Grizzly @ Adams

Hi everyone — below the jump are your final exam questions. Enjoy!

Laurel H. Your presentation got me to thinking about Harold Bloom’s remark in The American Religion that “the Mormons, like the Jews before them, are a religion that became a people.” One of the things he meant is that Mormon identity was forged as much by a shared historical experience as by shared religious belief. That in turn got me to wondering what might happen as time goose-steps into the future. As incidents like the Extermination Order, the assassination of Joseph Smith, the Utah Exodus, and other mythic elements of the Mormon experience recede ever further into the past — and as the Church is comprised more and more of converts not descended from the original LDS pioneers — will the Mormons become less of a people and more of a religion? (Bonus questions: Are the Jews still more of a people than a religion? Are they likely to remain so?)

Tylor H. Some critics read “Young Goodman Brown” as a story about a spiritual crisis or “dark night of the soul,” a disorienting, sometimes crippling time when everything one has hitherto believed is brought into doubt. According to her recently published diaries, Mother Teresa, of all people, seems to have undergone just such a crisis. Please read Teresa, Bright and Dark by Christopher Hitchens and report on Teresa’s case to the class, paying particular attention to any ways in which Hawthorne’s story and the famous nun’s experience might illuminate each other — and whether you think her “dying hour was gloom.”

Kaitlyn P. It’s interesting to speculate on what Karl Marx would have thought about “Bartleby.” He no doubt would have appreciated the way Melville populated the story with such easily identifiable and representative economic types: a Wall Street lawyer (working for the ur-capitalist John Jacob Astor) and a collection of obviously alienated laborers. But I’m much less sure about how Marx, who thought religion was the opiate of the workers, would have felt about the seemingly Christian note on which the story ends. What do you think? Do the religious allusions at the end of the story undercut its critique of the socioeconomic order?

Fonz V. In your response to one of my blog posts you wrote, “I have to give props to the pilgrims…. [T]hey had some serious guts to settle in a strange and dangerous land. I get freaked out if I feel lost while hunting, I can’t even imagine arriving on a foreign land and expecting to survive.” I have to agree: the Pilgrims had guts. (Of course, they also had guns, and money, and (for awhile at least) a big ship floating just offshore. But still.) What gets me is that in so many ways the Pilgrims were admirable, while in so many other ways (such as their religious fanaticism and intolerance) they were detestable. What I’d like you to meditate upon is the question of how we should respond generally to individuals or groups who elicit such a combination of admiration and detestation. Illustrate your thinking with a few contemporary examples.

Nathan S. In your presentation you mentioned Scientology’s opposition to psychiatry. Do you think that opposition might be part of the larger reaction against psychiatry in the 50s and 60s? Before answering this question, do a little research on Thomas Szazs’ The Myth of Mental Illness, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Erving Goffman’s Asylums, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Oh — let’s not forget Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Chelsea A. Your presentation piqued my interest in the dialogic relations between contemporary Christianity and American popular culture. It’s pretty obvious that Christianity has greatly influenced pop culture, but to what extent is the opposite also true? Do you think television shows like Seventh Heaven and Joan of Arcadia are shaping Christianity as much as Christianity is shaping them? Think of the formal requirements of television drama as a genre. Do those requirements lead to certain television-specific ways of portraying Christians and Christianity? (See Portrayals of God in Popular Media.) If so, do you think Christian viewers then internalize those portrayals? Should we expect to see as a result — or are we already seeing — the emergence of an altogether new, televisionish Christianity?

Emma M. In your presentation you compared Mary Rowlandson to Elizabeth Smart and, to a lesser extent, Rowlandson’s Narragansett Indian captors to Brian D. Mitchell. I’d like you to pursue these comparisons further. In particular, I’d like you to consider the possibility that, in general, the discourse of captivity follows a basic logic of binary opposition:

Captive = All that is good
Captor = All that is not good

Of course, since everyone is in some ways flawed, the construction of one character as embodying All That Is Good and the other as embodying All That Is Bad requires the repression of certain realities. This in turn makes me wonder whether some of the emotional power of the captivity narrative lies in its function as a “return of the repressed.” What do you think? What might be some of the discomfiting truths that have been repressed in the discursive construction of Rowlandson and Smart (and the Narragansetts and Mitchell)?

Jon A. In your presentation you linked the White Woman in Peril trope to white male fantasies of American expansion. To your comments I would add that those imperialist fantasies were traditionally very heavily gendered: first, by associating the female with the future, and second, by imagining the land as female and its exploration and conquest as male (the whole “mastering the virgin land” schtick). For your final, please read up a bit on the arguments of the ecofeminist critic Annette Kolodny and then report back to us on the extent to which you think this nation’s persistently gendered and racialized understanding of captivity reflects an essentially white supremacist vision of its future.

Julia C. The more I think about the White Woman in Peril trope and Missing White Woman syndrome, the more I see them as vehicles of a white supremacist American nationalism. It’s not just that the White Woman in Peril is everywhere in our culture, it’s that her counterpart is nowhere. Contrast the United States to Mexico, whose cultural imaginary includes figures like the Virgin of Guadalupe and, more important for our purposes here, La Malinche. Please read up on La Malinche, then compare and contrast her story, as a captivity narrative and otherwise, to the story of Mary Rowlandson.

Abby S. “Ignorance,” you wrote in response to one of my blog posts, “is one of the determining forces limiting our freedom.” I think you’re right, though your statement could use some clarification, particularly concerning its implications for knowledge and education. In a society like ours, where most of us enjoy basic political freedom, what sorts of knowledge, and what kind of education, would be best calculated to expand our freedom beyond the merely political? In order for Americans to most fully utilize their political freedom, what are the most important things they should know? And how should they be taught those things? (You might want to read up a bit on the idea of liberal arts education.) Finally, consider a very specific example of ignorance, a particular fact of which almost all Americans are unaware: namely, that their nation has long obsessed over this or that incarnation of the White Woman in Peril, but not over any figure even remotely resembling La Malinche. If the American education system leaves most Americans unaware of this and other aspects of the racism of its cultural imaginary, can Americans truly be “free”?

Illustration: “Malinalli, Malitzin, Marina o Malinche,” by Javier Campos Santander. Read more!