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Upcoming Events
Reception
Study Society panels at the American Literature Conference, Boston, May 26-29,
2011
The American
Literature Association’s 20th annual conference will meet at the
Panel 1. Mark Twain, Bound Music, and Barton's Messiah: New Methods in American Reception Scholarship Phil Goldstein
University of Delaware-Wilmington
"Reading Race and Gender: The Reception of Twain's Pudd'nHead Wilson."
Twain’s
antipathy to women writers is well known. As he said of Jane Austen,
"Every time I read Pride and
Prejudice, I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own
shin-bone." There are, nonetheless,
surprising parallels between his Pudd’nHead
Wilson and Ennui, by Maria Edgeworth,
who, along with Austen and Fanny Burney, was a successful and distinguished
early 19th century writer. Edgeworth depicts the Irish aristocrats,
while Twain describes the Old South’s aristocrats, what he terms the FFV or
first families of Virginia, but they both show that the aristocrats are
arrogant and oppressive. They both suggest, moreover, that these
characteristics are due to their upbringing. By means of a servant or slave
who, fearful for her baby’s safety or security, exchanges her baby for the
master’s baby, they emphasize the importance of upbringing and at the same time
protest the oppressive conditions of the serfs or slaves. Edgeworth goes on,
however, to show that the aristocrat can reform himself and, with the love and
support of a distinguished woman, return to his aristocratic status. Twain
shows, by contrast, not only that the aristocrat cannot reform himself but
that, instead of doing so, he turns to crime. Moreover, to solve the crimes of
the aristocrat and undo the “evil” exchange of babies, Twain brings in a
detective modeled on Sherlock Holmes. I will show that, by means of the reform,
Burney defends the Enlightenment rationality emphasizing the equality of the
classes and the genders. Along with Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, her work was
successful, but, because of the conservative reactions to the French
revolution, it was forgotten until the establishment of Irish studies in the
1970s. By contrast, in nineteenth-century America, the Enlightenment
rationality justifying such reform was associated with women’s sentimental
fiction, so Twain rejects it in favor of a comic realism which earned him a
high place in modern literature, in general, and American studies, in
particular.
Dan Cavicchi
Rhode Island School of Design
“Site-Reading: The History of the Book and
American Sheet Music, 1840-1870”
By bracketing the content of books and
instead focusing on their materiality, historians of the book have re-made
literary works into commodities, decorative objects, and tools of daily
life--evidence for an alternative literary past centered on publishers,
booksellers, and readers as much as authors. In this paper, I propose a similar
approach in the study of music, as one means of challenging the aesthetic focus
of musicological research and building an American musical past that includes
audiences and consumption.
In particular, I focus on an un-catalogued
collection of 19th century sheet music binders at Brown University.
Building on the organizing principle of parlor folio stands and music cabinets,
such binders were a more personal means for young middle-class women (and some
men) in the mid-19th century to collect and preserve their sheet music. People
at mid-century often purchased a piece of sheet music to remember and re-create
their experience of a specific stage performance, something still suggested by
cover art and musical notation. However, the act of binding was an attempt to
remember and re-create subsequent events ascribed to that commodity. Sheet
music binders’ content, organization, indexing, and marginalia provide
meaningful cues to diverse, individual, musical and non-musical ideas and
experiences; they show how sheet music served not only as a souvenir but also
as a means for teaching and learning, negotiating friendships, managing
emotions, and developing selfhood.
In the end, the application of
history-of-the-book methods to 19th century sheet music necessitates
some adjustment, since the layered processes re-production and re-reception in
home musicking do not clearly match practices of book reading (or even magazine
consumption). Nevertheless, the history-of-the-book approach can serve as a
useful inspiration for all those interested in challenging the continued absence
of audiences in much fine arts history.
