so much that it happened in the first place. It’s the ongoing strenuous refusal of so many influential Americans to acknowledge torture as torture — and beyond that the lack of outrage among Americans generally.

That waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in fact constitute torture has been acknowledged by everyone from the International Red Cross to Republican Senator John McCain (see here), yet any number of influential talking heads still refuse to acknowledge that truth (see here). But so far only a few low-ranking soldiers (like Charles Graner and Lynddie England) have been prosecuted for torture. The high-ranking officials who authorized torture in the first place are still at large. One of the most important of these people, John Yoo, is now a law professor. Another, Jay Bybee, is a federal judge. As for Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — I’m not holding my breath. As Bob Dylan once reminded us, “All the criminals in their coats and their ties / are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.”

Here let me quote the key concept from the work of David and Nanelle Barash, who define dystopia as the denial of a biologically-based human nature:

In justifying this nightmare society [of 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien...is wrong.

Well, is there “something called human nature” which is intrinsically outraged by what we do? Or has that something been hammered out of us? Is O’Brien right or wrong?

If we think of “the soul” in We as a kind of shorthand for all that makes us uniquely human — imagination, love — then is Zamyatin suggesting in the passage above that part of being human is the ability to recognize and be revolted by torture? If so, should we say that America has lost its soul?

I’ll give you my answer to this question after you’ve all replied.

P.S. For a recent essay likening torture at Guantanamo Bay to that in Nineteen Eighty Four, take a look at Scott Horton’s “Revealing the Secrets in Room 101.” Read more!

Senior Seminar. I’d like for you to keep Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) in mind as we continue our screening and analysis of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Lang’s film is not an adaptation of Zamyatin’s novel, yet it seems to me to give visual expression to many of the novel’s dystopian ideas. Would you agree? If so, can you give examples?

In the illustration above, just for fun, I’ve juxtaposed Lang’s New Tower of Babel shot with a still depicting Blade Runner’s dystopian, film-noir vision of Los Angeles in the year 2019. Read more!

American Studies. Semester’s end is approaching fast, and it’s time to start thinking about your final paper/project. Whether presented as paper or project (e.g., PowerPoint presentation or poster display), your work should analyze one or more of the texts or authors we’ve read in class in a way that helps readers better understand both the text itself and its relation to environmentalism.

You might consider working with one or two of your classmates to examine how various authors and texts approach a single cultural-environmental theme, such as the discursive construction of nature, the gender politics of environmentalism, or the ethics of direct action.

If you do work with a group you might consider a division of intellectual labor, with one person synopsizing and situating the text, another summarizing its critical responses, and a third advancing a new argument about it.

What I’d like you to do in your replies to this post is to get started thinking about possible topics by going back over the syllabus and combining one critical essay and one primary text with one “real world” environmental issue, and then indicate briefly why the resulting combination might lead to a good paper/project.

Here’s an example of what I have in mind:

Critical essay: “The Social Siege of Nature”

Primary text: Ecotopia.

Real-world issue: Clear-cutting on La Sierra above San Luis.

More detailed guidelines for the paper/project are available here. Read more!

Comm Arts II: In class today we began analyzing the film Project X (1987). The basic idea here is to remember that films are usually very carefully constructed. Nothing is left to chance. Whatever appears in any given frame is there for a reason, and part of film analysis involves nothing more than observing what is there, and then asking and attempting to answer the question, Why it is there? (Or perhaps better, What is the effect on the viewer of it being there?)

Let’s put our collective minds to work on the image above, which depicts the researcher Teri (played by Helen Hunt) and her subject Virgil (played by Willie). What’s there? Why do you suppose the director put it there? (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Of course, there’s much more to analyzing film than scrutinizing still frames. But if we each contribute one or two key observations about the frame we can get a little practice and at least get started on our analysis.

For more about the film and the military research that inspired it, review pages 25-29 in Animal Liberation. For guidelines for Paper #4, click here. Read more!

American Lit II: In class today I argued that Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” sermon are jeremiads that can be understood as part of a literary-religious-cultural tradition extending back to ancient Israelite prophets like Hosea, Isaiah, and the Rev. Wright’s namesake, Jeremiah. The jeremiad, in the words of Mike Abrams, “attributed the calamities of Israel to its abandonment of the covenant with Jehovah and return to pagan idolatry” and “denounced with lurid and gloomy eloquence its religious and moral iniquities.” And isn’t that more or less what Ginsberg and Wright are doing — luridly denouncing their nation for its iniquities?

Here’s a sample of some biblical prophecy that doesn’t seem all that different from “Howl.” It’s from the Book of Hosea (4:11-14, from a Christian translation titled The Message):

Wine and whiskey leave my people in a stupor....

Drunk on sex, they can’t find their way home.*

They’ve replaced their God with their genitals....

Before you know it, your daughters are whores and the wives of your sons are sleeping around.

But I’m not going after your whoring daughters or the adulterous wives of your sons.

It’s the men who pick up the whores that I’m after, the men who worship at the holy whorehouses — a stupid people, ruined by whores!

Is Allen Ginsberg a 20th-century prophet? Is “Howl” a jeremiad?

*Bonus points if you recognized this line as similar in sentiment and effect to Steve Winwood’s line, “I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home,” from the song, “Can’t Find My Way Home.” Maybe Winwood is also a prophet. You can listen to him and Eric Clapton performing a version of this song here. And for a YouTube video of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” which I believe shares some of the themes of “Howl,” click here. Read more!

American Studies. There are many ways to approach The Monkey Wrench Gang. You might treat it as a classic of environmental literature (and compare it to Ecotopia). You might treat it as a Western (and compare it to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), as a post-Vietnam novel (and compare it to Rambo or the novel First Blood), as a precursor of, and how-to manual for, the Earth First! movement, and so on.

Then again, you could focus solely on a single character — say, Hayduke, who could be compared to Will Weston, Butch Cassidy, John Rambo, and Dave Foreman respectively. Or you could focus on the use of a single element — such as theme or setting — in one or more of these works. Or you could do a men’s studies project, tossing Hayduke, Weston, and John Muir into the hopper and analyzing them as exemplars of different styles of masculinity.

The sky’s the limit. The intellectual world is all before you, where to choose.

The illustration above juxtaposes two iconic images: Hayduke and Rambo. In what ways are these two essentially the same character? Read more!

American Lit II: Think for a moment about what’s been happening during the years marked out by the composition of “Circumstance” (1860), “A White Heron” (1886), “South of the Slot” (1909), and “The Bloody Sire” (1941). Think of Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Think of the record-breaking, industrial-scale lethality of the Civil War. Think of the decline (though not the disappearance) of romanticism and the rise of literary realism and naturalism, and then of modernism, with its fixation on human alienation from nature and the “natural” self. Think of the German philosopher Nietzche’s pronouncement that God is dead. Think of the devastating Belgian “rape of the Congo” and of World War I, the “war to end all wars” that made the American Civil War look like a game of checkers.

In this time period science not only challenged traditional understandings of religion, it also made it possible for nature to bear completely new meanings and be put to completely new literary and ideological uses. History, meanwhile, in its stubborn, plodding way, continued to pose new and increasingly vexatious questions about human nature and human potential. And through it all, writers like Spofford, Bierce, Jewett, London, and Jeffers continued to do their writerly duty and try to make art out of it all, and maybe even help us readers make sense of it all.

In “Circumstance” and “A White Heron,” Harriet Spofford and Sarah Orne Jewett rewrite the biblical story of the Fall, each in their own way and each toward radically different ends. Sylvia, the poor little country child in “A White Heron,” resists the temptation of the satanic hunter and does not seem to fall at all, though the story ends with the brooding sense that her innocence and her oneness with nature cannot last forever — a sad thought, beautifully expressed in Jewett’s marvelous prose, but hardly earth-shattering news. In Spofford’s story, the man with the gun is not the Satan but Adam. He seems to be a “type” or forerunner of the Christ who will later save all humanity, just as in the story he saves his wife.

Different as these two stories are, they both understand the violence that an expanding nation inevitably does to nature. They are both in some way informed by the romantic conception of nature as a site of redemption and a source of value. And both stories hint at the conflict that results when a nation physically destroys the very thing — wild nature — from which it draws so much symbolic value. And, finally, they both attempt to do so while remaining within a traditional Christian imaginative framework, which is not the same thing as remaining “Christian” in a doctrinal sense.

Jack London and Robinson Jeffers have said goodbye to all that. Like Jewett, London continues to use nature — the “wild” nature of Buck in Call of the Wild and of Big Bill Totts in “South of the Slot” — to represent an essential self. By this time, however, that self can be reimagined in Darwinian terms as the gift of our evolutionary history, even as it remains a self from which we are alienated by civilized life. With London, as opposed to Spofford and Jewett, that alienation is no longer to be understood in the Christian framework as a “fall” from grace, reversible by the mysteriously transformative powers of the blood of the lamb. Now it’s merely a historical and sociological fact of modern life: civilization is alienating. If you don’t like being alienated, then do like Buck and Big Bill Totts and ditch civilization.

For Jeffers, the Darwinian understanding of nature likewise provides not only a scientific explanation of the origin of species but also a philosophical source and literary symbol of ultimate value. In “The Bloody Sire” Jeffers does not see the outbreak of World War II as a sign of fallen humanity’s sinfulness and depravity (much less as a sign of the approaching End Times). For Jeffers, war is a reminder that humankind remains immersed not in sin but in nature. We are not alienated from “nature” at all, says Jeffers. We remain as completely a part of it as always. We are as much bound up as ever in the violent processes of Darwinian natural selection that produced us as a species in the first place.

At first glance, Jeffers and Spofford would seem to be as different as Johnny Rotten and Jars of Clay. Then again, maybe not. I think it’s possible to read “Circumstance” as the story of a young woman who only thinks she is part of the grand unfolding of some divine plan — of a cosmic plan that conveniently enough seems to center upon her own nation and her own family and her own self. She might think this, but her “circumstances” remind us all too vividly of what she really is: just part of the food chain, a bit of fresh meat that can fuel the metabolism of a big cat, just another animal, albeit an animal that has evolved enough self-awareness to be able to regret the fact that it is about to die. In biological terms, our heroine is reminded that perhaps she is just a bit player in the ongoing and utterly aimless and amoral drama of the survival of the fittest. In political terms, she is reminded that she is merely a cog in a vast (and utterly immoral) imperial machine that lets neither cougars nor Indians stand in its way.

