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of the most forthright critics of American ruling-class ideology at the turn of the twentieth century,” a man whose “unpublished writings and speeches are overwhelmingly antiracist, anti-imperialist and revolutionary.”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!