Barbara Ryan
National University of Singapore
“Barton De-Judaicizes Jesus (and Judah
Ben-Hur): Upgrading Fan Mail Scholarship”
Several recent books and articles have
consulted readers’ letters to analyze reception of authors’ work. Much of this scholarship is
well-considered. But much is repetitive
too. To see more in readers’ letters, my
paper sketches a methods upgrade focused on how Bruce Barton’s best-selling
book The Man Nobody Knows (1924)
revised General Lew Wallace’s even better-selling Ben-Hur (1880). The relative
complexity of my approach sketches a way in which to steer reception
scholarship that consults fan mail away from taking readers’ letters at face
value. This paper is culled from a
book-length manuscript about the Ben-Hur
event in which I discuss Barton’s Man.
This paper begins by introducing a recent
article on Man that consults its fan
mail. I show how Erin Smith consulted
historical scholarship in 2007 to review how her interest in ‘lived religion’
is generative in the best ways.
Unfortunately, earlier Barton scholarship often faltered through historicization
that is shallow and, too, non-responsive to readers’ letters. To probe more deeply, I draw on additional
sources. Chief among these are other readers’
letters about Man and the strongest
Barton scholarship; readers’ letters about Ben-Hur
and journalism about Wallace’s tale; plus historical information about the
1920s that I pursued according to strains in readers’ letters to Barton. Cohering this information is the best
determinant for reception scholars: receptors’ feedback. Rather, that is, than use readers’ letters to
confirm a pre-existing scholarly argument, I ensure that intended readers’ mail
guide my inquiry. A gain enabled by this
approach is a thesis that one of the things some early readers liked about
Barton’s Man is how deftly it
de-judaicized the Jew that Christians recognize as the Christian Messiah. I tie this taste to the huge crowd appeal of
a Broadway play, that ran from 1922 to 1927, about a Jew so assimilated that he
was perceived as “all American.”
Respondent: Ellen Gruber Garvey, New Jersey City University
Panel 2: Race and the Reception of African
American Literature and Film
Chair: Ben Carson, Bridgewater State
University
Leila Mansouri, University of California,
Berkeley
“Race, Readership, and the Constitution of the American Body Politic in Frederick
Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom”
Sydney Bufkin, University of Texas at Austin
“Reviewers, race, and Charles Chesnutt’s The
Marrow of Tradition: The African American novel and the American literary
marketplace at the turn of the century”
Kimberly Davis, Bridgewater State University
“Deconstructing White Ways of Seeing: Teaching Do the Right Thing in the Ethnic Literature and Film
Classroom”
Abstracts:
Leila Mansouri, University of California,
Berkeley
“Race, Readership, and the Constitution of
the American Body Politic in Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom”
This
paper argues that Frederick Douglass’s 1855 My
Bondage and My Freedom, which revises and substantially expands his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
borrows tropes and formal devices from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling Uncle Tom’s Cabin in order to foster in
his white, abolitionist readers the sense that they are participating in a
sentimental reading community and, more importantly, to compel those white
audience members to regard him as a full and equal member of that community.
Specifically, in his reworking of his first autobiography, Douglass puts
considerably more emphasis on sentimentalized notions of family and domesticity
and much more frequently uses rhetorical conventions of sentimental novels such
as direct appeals to the “dear reader.” These revisions work to evoke in
readers both sympathy for Douglass the character, who struggles against the
cruelties of slavery and racism, and respect for the Douglass the narrator, who
presents himself as the white readers’ social equal through his erudite voice and who, by using
sentimental forms to appeal to these readers’ sympathy for his former enslaved
self, works to create a racially integrated sentimental reading community.