In other words, maybe “Circumstance” is as bleakly Darwinian as “The Bloody Sire.” If we pay attention once again to the story’s religious symbolism and see the young pioneers as Adam and Eve, we can ask ourselves, Who is the little “babe” the man carries in his arms? We all know the answer: “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain.” In the Book of Genesis, it is Adam and Eve, those gentle vegetarians, who have “all the world before them” as they leave Eden and initiate the Bible’s mythic human history.

In Spofford’s Americanized revision of that story, it is not just Adam and Eve, but Adam and Eve and Cain, the first murderer, baptized in the violence of an already-fallen world, who have all the New World before them, and who initiate a mythic American history. The baby symbolizes the American future, and because the baby is Cain, it looks like that future is going to be murder. And the murderers are not mountain lions and Indians (who of course are engaged not in murder but in self-preservation and homeland security, respectively). The murderers, the American pioneers, are the progeny not of Seth but of Cain.

At the end of Spofford’s story the mountain lion is dead, but the violent American future symbolized by the baby survives, the world all before it, where to choose. I’m not suggesting Spofford foresaw the specifics of that future. Writing in 1860, she might not have foreseen the final Native American body count, nor the millions of that child’s descendants would kill in the Philippines and Central America and Vietnam and Cambodia and Iraq, but somewhere in the back of her mind, lurking behind the frontier mythology, she seems to have divined the truth of her nation’s general modus operandi.

This is not to say Spofford was not sincerely religious. Far from it. The archetypal pattern is right there in her Bible: after Adam and Eve comes Cain, who unwittingly arouses God’s ire by killing his own brother, and a millennium or so after Cain comes Joshua, who quite knowingly earns God’s praise by slaughtering the Canaanites — by ethnically cleansing the Promised Land to receive God’s Own Nation. Like most other Americans, on some deep level Spofford understood the pattern inherent in both her religion and her national experience, and (perhaps on an even more deeply repressed level) she understood the terrible implications of that pattern and wrote them into the fabric of her story. In doing so she produced something that expressed far more truth than she consciously intended. Art can be like that.

Now let’s contrast Spofford to Jeffers. We’ve already seen how they might be read as similarly bleak in their casual acceptance of violence. But how, in terms of theme and worldview, do they differ? In “Circumstance,” the evil aspect of nature is represented by the mountain lion and the evil aspect of humankind by Native Americans. Both cougars and Indians, in turn, are seen as manifestations of Satan: the cougar is repeatedly called an “Indian Devil,” and the Indian raiding party leaves behind it the “work of their accomplished hatred and one subtle footprint in the snow.” (For nineteenth-century American readers familiar with Milton’s Paradise Lost, both the hatred and the subtlety would conjure up an image of Satan.)

By attributing both natural violence and human violence to the devil, Spofford places both natural history and human history on an equal plane and folds them both into the cosmic history of Christianity. Jeffers, by contrast, having traded the Christian worldview for a Darwinian one, does not put them on the same plane. For him, human history is just a subset of natural history. He thus folds human history (wars and the like) into natural history (ongoing evolution-by-natural-selection) and leaves it at that. Beyond nature, there is nothing. But that’s okay, Jeffers seems to say, because nature itself is a wonderful source of values.

After all, it created us. Didn’t it? Read more!

Senior Seminar. At the same time that Herland is busily defamiliarizing sexism and the patriarchy it is also steadily developing the characters of its three male traveler-protagonists. You don’t always see a lot of character development in the utopian genre. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Jeff Margrave and Vandyck Jennings are fully developed or “round” characters, but Herland certainly does more with them than Utopia does with Raphael Hythloday or Looking Backward with Julian West.

Is there something intrinsic to the feminist dystopia that demands, or at least encourages, greater character development? More generally, does Herland suggest any ways in which a feminist utopia’s focus on gender revises the very form of the utopia? Or does the focus on gender never get beyond mere content? Read more!

American Studies. By now you should be well into that classic of environmental literature, John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra. Reading this book again after many years makes me think that the summer of 1869 was a key moment in the history of human consciousness, an altogether new alignment of the stars of perception and sensibility.

There’s John Muir — with a mind trained in both botany and Christian creationism, and a literary taste built by Emerson and Wordsworth on a foundation of the Psalms and the Book of Job — set loose in an unspoiled Yosemite at precisely the moment when he could see the possibility of its spoiling, under this precise combination of influences creating a great book and an environmentalist sensibility, all while sitting on the ground, his back against some log as he wrote in his journal.

At the same time, he was accumulating evidence in support of a theory about Yosemite Valley’s creation that would eventually prevail over the competing theories of California State Geologist Josiah Dwight Whitney. He also seems to have spent his entire three months in the mountains on a more or less uninterrupted natural high.

It’s worth spending a moment to admire the suppleness of Muir’s prose. As a representative sample, consider this bit about one of the Sierra Nevada’s monstrously large ants (whose painful bite he has just finished describing):

This wonderful electric species is about three fourths of an inch long. Bears are fond of them, and tear and gnaw their home-logs to pieces, and roughly devour the eggs, larvae, parent ants, and the rotten or sound wood of the cells, all in one spicy acid hash. The Digger Indians are also fond of the larvae and even of the perfect ants, so I have been told by old mountaineers. They bite off and reject the head, and eat the tickly acid body with keen relish. Thus are the poor biters bitten, like every other biter, big or little, in the world’s great family. (46)

Note first the frequent, metrical use of consonance, assonance, internal rhyme, and other techniques more commonly associated with poetry than prose (“spicy acid hash,” “so I’ve been been told by old mountaineers”). Note also how the description moves steadily outward, from the ants themselves, to their place in the natural world (as food for bears), to their place in the human world (as food for Indians), to their place in the cosmos (“the world’s great family”).

Good stuff. But what can My First Summer tell us about environmentalism as culture? Can you find places where the cultural-environmental theory we’ve been reading can help us appreciate the contemporary significance of Muir’s writing? You might want to look particularly at his description of the Merced River headwaters and the lily (16-17), of the poisoning of the sheep (22-23), of shepherds generally (23-25), of the bear hunter David Brown (27-31), and of Native Americans (e.g., 54-55 and 58-59). Read more!

American Lit II: I would argue that Cheyenne Autumn’s final paragraph draws on a conceit that has been quietly building throughout the story: that Little Wolf is a Cheyenne Moses, leading his people out of bondage to their Promised Land. Consider this passage from the Book of Deuteronomy, in which Moses, having led the Israelites out of Egypt, is permitted to look across the Jordan River and see the Promised Land — but not to enter it:

Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho. There the Lord showed him the whole land...all the land of Judah as far as the western sea, the Negev and the whole region from the Valley of Jericho, the City of Palms, as far as Zoar. Then the Lord said to him, “This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you will not cross over into it.” And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in Moab.... The Israelites grieved for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days, until the time of weeping and mourning was over. Now Joshua son of Nun was filled with the spirit of wisdom because Moses had laid his hands on him. So the Israelites listened to him and did what the Lord had commanded Moses. Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, who did all those miraculous signs and wonders the Lord sent him to do in Egypt — to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole land. For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel. (Deuteronomy 34:1-12, NIV)

Compare the above to the closing words of Cheyenne Autumn:

For twenty-five years Little Wolf lived so, the humblest of a reservation people. When he died in 1904, there were some who still remembered and still loved him. They propped his body up tall on a hill and piled stones around him, drawing them up by travois [a two-poled vehicle for dragging heavy loads] until he was covered in a great heap. There Little Wolf stood on a high place, his face turned to look over the homes of his followers and beyond them, down the Rosebud that flowed northward to the Yellowstone. (272)

Sandoz’s use of this Promised Land conceit strikes me as pointedly ironic, given that it was also used by American imperialism to justify the Cheyenne’s dispossession. She’s basically casting the Cheyenne as the Israelites and the Americans as the Egyptians.

Anyway, now that we’re done with Cheyenne Autumn, what are your thoughts? I’m especially interested in what you think about the book as “witness literature” and as a counterpoint to O Pioneers! Does Cheyenne Autumn succeed in fulfilling the moral obligation that we never forget what happened to the Cheyenne people? Does it help correct Cather’s romanticized and “white”-washed version of the frontier? Or what? Discuss. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Despite Edward Bellamy’s bland prose, Looking Backward was a runaway bestseller. (In fact it was the third-best-selling book in 19th-century America. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of course, was number one.) And despite its high kumbaya index it was taken quite seriously and prompted the birth of “Bellamy Clubs” devoted to promoting its brand of socialism.

While it can be argued that Bellamy fundamentally misunderstood capitalism, a few of the economic ideas in Looking Backward have taken root (in the form, for example, of consumer cooperatives like REI and warehouse stores like Costco). But most economists today would probably just laugh at Bellamy’s insistence on the necessity of central government economic planning:

In your day the production and distribution of commodities being without concert or organization, there was no means of knowing just what demand there was for any class of products, or what was the rate of supply. Therefore, any enterprise by a private capitalist was always a doubtful experiment. The projector having no general view of the field of industry and consumption, such as our government has, could never be sure either what the people wanted, or what arrangements other capitalists were making to supply them. (140)

Actually, a free-enterprise system “without concert or organization” does have a “means of knowing” about supply and demand. Marketing departments do a great job of figuring out “what the people want,” and advertising actually creates wants where none existed before. And the profit motive (as Marx was fully aware) provides a tremendous incentive for capitalists to diligently seek out and exploit weaknesses in the existing production and distribution of goods. (There are no comparable incentives for government planners.) Less efficient businesses get destroyed by more efficient ones, leading to the continuous improvement of the economic system overall.

Yes, argue the free-marketeers, this system is unstable and in many ways wasteful, but on balance the gains in efficiency far outweigh the losses of what is sometimes called capitalism’s “creative destruction” (which refers to the way old practices are continually destroyed as new ones are continually created — or, as Marx put it, the way “all that is solid melts into air”).

Part of what Bellamy seems not to understand is the general idea of spontaneous order, in which highly organized systems emerge on their own without any actual agent doing the organization — systems whose organization is in fact far beyond the planning capabilities of any agent. (Think of the evolution of ecosystems — who could possibly design one from scratch?) As the philosopher Friedrich Hayek pointed out, capitalism is such a system and thus works best when left to operate on its own. (Needless to say, Hayek is one of the key figures in modern conservativism.)

Here’s another passage I want to call to your attention but can’t think of any clever paragraph transition for:

Now nothing about your age is, at first sight, more astounding to a man of modern times than the fact that men engaged in the same industry, instead of fraternizing as comrades and co-laborers to a common end, should have regarded each other as rivals and enemies to be throttled and overthrown…. Your contemporaries, with their mutual throat-cutting, knew very well what they were at. The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, he at the same time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental. It was just as feasible and as common to increase one’s private hoard by practices injurious to the general welfare. One’s worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan of making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the article he produced was what each particular producer desired. It was for his interest that no more of it should be produced than he himself could produce. To secure this consummation as far as circumstances permitted, by killing off and discouraging those engaged in his line of industry, was his constant effort. When he had killed off all he could, his policy was to combine with those he could not kill, and convert their mutual warfare into a warfare upon the public at large by cornering the market, as I believe you used to call it, and putting up prices to the highest point people would stand before going without the goods. The day dream of the nineteenth century producer was to gain absolute control of the supply of some necessity of life, so that he might keep the public at the verge of starvation, and always command famine prices for what he supplied. (140-141)

The modern free-market economist would agree with Bellamy that, when private greed leads to greater “aggregate wealth,” such a result is “merely incidental.” But so what? The question is not whether capitalism’s contribution to the aggregate wealth is intentional or incidental, but whether it is greater than socialism’s contribution. On this point, at least, history has not been kind to Bellamy.

On the other hand, Bellamy’s criticism of monopolies was spot-on in the 1880s and still rings true today. We still have antitrust laws designed to prevent the creation of monopolies. And we still generally insist that certain “necessit[ies] of life,” such as drinking water, be produced and distributed in common rather than by private enterprise.

Of the many responses (both pro and con) to Looking Backard, perhaps the best, at least from a purely literary perspective, was News from Nowhere by British socialist William Morris.

Edward Bellamy had a cousin named Francis Bellamy, who was a Christian socialist and who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. Now for your questions: Which economic system is most consistent with Christian values? Are things like economic efficiency and aggregate wealth creation relevant in answering such a question? Read more!

Comm Arts II: Over at the Tyson Foods website is a page titled “Our Core Values.” Two of the listed values are religious:

We strive to be a faith-friendly company.

We strive to honor God and be respectful of each other, our customers, and other stakeholders.

Another of the listed values is more worldly:

We strive to earn consistent and satisfactory profits for our
shareholders.

Given that Tyson is located in Arkansas, I’m guessing the “faith” they’re talking about is Christianity and the “God” they strive to honor is Jesus.

But wait a minute. Didn’t Jesus tell people not to lay up for treasures for themselves on earth, because where their treasure is, there will their heart be also? And don’t huge corporations like Tyson Foods exist to generate profits, that is, to “lay up treasures on earth”? Is Tyson lying about its core values? Or has it hit upon some clever theology that allows it to honor Jesus by repudiating the words of Jesus? Read more!

American Studies. In “Wet, Dark, and Low: Eco-Man Evolves from Eco-Woman,” Andrew Ross observes that, at the same time feminism was calling masculinity into question, environmentalism was offering men new ways of being masculine. Perhaps more accurately, environmentalism was offering men new rationales for continuing to indulge the same old fantasies and enjoy the same old privileges of patriarchy:

Among the so-called new social movements, the ecology movement has been exceptional in ceding a leading role, in theory and in practical activism, to heterosexual white men. It has been one of the few spaces in post-New Left politics where such men have felt that they can breath freely and easily, while indulging in the wilderness cults traditionally associated with the making of heroic white male identities: the frontiersman, the cowboy, the Romantic poet, the explorer, the engineer, the colonizer, the anthropologist, the pioneer settler, and so on. (220)

Environmentalism might prompt men to question their impact on the environment and their implication in an environmentally destructive economic system, but it didn’t require them to think very deeply about their gender. Keep this in mind later in the semester as we read works by John Muir, Edward Abbey, and Dave Foreman.

Toward the end of his essay Ross argues that the “wild man” phenomenon was closely tied to the yuppie generation and was giving way to the cyborgism of the young:

For tourists of the soul like the Wild Man and the goddess worshipper, the forest is a place of white flight, a traditional location for regrouping and for recharging spiritual batteries with the exotica of Amerindian and ancient European myths. For their sons and daughters, the all-night sweatfests of the rave were semi-outlawed events, throwing up retrofitted memories of their parents’ pastoral hippie gatherings, once the creative social crucible for new forms of sexual and familial behavior. (235)

Is Ross basically right? Are we now seeing the replacement of the organic hippie ideal with an increasingly technological youth culture?

Update: Per popular request, I’ll set aside 30 minutes or so before the exam Thursday so we can finish the discussion of environmentalism, gender, and social class in WALL-E. There’ll still be plenty of time to finish the exam. Let’s meet again in the Haynie Center — if you need desks for writing your exams we can use the computer tables. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Among many other things, The Communist Manifesto portrays capitalism as dystopian. Consider, for example, this description — not at all inaccurate for the time — of how

the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him…. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois State; they are hourly and daily enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is. (61-62)

Then there’s the effect of capitalism on the proletarian family, or rather

the practical absence of the family among the proletarians…. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. (71-72)

This point is driven home in our edition by the footnote about an 1833 law permitting children aged 9-13 to be worked 48 hours per week and those 13-18 to be worked 69 hours per week.

Here are some questions: Are workers today “enslaved to the machine”? If so, how? In what ways are families and education nowadays degraded by capitalism? More generally, what are some of the ways capitalism today provokes the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,” so that “[a]ll that is solid melts into air, [and] all that is holy is profaned”?

Do you think that capitalism has found a way around what Karl Marx considered the inevitable result of capitalism’s “uncertainty and agitation,” namely, that “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life”? Is there any future for communism? Read more!

American Lit II: Mari Sandoz’s Cheyenne Autumn can be read and evaluated as an example of the “literature of witness,” as a work whose primary purpose is to bear witness to an epochal tragedy. The usual example of such an event is the Shoah or Jewish Holocaust, though there are many others, including Native American genocide.*

The basic idea is that something important happened here, something so important it behooves us never to forget. The event simply must be recorded — and, unavoidably, interpreted. In this conception, a work qualifies as witness literature if it is a particular author’s attempt to give permanent shape to their own conception of the event and its meaning.

The psychology of thus bearing witness is complex. Part of it is the sense that to forget the tragedy is somehow to compound it, and thus that one has a strong ethical obligation to ensure its remembrance. Not just anyone, of course, but certainly anyone who knows of the event and has felt its power, who has the first-hand experience or archival access necessary to relate it accurately, who has the literary skill to do it justice, and who is otherwise is in a good position to bear witness to it.

One can easily imagine Mari Sandoz feeling herself in such a position and thus more or less obligated to tell the story of the Northern Cheyenne.

Sandoz, of course, is an individual. What about nations? Does a nation like the United States — created in large part through conquest — have a moral duty to support the witness of its own atrocities? (Anyone looking for an essay topic might consider comparing and contrasting the American cultural treatment of Native American conquest to the German handling of the Holocaust.)

* Whether this nation’s treatment of Native Americans should be considered “genocide” is a controversial question. I believe it should; others disagree. Some, for example, claim the label “genocide” is inaccurate because the nation’s intent was not generally to kill Indians simply because they were Indians. Compare to the Nazis, who killed Jews for no other reason than that they were Jews. America’s killing of Indians, while certainly immoral, was incidental to other aims and thus cannot be considered true genocide. I think this conception is too narrow. I argue that the term “genocide” should apply to any unjustified state action pursued in the full knowledge that it will lead to the widespread death of a particular group, even if the killing is not the primary aim. Read more!

Comm Arts II: Allow me to get all academic for a moment and suggest that we think of the practices Peter Singer describes in chapters two and three of Animal Liberation as examples of what happens when animal treatment meets modernity. Modernity saw the rise of science and industrial capitalism, and thus provided the conditions for animal experimentation and factory farming.

But now we’re leaving modernity behind and entering postmodernity, which I’ll try to explain today in class. Right now all I want to say is that most of Singer’s argument can be seen as a reaction against some of the key values of modernity — most of that argument, but not all of it. He also criticizes Jewish and Muslim dietary laws, which are decidedly premodern, and genetic engineering, which is postmodern (152-157). I bring this up in part because maybe, as we leave modernity behind and our conditions of existence become more and more postmodern, we’ll need a new book that takes on the problems Singer only begins to ponder in Animal Liberation.

Anyway, what do you think about the genetic engineering of nonhuman animals? Is it ethical to use genetic engineering to create an entirely new species of animal? Should it be legal to patent such a creation? Read more!

American Lit II: Ambrose Bierce, aka “Bitter Bierce” and “The Wickedest Man in San Francisco,” was born in 1842 in Ohio, the son of poor farmers. When the Civil War began he enlisted in the Ninth Regiment of the Indiana Infantry, mapping out battlefields as a topographical engineer. He fought at Shiloh, rescued a wounded soldier in the Battle of Rich Mountain, and was wounded in the head during the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. In her headnote to the Ambrose Bierce selections in the Heath Anthology of American Literature, Cathy N. Davidson notes that the soldier Bierce rescued died later of his wounds, giving Bierce “his first taste of ambivalent heroism.”

In 1875 Bierce settled in San Francisco and began writing regularly for the San Francisco Examiner (one of the William Randolph Hearst papers). In both his journalism and his short stories he evinced the no-holds-barred social criticism that earned him the nickname “Bitter Bierce.” His cynicism and his economy of style are best expressed in the definitions that make up his satirical Devil’s Dictionary, which first appeared in 1906. Some samples:

Christian—One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.

Corporation—An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Pray—To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.

Vote—The instrument and symbol of a freeman’s power to make a fool of himself and a wreck of his country.

In 1913 Bierce went to Mexico, hoping to meet Pancho Villa and gain some insight into the Mexican Civil War. His last known letter is dated the day after Christmas in 1913; after that he was never heard from again. His only peer in American journalism was the equally cynical and even more brilliant H.L. Mencken (popularized as the character Hornbeck in the film Inherit the Wind).

Now for Twain. In “The Mark Twain They Didn’t Teach Us about in School” (International Socialist Review 10 [Winter 2000]: 61-65), Helen Scott reminds us that Twain was “one of the most forthright critics of American ruling-class ideology at the turn of the twentieth century,” a man whose “unpublished writings and speeches are overwhelmingly antiracist, anti-imperialist and revolutionary.” Wrote Twain:

I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.

Scott goes on to describe many of the other aspects of the Twain they don’t teach in school — Twain the union organizer and champion, the religious skeptic, the critic (and victim) of police harassment, the militia deserter, author of books now considered classics but once thought to be “only suitable for the slums,” and vigorous opponent of the Spanish-American War.

Here is Twain himself on his anti-imperialism:

[I used to be] a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ...Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.

But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.

Twain wrote any number of sarcastic critiques of American and European militarism and imperialism (e.g., “The War Prayer”).

Scott does point out that Twain was not too much of a revolutionary to marry into money and invest in schemes he hoped would make him rich. We should consider whether Twain’s “reliance on such wealthy sponsors undermined his independence and compromised his social criticism.” But she concludes that Twain’s is nonetheless

a voice that should be remembered and celebrated: anti-imperialist and revolutionary — this is the Twain of our tradition. If Twain were alive today [Scott is writing in 2000], he would denounce the imperialists carving up Kosovo and killing Iraqis and Serbs in the name of freedom. He would say of Bill Clinton, “When his time comes, I’ll buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake!”

The literary establishment — the modern equivalent of those who scorned Twain — has claimed him for their own. It is up to us to keep alive the other Twain and to fight for the world he wanted. As Twain proposed in 1902, “Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers, and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love.”

Does America have anything like a Mark Twain or an Ambrose Bierce today? Do we need one? Read more!

Comm Arts II: In Animal Liberation Peter Singer quotes a pork producer as he explains his pigs’ response to having their tails cut off.

They hate it! The pigs just hate it! And I suppose we could probably do without tail-docking if we gave them more room, because they don’t get so crazy and mean when they have more space. With enough room they’re actually quite nice animals. But we can’t afford it. These buildings cost a lot. (121)

I sense that this farmer would prefer to treat his pigs humanely, if only he could “afford it.” Well, if you’re not rich I’m sure you know what it’s like not to be able to afford something. But does economic necessity justify inhumane treatment? Is there really any such thing as economic necessity? I can’t afford a Jaguar, but that doesn’t make it okay for me to use unethical means to obtain one. It just means I do without.

In the same way, if the only way to profitably raise pigs these days is to torture them, shouldn’t that mean we should simply do without factory-farmed pork? Isn’t the farmer really saying “We can’t afford to raise pigs ethically, so we do it unethically”? And isn’t that the same as my saying, “I can’t afford to own a Jaguar ethically, so I’ve obtained one unethically”? Read more!

American Studies. Carolyn Merchant’s “Reinventing Eden” contrasts two creation stories, both of which turn on the actions of a woman: a Penobscot Indian “Corn Mother” myth that “mov[es] from desert to garden” (leaving humankind in a happy, stable position) and an old Israelite myth that moves from garden to desert (leaving humankind in an unhappy, unstable position it must struggle to rectify). Merchant proceeds to frame all of western culture — at least its patriarchy, Christianity, science, capitalism, and imperialism — in terms of a furious and ongoing attempt to recover the lost garden (132-133). Hence the “recovery narrative” of her subtitle.

Opposed to the main western story, says Merchant, are two counter-stories: feminism and environmentalism. The first opposes patriarchy and attempts to recast Eve as a Corn Mother. The second opposes the capitalist-technocratic-imperialist attempt to transform wild nature into human-friendly garden.

Richard White’s essay is not quite so ambitious. White notes that environmentalism tends to see wild nature as a place for recreation, a place where one goes to play, rather than to work. Environmentalists tend to

equate productive work in nature with destruction. They ignore the ways that work itself is a means of knowing nature while celebrating the virtues of play and recreation in nature. Whereas mainstream environmentalism creates a popular imagery that often harshly condemns all work in nature, this second group is apt to sentimentalize certain kinds of farming and argue that work on the land creates a connection to place that will protect nature itself. (171)

One result of these habits is the familiar conflict between urban middle-class environmentalists and rural working-class people of the sort whose cars bear the famous bumper-sticker that asks, “Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?” Note how the bumper-sticker implies that if you’re not working out in nature, you’re not really even working. To work is to work outdoors, with one’s hands — not indoors with one’s brain. In this view ranching and logging count as work, but not, say, approving loans or teaching American studies courses.

I’d like you to put these two essays in dialogue. What do you suppose Merchant and White might have to say about each other’s ideas? Also, feel free to provide examples of how their ideas are (or aren’t) reflected in popular culture. Here’s my example: Joni Mitchell’s justly famous song about getting caught up in the “devil’s bargain” of patriarchal-technocratic-capitalist-imperialism and trying to recover the garden, Woodstock. And what the heck — I'll throw in Merle Haggard singing the Working Man Blues. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Now that you’ve all read the “Book of the Machines” chapters in Erewhon, I’d like you to move from Samuel Butler’s 19th-century fantasies to some 21st-century realities, such as the Slugbot and the EcoBot — predatory robots that capture and consume food from their environment, digest it, and turn it into the energy they need to continue operating. According to the Slugbot’s creators, the goal is greater autonomy for the machines:

Most mobile robots are not truly autonomous; most operate in simplified environments. Almost all non-industrial robots still require a helping hand from humans, e.g. battery charging, the odd push if they get stuck, obstacles that are suited to their sensors, etc. The notable exceptions are smart missiles, satellites and torpedoes which carry enough fuel and computational resources to successfully complete their missions. However, we are interested in building robots which will be self-sufficient in terms of decision making and energy — robots which can be left unsupervised to organize their work and nourishment.

The work on energy autonomy in robots is an on-going process. The initial stage looked at the problems faced by a robot predator. It is not only the energy transformation process but the necessary behavior of the robot which we wish to study. This is an important point — the two processes are tightly interlinked. In this case the robot “hunted” slugs. The collected slugs would be fermented to produce biogas in a separate off-board digester unit. The gas would then be passed through methane fuel cell to generate electricity. The electricity would be stored in batteries and could be downloaded to a “hungry” robot. We are currently working on the employment of a different type of “digester” — the microbial fuel cell (MFC). In this type of cell microbes are employed in a special container with a semi-permeable membrane to extract electrons from the nutrient (such as carrot peelings) and pass them onto an electrode. In this way a form of “biological battery” can be made.

The EcoBot II eats flies instead of slugs. What do you suppose Butler might have made of all this? And what about Erewhon’s form — does “The Book of the Machines” make the book quasi-dystopian?

Speaking of dystopia, do you see anything potentially dystopian about the possibility that job interviews might routinely include brain scans? According to a recent post at one of my favorite blogs, Next Nature,

MRI scans for candidates in top jobs such as bank directors could soon become part of the job-application package, says Erasmus University researcher Prof Willem Verbeke of Rotterdam. He’s confident brain scans will replace job interviews within 5 years.

Prof. Verbeke heads the department of neuro-economics, (NSIM), at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He predicts in an interview with Good Morning Netherlands radio station that employers demanding compulsory brain scans from their job applicants will soon become the most normal thing in the world – in fact within five years’ time.

Read the whole thing here.

Update: Let me recap some highlights from class today. The philosophical status of artificial life depends on how we define “life.”We could approach the question by isolating a set of attributes that all life necessarily possesses qua life, and then asking whether these defining attributes could also be possessed by a human-built machine.

Here’s one plausible list of the attributes all life necessarily possesses qua life:

1. Perception and response (living organisms sense and respond to things going on in their environment).

2. Metabolism (living organisms capture part of their environment and turn it into energy).

3. Reproduction (living organisms produce copies of themselves, and the copies are themselves capable of reproduction).

Machines are already quite capable of 1. and 2. The real question concerns reproduction. It’s possible to imagine that at some point in the future artificially intelligent robots might be capable of building replicas of themselves. But Samuel Butler offers a more subtle approach to the problem of machine reproduction. Machines reproduce themselves with our help, as part of a symbiotic relationship. If that kind of reproduction does not count as satisfying criterion 3. above, then what are we to make of the flowering plant that cannot reproduce without the help of the bumble bee? If the plant’s symbiotic dependence on the bee does not disqualify it from “life,” then on what grounds can we rule out the possibility of machine life?

Miscellaneous Note 1: The Very Smart MIT Scientist who believes we’ll be able to upload human consciousness into a computer is Ray Kurzweil. The (IMHO) Even Smarter MIT Scientists who revolutionized robotics are Rodney Brooks and Cynthia Breazeal (check out the bit about her “social robots” here).

Miscellaneous Note 2: You might want to watch the “birth of technology” clip from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can find it here. Read more!

American Lit II: Early in The Age of Innocence Ellen Olenska says, “I want to forget everything else, to become a complete American again” (41). Part of the irony here is that her New York social circle seems to consist of “complete Americans” only in the sense that they were all born in America. They don’t strike us as “American” in any more fundamental sense. If anything they venerate Europe so much they seem more European than the Europeans. They’re aristocratic instead of democratic. Rather than making their own way in the world (like, say, that ur-American, Benjamin Franklin) they live off of inherited wealth. They even go to the opera, for crissakes.

Deepening the irony is Newland Archer’s claim that as Ellen’s lawyer “his business would be to make her see Beaufort as he really was, with all he represented — and abhor it” (49). But wait. What if Beaufort — with his willingness to take risks, his rejection of petty social morés, and his bold marriage to the lower-caste Fanny Ring — in fact represents all the can-do independence, forthrightness, and freedom we typically think of as American? Then what Archer is vowing to do is to teach Ellen to abhor America itself.

What other ironies do you see in this novel? What would you say are its plot and theme? Read more!

Comm Arts II: In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer basically calls the pioneering “chicken tycoon” Frank Perdue a lying sack of crap. Well, that’s my paraphrase. What Singer actually does is tell us Perdue’s claim “that the chickens on his ‘farm’ are pampered and ‘lead such a soft life’” (105) does not match reality. Singer lets us draw our own conclusions about the man’s honesty.

Do you think Singer has treated Perdue fairly? Or did he let him off too lightly? Are you confident that Singer is right about Perdue? (Checking Singer’s use of his sources here would make for a great essay, BTW.) If Singer is right, what would have been the most rhetorically effective way to call Perdue on the carpet? Read more!

Senior Seminar. As I mentioned in class, I think Samuel Butler’s treatment of religion in Erewhon makes for pretty thin satiric gruel and might as well have been left out of the book altogether. I think he gets a lot more mileage out of the “Birth Formulae” and “World of the Unborn” chapters. As is so often the case — especially in the brilliant “Book of the Machines” chapters — Butler manages to be both satirical and prescient at the same time. In this passage, for instance, Butler prefigures a key element in the political philosopher John Rawls’ influential theory of “justice as fairness”:

First, [the unborn] must take a potion which will destroy their memory and sense of identity; they must go into the world helpless, and without a will of their own; they must draw lots for their dispositions before they go, and take them, such as they are, for better or worse — neither are they to be allowed any choice in the matter of the body which they so much desire; they are simply allotted by chance, and without appeal, to two people whom it is their business to find and pester until they adopt them. Who these are to be, whether rich or poor, kind or unkind, healthy or diseased, there is no knowing; they have, in fact, to entrust themselves for many years to the care of those for whose good constitution and good sense they have no sort of guarantee.

As part of his theory of justice, Rawls concocted a now-famous thought-experiment which asks us to imagine ourselves being born into the world from an Original Position, in which we view our future condition behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing whether we’ll be white, black, or brown, male or female, gay or straight, etc. It is from this original position that we should create the social contract under which we all should live.

Your question: what do you see as some of the philosophical implications of Butler’s parody in these chapters? Does Butler’s treatment of Erewhonian beliefs about the unborn help us figure out whether the book is an anti-utopia? Read more!

American Studies. With his now-classic essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon introduced the field of environmental studies to postmodernism. He did so by problematizing the seemingly straightforward concept of wilderness. To problematize a concept is to question the fundamental premises that lie beneath it and demonstrate that it’s not as simple as everyone had been used to thinking — to show, as Cronon puts it in the case of wilderness, that it “is not quite what it seems” (69).

In the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, wilderness denotes “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” “Untrammeled by man” means something like “not significantly altered by humans.” The Wilderness Act’s definition (which has the force of law) is problematic because in fact, as environmental historians have demonstrated conclusively, many of the landscapes we think of as wild have been significantly altered by humans, in particular by Native Americans, who for thousands of years had been deliberately altering the ecosystems in which they lived — by hunting animal species to extinction, by setting fires to clear out underbrush and foster the growth of certain kinds of trees, and so on.

To point out such historical facts is not exactly to deconstruct wilderness, however. Cronon comes closer to actually deconstructing wilderness when, first, he reviews just how decisively the term has been shaped by centuries of changing ideologies of nature and, second, when he analyzes the binary oppositions (human-nonhuman, artificial-natural, impure-pure, etc.) in terms of which wilderness has been defined.

Cronon argues that the deconstruction of wilderness has practical implications. He argues that environmentalism’s near-deification of wilderness has left us with a tendency to value pristine landscapes at the expense of the “impure” landscapes in which most of us actually live. (And what happens when people discover that those pristine landscapes are not really so pristine after all? Will they cease to protect them?) And, because wilderness by definition is a place where humans do not live, our idealization of wild nature makes it difficult for us to think clearly and creatively about how we should fit ourselves into the rest of nature, as inevitably we must do.

It’s fine to preserve wilderness landscapes as human-free zones, as places we visit but do not inhabit, but we still need to live our everyday lives somewhere, and the ideology of wilderness doesn’t tell us how best to do so. Wilderness ideology grounds an environmentalism for our vacations, but how are we to live the rest of the year? “Our challenge,” writes Cronon,

is to stop thinking of such things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others. (89)

Cronon’s essay, and the other essays collected with it in the anthology Uncommon Ground, provoked angry reactions from biologists convinced that, by deconstructing wilderness, a bunch of scientifically illiterate know-nothings in the humanities were denying the seriousness of environmental crisis and the very reality of nature itself.

A counter-anthology, Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, was put together by Soulé and his colleague Gary Lease and published as a response to the essays in Uncommon Ground. It was touted as a refutation of the postmodern position, but many of its essays turned out to be pretty postmodern themselves and could have just as easily have been included in Cronon’s volume (see, for example, Lease’s “Nature Under Fire” and David Graber’s “Resolute Biocentrism”).

One exception was Soulé’s contribution, “The Social Siege of Nature,” which claimed not only that the idea of nature as a social construct is wrong, but that it amounts to a “social assault” that justifies the exploitation of nature (137). Basically he was saying that people like Cronon (and me) were collaborators with the bad guys.

Given its thesis, you might expect Soulé’s essay to cite instances where developers justified their environmental destruction with the idea that nature is socially constructed. If you’ve read the essay, however, you’ll notice that Soulé never quite gets around to doing that. I’ll go over this essay’s many shortcomings in class; for now, it suffices to say that Soulé lost and Cronon won.

Here’s your question: What are some of the human values you’ve been taught to associate with wilderness? Can you provide examples of wilderness ideology or imagery in popular culture? Read more!

American Lit II: Talk about family values — here’s Edith Wharton, in The Age of Innocence, on the farewell dinner Newland and May host for Ellen Olenska: “There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.” At this point, Newland doesn’t know the half of it.

But as the evening wears on he’s sure going to find out! Chapter 33 is dedicated to his gradual awakening to a number of unpleasant facts, among them just how completely he has underestimated his wife. And the reader, perhaps, begins to understand just how hard society makes it for one to be a truly free individual, even if one does happen to be a wealthy white male aristocrat living in the Sweet Land of Liberty.

By chapter’s end Newland will know that his family, conspiring to save May’s marriage by exiling that troublemaking countess, Ellen, has played him like a chump. The final image, before the novel fast-forwards 26 years, is of Newland looking up at May “with a sick stare” of realization while May looks down at him with “blue eyes wet with victory.”

Game over. Society 1, Individual 0.

As Newland sits down to dinner that evening he is aware that he is engaged in a “deadly silent game,” but at first he believes “the trumps were still in his hands.” What a dope! Why would he think such a thing? Because he’s the man of the house? You can easily imagine Wharton at her typewriter, tapping out this chapter and snickering about the way men think they’re in charge.

A few pages later, Wharton allows the light to begin to dawn over the benighted landscape of Newland’s understanding:

As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May’s canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators…. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything…. Archer felt like a prisoner in the centre of an armed camp.

Newland winds up disillusioned, trapped, forever dispossessed of his One True Love, and with his “inner devils” laughing at him. As May says, “It did go off beautifully, didn’t it?” Wharton’s humor is subtle, but it’s wicked.

Your assignment today is to compare and contrast The Age of Innocence and O Pioneers! Let’s see how many similarities we can find, and how many differences. (Don’t neglect the obvious — e.g., they’re both novels.) Bonus points if you indicate which novel you think is better and explain why.

P.S. The scene in Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence where May triumphs over Newland is so nice we had to watch it twice. If you’d like to watch it a third time, you’ll find it here. Read more!

Comm Arts II: I spent most of class Friday lecturing on the concept of spontaneous order as part of a broad shift in thought that touches on everything from biology to economics to linguistics. A spontaneous order is any kind of organization that emerges on its own out of chaos, through some unplanned and undirected process of self-organization. Probably the most famous example is biological evolution, in which complex, highly organized, and seemingly designed life forms and ecosystems evolve naturally, without the help of any outside direction. (Compare evolution-by-natural-selection to the process of selective breeding, which does depend on outside direction, namely, that provided by the animal breeder.)

Other examples of spontaneous orders include the modern market economy, the human brain, and, most important for this class, language.

Just like a market economy, a natural language is not planned or designed by any individual authority or designer. The meanings of its words, the rules of its grammar and syntax, and the conventions of its writing emerge naturally out of the zillions of judgements and choices made by the many people who use the language.

Why do I stress this fact? Because it’s crucial to understanding the debate over prescriptivism and descriptivism. I won’t try to explain these concepts here; if you missed my “prescriptivism and descriptivism” lecture in class you’ll have to get yourself up to speed by perusing the links I’ve provided. (If you’re feeling particularly intellectually adventurous, read this famous Language Log essay, Everything Is Correct Versus Nothing Is Relevant.)

Here’s your question — and it’s not an easy one to answer. To what degree do you think our society should try to standardize its language and try to stop it from evolving? To what extent do you think we should let it evolve naturally? What implications does your answer have for the teaching of writing in the schools? Read more!

Senior Seminar. By now you should be far enough into Samuel Butler’s Erewhon to know “that illness of any sort was considered in Erewhon to be highly criminal and immoral.” At the same time, actions that seem more properly to be criminal or immoral are treated by the Erewhonians as illnesses.

Ha ha ha — that Erewhon sure is a wacky place! But are we any better? Can you provide examples of ways that our own culture confuses criminality and illness? Read more!

American Studies. Jennifer Price’s essay “Looking for Nature at the Mall” is typical of the deconstruction-of-nature-style intellectual work being done during the 1990s. Price suggests that environmentalism, like pretty much everything else, has been captured by the ideology of consumerism. Rather than defining themselves as “green” by living like Thoreau in the woods or actively working to save the planet or whatever, people do it by buying stuff at the Nature Store, whose basic product is not nature itself but the signifiers of a green identity. “We graft meanings onto nature to make sense out of modern middle-class life,” writes Price, “and then define ourselves by what we think nature means.”

What are some of those meanings we “graft onto nature”? “Authenticity, simplicity, reality, uniqueness, purity, health, beauty,” and so on (190). (The irony of the fact that we go looking for authenticity and reality at a shopping mall, of all places, is not lost on Price.)

Anyway, the upshot is that “we approach the natural world, like everything else, instinctively as consumers” (198). Here’s this morning’s discussion prompt: Given that consumerism seems pretty deeply entrenched and is not likely to go away just because we kvetch about it, is there any way environmentalism might co-opt it? Is there any way we might save the planet as consumers? Read more!

American Lit II: O Pioneers! was published in 1913, back in the days when Sigmund Freud was all the rage among intellectuals like Willa Cather. What I’d like you to do today is to closely analyze the following passage, which closes Part III of the novel and sets the stage for the climactic events of Part IV:

She [Alexandra] had never been in love, she had never indulged in sentimental reveries. Even as a girl she had looked upon men as work-fellows. She had grown up in serious times.

There was one fancy indeed, which persisted through her girlhood. It most often came to her on Sunday mornings, the one day in the week when she lay late abed listening to the familiar morning sounds; the windmill singing in the brisk breeze, Emil whistling as he blacked his boots down by the kitchen door. Sometimes, as she lay thus luxuriously idle, her eyes closed, she used to have an illusion of being lifted up bodily and carried lightly by some one very strong. It was a man, certainly, who carried her, but he was like no man she knew; he was much larger and stronger and swifter, and he carried her as easily as if she were a sheaf of wheat. She never saw him, but, with eyes closed, she could feel that he was yellow like the sunlight, and there was the smell of ripe cornfields about him. She could feel him approach, bend over her and lift her, and then she could feel herself being carried swiftly off across the fields. After such a reverie she would rise hastily, angry with herself, and go down to the bath-house that was partitioned off the kitchen shed. There she would stand in a tin tub and prosecute her bath with vigor, finishing it by pouring buckets of cold well-water over her gleaming white body which no man on the Divide could have carried very far.

As she grew older, this fancy more often came to her when she was tired than when she was fresh and strong. Sometimes, after she had been in the open all day, overseeing the branding of the cattle or the loading of the pigs, she would come in chilled, take a concoction of spices and warm home-made wine, and go to bed with her body actually aching with fatigue. Then, just before she went to sleep, she had the old sensation of being lifted and carried by a strong being who took from her all her bodily weariness.

So, what’s up with that? Is Cather getting all Freudian on us here? All religious? Or what? Read more!

Senior Seminar. Probably the most notable aspect of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is its depiction of Solomon’s House, the scientific organization whose goal is “the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things…to the effecting of all things possible” (370).

Think about that. The effecting of all things possible.

“Effecting” here means something like “causing to happen” or “bringing about.” Perhaps Bacon was writing a bit carelessly and we shouldn’t read too much into this phrase, but read literally, especially from our own perspective, isn’t it both prescient and chilling?

The effecting of all things possible.

Not bringing about all things desirable, but bringing about all things possible.

Why dig up body parts from the graveyard, stitch them together into a body, and bring that body to life? Why strap a mountain lion down to a table and try to surgically transform it into a human being? Not because we should, but because we can.

Then again, perhaps Bacon wasn’t writing carelessly. Perhaps he understood perfectly well the implications of the relentless, value-less effecting of all things possible, in which case maybe we should read New Atlantis as an anti-utopia rather than a utopia, a warning about rather than a model for the future.

Anyway, here are some questions: What does New Atlantis have in common with Utopia? How do the practices of Solomon’s House compare to those of the institution of modern science? In what ways does Bacon seem particularly prescient? Read more!

American Studies. You might be wondering why I’m having you read that hefty excerpt from Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage. It’s because I believe it can help us understand an intellectual event crucial to this course: the controversy, which took place during the 1990s, over the deconstruction of nature. Think of Jacques Derrida’s infamous dictum, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” which is usually (and misleadingly) translated as “there is nothing outside the text” but actually means something like “there is no escaping textuality,” which in turn means something like “there is no escaping the fact that our understanding of reality is always mediated by signs,” which is important because signs always have to be interpreted.

As you’ll recall, a sign is made up of a signifier and a signified, and there’s no intrinsic relationship between the two. There’s no intrinsic relationship between, say, the signifier cat (the sound or the marks on a piece of paper) and the signified cat (the mental image of a cat that comes into our minds when we hear or read the word). The relationship between the two is basically arbitrary. The relationship does not exist in nature; it exists only because human beings have invented a code (in this case, the English language) linking the two together.

Back to deconstruction and “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” The basic idea here is not that objects do not have their own objective reality, but that we humans always encounter objects through the mediation of some human-devised code (that is, some semiotic system). For us, a sunset is never just a sunset. It’s something we understand symbolically as part of a larger symbol system of meanings, the all-encompassing “textuality” from which Derrida says we cannot escape.

Note that to call the sunset a sun “set” is to name it not simply in reference to what it is “in itself,” but in reference to a larger set of understandings in which the sun “rises” and “sets,” rather than a framework in which, say, the sun stands still and the earth rotates. We might call the first of these sets of understandings a geocentric code and the second a heliocentric code. (If we were approaching this issue by way of Michel Foucault instead of Jacques Derrida, we might speak instead of the geocentric and heliocentric discourses of astronomy.)

A deconstructionist would note a fundamental conflict in Interpreting Our Heritage. On the one hand, Tilden stresses the value of bringing national park visitors face-to-face with the “thing itself.” On the other hand, being in direct contact with the Thing Itself is never quite enough for the visitor to comprehend that thing’s significance. Even when visitors are confronted by the Thing Itself, they still need the park ranger to tell them what it means. But wait — it’s not the Thing Itself that has a meaning; only signs have meaning. The Thing Itself has no meaning; by itself it is only — the Thing Itself.

Once you have something that can be interpreted you’re no longer dealing with the Thing Itself, you’re dealing with a sign, the entity that appears after the yoking-together of the thing and the meaning you’ve assigned to the thing. And once the thing has in this way become a sign, whose meaning depends on its place in a larger system of signs, it has entered the realm of textuality. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.

Okay, so “natural” landscapes are texts. In my essay “Canonizing Landscape,” I argue that the national parks function much as conservative literary critics would like the western literary canon to function: as a collection of the most profoundly beautiful and meaningful texts which must be preserved for the edification of future generations. In the language of traditional lit-crit, the canon is the best that humans have thought and said; in the language of natural theology (think of Thomas Paine’s argument in The Age of Reason), the national park landscapes are the best that God has thought and said (or revealed).

In the same vein, the national park service interpretive ranger becomes analogous to the literary critic. Each, in this essentially conservative view, is responsible for transmitting their respective texts’ intrinsic meanings to the masses, who are too illiterate to draw out those meanings without professional help. Here’s Tilden:

Thousands of naturalists, historians, archeologists and other specialists are engaged in the work of revealing, to such visitors as may desire the service, something of the beauty and wonder, the inspiration and spiritual meaning that lie behind what the visitor can with his senses perceive. This function of the custodians of our treasures is called Interpretation. (3-4, my italics)

A bit later, Tilden adds that interpretation is

[a]n educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information…. Interpretation is the revelation of a larger truth that lies behind any statement of fact. (8, Tilden’s italics)

I argue that if park interpreters perform the same function as literary critics, then their work is vulnerable to the same critique that has been leveled against traditional literary criticism since the 1960s, namely, that it pretends to be an objective revealing of the intrinsic meanings of the works themselves but is actually a decidedly subjective exercise in discursive construction shot through with unconscious biases (including racism, sexism, nationalism, and the like).

I included this post’s illustration as an example of what Tilden calls “the genius of the revealer — the man or woman who uncovers something universal in the world that has always been here and that men have not known…. To take a slice of a tree like the giant sequoia, and to associate its growth rings with a time chart of human history, was an idea that occurred to some master interpreter” (5). Well, that was a clever idea. I would add, however, that it requires killing a tree, which we may take as a symbol of what happens to the Thing Itself — to “real” or unmediated nature — when it into enters the realm of textuality. There’s a kind of violence involved in turning the Thing Itself into a sign.

So, any comments on the deconstruction of nature? Read more!

American Lit II: The first half of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! is set around 1883 and the second half around 1900. Because the novel thus spans the closing of the frontier in 1890, it’s hard to resist reading it through the lens provided by Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Here’s Turner on the impact of the frontier on the American character:

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance.... [T]o the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom — these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

It was the frontier, Turner said, that more than anything else made America so democratic and its citizens so independent and so capable of self-government. It was the frontier that transformed the servile, dependent European personality into a new kind of self-sufficient, freedom-loving citizen that we recognize as specifically American. Which is all well and good, even if it is myth rather than history. What I want to know is this: Is Cather peddling essentially the same myth in O Pioneers?

P.S. Wondering where the novel’s title come from? Walt Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” from Leaves of Grass:

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Come my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,
Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,
From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,
From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,
Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental
blood intervein’d,
All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!
O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!
O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,
Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,
(bend your heads all,)
Raise the fang’d and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon’d mistress,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,
By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,
Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,
With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill’d,
Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!
Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?
Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill’d.
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,
Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,
Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life's involv’d and varied pageants,
All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,
All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,
All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,
All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,
We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,
Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!
Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,
All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,
All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,
We to-day’s procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!
O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!
Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!
(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)
Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,
Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,
Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?
Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock’d and bolted doors?
Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?
Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding
on our way?
Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,
Far, far off the daybreak call—hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,
Swift! to the head of the army!—swift! spring to your places,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Read more!

Senior Seminar. Scholars have long debated the relationship between the values and practices of the Utopians and those of Utopia’s author, Thomas More. Ditto for the degree to which More agrees with his character, Raphael Hythloday — and also the degree to which the real More agrees with the More who narrates the book’s beginning and conclusion. Let’s look at what More-the-narrator has to say when Hythloday has finished describing the Utopians:

[M]any things occurred to me, both concerning the manners and laws of that people, that seemed very absurd, as well in their way of making war, as in their notions of religion and divine matters; together with several other particulars, but chiefly what seemed the foundation of all the rest, their living in common, without the use of money, by which all nobility, magnificence, splendor, and majesty, which, according to the common opinion, are the true ornaments of a nation, would be quite taken away.

More-the-narrator objects most strongly to Utopia’s “foundation,” that is, its communism (“living in common, without the use of money”). Is this also the position of the real More? Maybe, but I think probably not. Note the reason More-the-narrator gives for repudiating Utopian communism: it would do away with the nobility and splendor that glorify nations — not according to his opinion but according to the common opinion. I doubt the real Thomas More would accept the common opinion as a valid reason for believing anything. If he really opposed Utopian communism, one would think he would not have given his narrator such a lame reason for doing so.

More-the-narrator ends the story in a state of ambivalence:

[T]hough it must be confessed that [Hythloday] is both a very learned man, and a person who has obtained a great knowledge of the world, I cannot perfectly agree to everything he has related; however, there are many things in the Commonwealth of Utopia that I rather wish, than hope, to see followed in our governments.

Noteworthy here, in addition to the fact that More-the-narrator declines to get into any more specifics, is the fact that More-the-author has chosen to end on a positive rather than a negative note. It’s a question of how he structures his ambivalence. He doesn’t say Even though X is good Y is bad. He says Even though Y is bad, X is good. What this means, if anything, I’m not sure.

Maybe what’s most important, however, is the part of the ending I’ve so far left out, the part that comes between the two quotes above:

[S]ince I perceived that Raphael was weary, and was not sure whether he could easily bear contradiction, remembering that he had taken notice of some who seemed to think they were bound in honor to support the credit of their own wisdom, by finding out something to censure in all other men’s inventions, besides their own; I only commended their constitution, and the account he had given of it in general; and so taking him by the hand, carried him to supper, and told him I would find out some other time for examining this subject more particularly, and for discoursing more copiously upon it; and indeed I shall be glad to embrace an opportunity of doing it.

More could have ended Utopia without this material. He could have said simply that Hythloday yawned and stopped talking, and that he (More-the-narrator) disagreed with some parts of the discourse and agreed with others. How does the inclusion of the extra details affect our understanding of the book? Read more!

American Lit II: I read Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” as a story of a young black woman’s attempt to find authenticity in the black separatism of the late 60s. In doing so she alienates herself from her “backward” Southern mother and sister, who, the story suggests, are more authentically black than Dee. This alienation is conveyed by Dee’s desire for her mother’s handcrafted items, such as a butter churn, dasher, and, above all, a pair of quilts. When Mama tells Dee the quilts have been promised to Maggie, Dee “gasped like a bee had stung her. ‘Maggie can’t appreciate these quilts!’ she said. ‘She’d probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use’” (2110).

Dee insists that she would hang the quilts on the wall. Instead of being genuinely authentic parts of an organic and deeply rooted black culture, they would be mere signifiers of authenticity to be seen by Dee’s faux-African acquaintances. A student at a prestigious northern university, Dee has reached a point where she doesn’t even recognize authenticity when she sees it. She prefers authenticity’s signifiers to authenticity itself.

The story thus raises a number of questions posed by modern and postmodern conceptions of authenticity and identity. Is there really such a thing as a truly “authentic” cultural authenticity? Or are there only signifiers of authenticity? Has identity become wholly a matter of signification (or “fashion”)? Has identity always been wholly a matter of signification? Has identity been commodified, that is, has it become a matter of signifiers that can be bought and sold in the marketplace?

In general, can we ever get past the signifiers to the reality they signify? Or is it signifiers “all the way down”?

More narrowly, how are we to understand the discourse of black authenticity? Was the black separatist movement a failure?

As for “1955,” Walker’s story of white America’s appropriation of black culture, I will simply refer you to the brilliant Gil Scott-Heron’s musical commentary, “Ain’t No New Thing.” (Scott-Heron’s most famous works are probably “Lady Day and John Coltrane” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”) Read more!

Senior Seminar. There is so much of interest in Utopia I hardly know where to begin, folks. Let’s talk about happiness. When Raphael Hythloday describes the Utopians’ philosophy he notes that the “principal question is in what thing, be it one or more, the felicity of man consisteth.” That is, what makes us happy? This is not an easy question to answer, nor is it a trivial one. It is central to our understanding of our own nation’s political philosophy (think of how the Declaration of Independence stresses the “pursuit of happiness”), and I would think it central also to any conception of utopia. After all, it can’t be utopia if people aren’t happy there — can it?

Well, I don’t know. Maybe happiness is irrelevant to utopia. Maybe the key ingredient, the defining criterion, is not happiness but rather (as it was for Plato) justice or virtue. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. In Brave New World, remember, the denizens of the World State are all happy, at least in some superficial sense, and yet, in the standard interpretation of that novel, they lack something crucial to their humanity. That “something” includes things like frustration, anxiety, and suffering — things we don’t traditionally associate at all with happiness. So maybe we should say, not that utopia is a place where we can be completely happy, but a place where we can be fully human.

Anyway, Hythloday says that on the question of happiness the Utopians “seem almost too much given and inclined to the opinion of them which defend pleasure, wherein they determine either all or the chiefest part of man’s felicity to rest.” That is, happiness (i.e., “felicity”) is a matter of pleasure. This suggests that the Utopians are not so much followers of Plato as of Epicurus, who taught that the moral categories of good and evil are based on the body sensations of pleasure and pain. From this follows the specific form of hedonism known as Epicurianism.

So, are any of you hedonists? (The philosophy is not as selfish as it sounds, BTW.) How would you define happiness? How does happiness relate to justice, to virtue, to religion? Read more!

American Studies. In the preface and opening chapter of The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860, Annette Kolodny argues that a “psychosexual dynamic of a virgin paradise meant…that real flesh-and-blood women — at least metaphorically — were dispossessed of paradise.” Therefore the women who settled the American frontier “struggled to find some alternate set of images through which to make their own unique accommodation to the strange and sometimes forbidding New World landscape” (3). For women that image tended to be the garden (a real garden, not the Garden of Eden) as opposed to the favored male image of the virgin bride or nurturing mother. The upshot is that “men sought sexual and filial gratifications from the land, while women sought there the gratifications of home and family relations” (10).

In the remainder of The Land Before Her Kolodny explores how the garden and other images of “home and family relations” structured women’s writing about the frontier during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Does this fantasy structure persist in green culture today? I suspect so. Consider how blatantly Bambi appeals strongly to “the gratifications of home and family.” Can you think of other examples of green culture that fit Kolodny’s model? Read more!

American Literature II. In “Sonny’s Blues,” James Baldwin gives us a moving story that is at once a sketch of 1940s Harlem and a gospel, a retelling of the old story of human suffering and redemption. Why a “gospel”? Well, its antagonist is named “Sonny” (get it?) and its narrator-protagonist, with his tragic family history and his neglect of his suffering brother, is overwhelmed by sadness and guilt. That Baldwin has set out to use these materials to retell the core Christian story becomes more and more obvious as Sonny’s combo performs its rendition of “Am I Blue” in a seedy nightclub:

Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.

What makes the performance a kind of gospel, of course, is Baldwin’s description of the blues as “the tale of…how we may triumph,” a tale that is “the only light we’ve got in all this darkness,” that is, the only redemption from universal human misery. Though this tale is as old as humankind, it becomes in Baldwin’s hands a living gospel, one that takes on “another aspect in every country, and a new depth in every generation.”

Sonny is a Christ figure, and his suffering, transformed into musical expression, “filled the air with life, his life.” The narrator has presumably been exposed to the Sunday-school version of the Gospel, but he does not seem to truly understand it until he encounters it in Sonny’s musical version, that is, in a form organic to African American experience and expressed in a black idiom. Only then does the narrator say of Sonny, in language clearly meant to have a universal meaning, that “I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did” (1554).

“He could help us to be free if we would listen” — I get what that’s about, and I’m not even a Christian. It’s true that Baldwin’s Christ figure is a bit heretical. Many orthodox Christians would probably balk at the idea of a Christ who can “never be free” until humanity is free, and the more priggish among them would object to Baldwin’s portraying Christ as a nightclub performer and former heroin addict.

“Sonny’s Blues” can of course be read not only as I have done here but in many other ways as well — as a culturally and historically specific account of African American experience, as an account of the transmutation of suffering into art, as a critique of masculinity, even as an extended commentary on the old story of Cain and Abel, as Baldwin’s answer to the famous question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

It can also be read as part of a larger tradition. If you think of it as part of the African American literary tradition, you might want to compare it to “The Goophered Grapevine,” Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, “Heritage,” or (if you’ve read them already), Alice Walker’s “1955” and “Everyday Use.” If you think of it as part of the broader tradition of America literature, you might want to compare it to the works we’ve read by Twain or Ginsberg. If you think of it as part of the Christian literary tradition, or of the literary tradition as a whole, you could compare its treatment of suffering and redemption to that in any number of other works. If you’re into the Bible you might want to take a look at the Cain and Abel story and tell us how you think Baldwin used it as a basis for “Sonny’s Blues.”

Feel free to respond with your own interpretation or evaluation. Read more!

Comm Arts II. Below the fold I’ve pasted in a sample abstract of the sort you’re supposed to turn in on Friday. It’s not perfect, but I hope it demonstrates what my paper will be about and what is at stake in its argument. Here’s the abstract:

Other Pathways to Animal Liberation: Tom Regan and Tzachi Zamir
Abstract
In Animal Liberation, Peter Singer bases his arguments not on the notion of animal rights but on the principle of equality and the rejection of speciesism. Because of the tremendous controversy over our treatment of nonhuman animals, it is important to understand that Singer’s utilitarianism is not the only way to defend animal liberation. Even if Singer’s opponents were to prove him wrong, they would still have to contend with other animal-liberationist arguments. In this paper I will compare and contrast Singer’s work to that of two philosophers who take different routes to the same animal-liberationist end: Tom Regan, who argues that nonhuman animals do indeed have rights, and Tzachi Zamir, who argues that animal liberation is consistent with speciesism.

What do you think? Does this proposed project meet the basic criteria for a good intervention in the local public sphere?

P.S. Yes, I'm really going to write this paper. I try not to ask my students to do anything I don’t do. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Read more!

Senior Seminar. In Utopia, setting the stage for a contrast with the good government and wise laws of Utopia, Book I gives examples of poorly organized governments and bad laws. Prominent among them is the law specifying the death penalty for thieves. Raphael Hythloday argues against this law, and underlying his argument is the assumption that crime is at least partly a matter of social organization rather than personal morality. As he puts it, instead of attempting to prevent theft by means of harsh punishments, “much rather provision should have been made, that there were some means whereby [destitute people] might get their living, so that no man should be driven to this extreme necessity, first to steal and then to die.” His thinking here seems to be what today we would call sociological. Is the same true of Hythloday’s other arguments and observations in Book I? Read more!

Senior Seminar. The Republic covers a lot of philosophical, political, and cultural-critical ground. As a work of philosophy, it explores the nature of justice and propounds the famous theory of Forms. As a work of political analysis, it compares and contrasts various forms of government (timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny). And as a work of cultural criticism it explores the social effects of the arts (especially literature and music).

Today I want to point out that The Republic uses a device that today is called the thought experiment, (for example, the story of Gyges’ ring and the allegory of the cave). The thought experiment continues to be used by philosophers to this day — most notably, I would say, by John Rawls, whose notions of the original position and the veil of ignorance are key to his influential book, A Theory of Justice (1971). The thought experiment also happens to be crucial to the genres of utopia, dystopia, and science fiction. (Actually, thought experiments have long been used not only in philosophy and literature but also in physics, mathematics, biology, and computer science — think, for example, of Zeno’s paradox and Schrödinger's cat.)

Your job today is to ransack your vast knowledge of literature and film and come up with some other examples of thought experiments. Read more!

American Studies. For class today I asked you to read two essays that have become classics in American studies: Perry Miller’s “The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism and the Concept of Nature” and Henry Nash Smith’s “The Myth of the Garden and Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis” (a chapter from his book Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth). Let’s talk about Smith.

Smith argues that Frederick Jackson Turner, when he wrote his famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” got suckered by America’s pastoral ideology. He draws a distinction between the use of metaphor as “a rhetorical ornament” in an argument that has “a rational structure” (254) — which he says is fine — and the use of metaphor “as a structural principle or a means of cognition” (253) — which is decidedly not OK.

It’s one thing to be thinking logically and grounding one’s argument in facts, and then occasionally use a metaphor to help illustrate this or that point; this use of metaphor Smith terms “rhetorical.” It’s another thing entirely to unconsciously let the metaphor distort the facts or otherwise shape one’s argument; this he terms “poetic” (253). Smith goes on to argue that in many places in “The Significance of the Frontier” Turner uses metaphors poetically rather than rhetorically. And to the extent that Turner does so, he is not writing genuine history but merely perpetuating a myth (namely, the myth of America as pastoral utopia).

Smith also makes a nifty argument about the conflict between pastoral and progressive ideologies. The pastoral idea equates virtue with nature and therefore says that the closer a society is to nature, the better that society is. By contrast, the progressive myth says that societies improve as they evolve out of savagery into higher and higher degrees of civilization (255).*

Because America was historically “behind” Europe, it tended to favor the pastoral myth, which allowed it to claim superiority over Europe. Unfortunately, however, Americans could not completely escape the power of the progressive myth, even when thinking about the frontier. After all, however much of an ideological buzz they might have gotten from being “close to nature,” the average pioneer always worked hard to achieve greater and greater degrees of…civilization!

Smith argues that Turner’s essay, in addition to misusing its pastoral metaphors, finds itself trapped in the ideological double bind of primitivism vs. progressivism, nature vs. civilization. He also argues more generally that America’s fixation on pastoral myth prevented it from understanding its increasingly industrial reality. In particular, he writes, “the notion of democracy born of free land” available on the primitive frontier “is not an adequate instrument for dealing with a world dominated by industry, urbanization, and international conflicts.”

The philosophy and the myth [of agrarianism and pastoralism] affirmed an admirable set of values, but they ceased very early to be useful in interpreting American society as a whole because they offered no intellectual apparatus for taking account of the industrial revolution. A system which revolved about a half-mystical conception of nature and held up as an ideal a rudimentary type of agriculture was powerless to confront issues arising from the advance of technology. (259)

Hmm — a mode of thought “which revolved about a half-mystical conception of nature” and finds itself “powerless to confront issues arising from the advance of technology.” Is American environmentalism also such a mode of thought? If so, in what ways?

*Perry Miller, in “The Romantic Dilemma in American Nationalism,” also has much to say about this theory of social progress, and illustrates its power over the nineteenth-century American imagination by referencing “The Course of Empire” (1834-36), a series of paintings by American artist Thomas Cole. See all five paintings in the series here. Read more!

American Studies. In 1893, in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the long-term existence of the American frontier was the single most important factor in shaping America up to that time. He argued in particular that the strength of American democracy derived principally from the frontier experience. That experience, said Turner, transformed the servile, dependent European personality into a new kind of self-sufficient, freedom-loving citizen that we recognize as specifically American.

Because the Census Bureau had declared the frontier “closed” in 1890, just a few years before Turner first presented his paper, he suggested that a crucial “first period of American history” had ended, and that perhaps the nation’s future would see the undoing of some or all of the benefits of the frontier. Without a frontier to democratize American politics and empower its citizens, perhaps America would cease to be exceptional and would become just another nation.

Turner’s frontier thesis became extremely influential in American historiography and American studies. It also provoked considerable dissent. Among the critics was the economic historian Louis M. Hacker, who held that “Turner and his followers were the fabricators of a tradition which is not only fictitious but also to a very large extent positively harmful” (61). For Hacker,

[t]he free lands of the West were not important because they made possible the creation of a unique “American spirit,” that indefinable something that was to set the United States apart from European experiences for all time, but because their quick settlement and utilization for the extensive cultivation of foodstuffs furnished exactly those commodities with which the United States, as a debtor nation, could balance its international payments and borrow European capital in order to develop a native industrial enterprise.

In this view the importance of the frontier is not that it developed character but that it “served…the capitalist development of the nation” (63-64). Hacker claims that the frontier further served the interests of American industrial capitalism by forestalling resistance on the part of labor:

[T]he presence of the frontier helps to explain the failure of American labor to preserve a continuous revolutionary tradition: class lines could not become fixed as long as the free lands existed to drain off the most spirited elements in the working and lower middle-class populations...and to prevent the creation of a labor reserve for the purpose of thwarting the demands of organized workers. (64)

Hacker specifically rejects Turner’s claims for American exceptionalism:

The historical growth of the United States...was not unique; merely in certain particulars and for a brief time…. With settlement achieved — that is to say, the historic function of extensive agriculture performed, class (not sectional!) lines solidified, competitive capitalism converted into monopolistic capitalism under the guidance of the money power, and imperialism [became] the ultimate destiny of the nation — the United States once again was returning to the main stream of European institutional development. (64)

Finally, note that Hacker insists that Turner’s thesis was not merely wrong, but also harmful — because it functioned as a red herring that distracted historians from other, more appropriate forms of analysis:

What is of greater concern is the perverted reading Turner gave to American history in his insistence upon the uniqueness of American experience…. The unhappy results, for forty years, were the following: a turning inward of American historical activity at exactly the time when all trained eyes should have been on events going on beyond the country’s physical borders; an accumulation of supposed evidences of the development of American institutions entirely in nativistic terms without an understanding of how closely American institutional growth paralleled the European; an almost complete disregard of the basic class antagonisms in American history; and a profound ignorance of the steps by which monopolistic capitalism and imperialism were being developed in the country. (63)

It might be a good idea for American studies to avoid what Hacker said happened to American historiography. Even though it’s called American studies, in our search for insight we should not neglect “events going on beyond the country’s physical borders,” and in our concern with what makes America unique we should not lose sight of “how closely American institutional growth parallel[s] the European.” Nor should we ignore the tremendous importance of economics.

Thanks for reading this far. Here’s your question: What are some ways in which what we’re calling “environmentalism as culture” seems to be determined not so much by local considerations but by global economic forces?

Source: Hacker, Louis M. “Sections—Or Classes?” George Rogers Taylor, ed. The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1949: 61-64. Reprinted from The Nation 137 (26 July 1933): 108-110. Read more!

Senior Seminar. Let’s talk about some of the juicier parts of Book V of The Republic. Among other things, Socrates says that in his ideal state “the wives of our guardians are to be common” — that is, the women are to be shared among the men. Monogamy is out, to be replaced by a sort of state-controlled promiscuity designed to promote a eugenicist agenda. And that’s not all. The guardians’ “children are to be common” as well, so that “no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent” (124).

How do you like those for family values? And it just gets worse. The rulers are supposed to “invent some ingenious kind of lots” to make it appear as if women are being matched up with men at random, even though the process is actually being controlled by the rulers in such a way as to match the strongest and smartest men to the strongest and smartest women. That way, when the less worthy men find themselves always hooking up with the less worthy women, they’ll blame their bad luck instead of the rulers (127).

This lottery system will only be used for women aged 20-40 and men aged 25-55. After that, the guardians will be allowed “to range at will,” provided that any women who wind up getting pregnant while thus, um, ranging are under “strict orders” to get an abortion (128).

What else? Socrates also argues against individual privacy (129) and for the participation of children in war (134) and…but you get the picture. And all this is on top of Socrates’ argument in favor of censorship.

Remember, Socrates is describing the ideal state in which he believes true justice is to be found.

Okay. We’re reading The Republic to understand its influence on utopian and dystopian literature and film. What do you think so far? Does it strike you as a better blueprint for a utopia, a dystopia, or an anti-utopia?

Is Socrates insane? Read more!

American Lit II: Today I’d like to ask you to focus on Chapter XVIII of Pudd’nhead Wilson. In this chapter the novel’s light tone turns deadly serious, as Roxana tells Tom of the abuse she suffers “down the river” (and reminds us that slavery is no laughing matter). There’s much to marvel at here, including Roxana’s incredible resourcefulness and courage, Tom’s utter depravity, and Twain’s skillful development of these two characters through the use of plotting and dialect.

For now I’d like you to reduce this chapter to three of its key structural elements — White Man, Black Woman, and Mississippi River — and then analyze this video of Beyonce performing John Fogerty’s brilliant song Proud Mary. Your job is to compare and contrast the video to Chapter XVIII of Pudd’nhead Wilson. (If you wish you may wait until after Friday’s class to respond.)
Read more!

Comm Arts II: Among the many experiments described in Animal Liberation, perhaps the most grotesque is the one that involved “transplanting the heads of monkeys and keeping these monkey heads alive in fluid after they had been totally detached from their bodies.” The goal of the researcher, Robert J. White, was “‘to offer a living laboratory tool’ for research on the brain” (75). Do you think this kind of research can be justified, or is it simply beyond the pale? If you think it can be justified, on what grounds? If you think it’s beyond the pale, what do you think it says about our culture that it permits such things? (If you’d like to see video taken during the original experiments, click here.) Read more!