In doing so, Douglass radically challenges
the racial hierarchy and the political ideology of the Garrisonian abolitionist
community, which encouraged escaped and freed slaves – including Douglass
himself – to tell their stories of suffering, both in writing and on the
abolitionist lecture circuit, using only “simple” language ostensibly so that
white audience members would believe that they really were former slaves and
discouraged them from intellectually engaging with the principles at the core
of Garrisonian movement, which at the time saw the U.S. Constitution as so
corrupted by its compromise with slavery that the North’s only moral choice was
to succeed from the union. My Bondage and
My Freedom, published roughly five years after Douglass had broken with the
Garrisonians and concluded that “every American citizen has a right to form an
opinion [on] the constitutionality or unconstitutionality of slavery,” not only
rejects Garrisonian racism by emphasizing Douglass’s authorial agency and
prowess but further, by mobilizing the tropes and forms of sentimental fiction
in order to create an integrated readerly community, attempts to create an
American “community of feeling” that mimetically stands in for the integrated
body politic whose “right” it is to read and interpret the Constitution. As
such, the relatively poor sales of My
Bondage and My Freedom compared with those of Narrative should be interpreted not merely as a result of the
difficulties marketing and distributing a slave narrative outside the
Garrisonian network but also as a reflection of the resistance of many white
abolitionist readers to writing that challenged the familiar and comfortable
racial and political notions of the Garrisonian movement.
Sydney Bufkin, University of Texas at Austin
“Reviewers, race, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition:
The African American novel and the American literary marketplace at the turn of
the century”
To better
understand the position of African American literature in the twentieth- and
twenty-first-century literary marketplace, we must first examine the conditions
under with African American novels were being read at the moment they first
achieved a national audience, when readers and reviewers were beginning to work
out the standards by which novels by African American authors, especially
novels that address contemporary racial issues, would be considered and
evaluated. In these reviews, we can see
the foundation being laid for the limitations the literary marketplace would
place on African American novels throughout the twentieth century. An
examination of the reception of Charles Chesnutt’s second novel, The Marrow
of Tradition, provides an instructive case study, since the novel was
widely read and reviewed, most famously by William Dean Howells. Howells, who had written favorable reviews of
Chesnutt’s first two story collections, gave the novel a review that was
lukewarm at best, calling it “bitter.”
Howells’s dismissal of Chesnutt’s novel has become an important part of
our critical understanding of Chesnutt and his work, but his review and the
reception of Chesnutt’s novel in general is usually considered in terms of
Chesnutt’s particular literary career, rather than in terms of what that
reception can tell us about the expectations for African American novels and
novelists at the time.
This paper
will expand our understanding of the reception of Chesnutt’s novel beyond
Howells’s review, examining reviews and responses from a wide range of
sources—national and local publications; prominent literary magazines;
specialized and vocational publications (including religious journals, law
magazines, and hobbyist periodicals); and newspapers and magazines aimed at
African American audiences. It will
consider the themes common to many of the reviews—particularly the justice or
injustice of the characters in the novel and the significance of Chesnutt’s
racial background (especially considering Chesnutt had obscured his ethnicity
during the publication of his earlier conjure stories)—in order to better
outline the evaluative criteria that were being established for African
American novels at the turn of the century.
Finally, it will interrogate the different ways “success” was understood
when it came to a novel written by an African American author, thereby
enriching our understanding of the expectations established by the marketplace
at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Kimberly Davis, Bridgewater State University
“Deconstructing White Ways of Seeing: Teaching Do
the Right Thing in the Ethnic Literature and Film Classroom”
In my courses on ethnic literature and film,
I have witnessed white students engaging the work of black filmmakers with both
empathetic and defensive responses.
Ideally, the texts themselves allow students to explore cultural
investments and political points of view different than the white norm and to
encounter evidence of racism and the destructive effects of white privilege to
which they may have previously been blind.
Films about racial conflict between blacks and whites are particularly
useful in the classroom because they often highlight differences in black and
white points of view which can then be productively analyzed. On the other hand, my experiences teaching
films about racial conflict between blacks and whites has also made plain the
difficulty of dislodging white ways of seeing.
This paper examines how white and black students at three institutions
responded to Spike Lee’s Do the Right
Thing, which depicts one hot summer day in a poor Brooklyn neighborhood,
culminating in the death of a black man at the hands of white police, and the
resulting riot and destruction of a white-owned pizzeria. My evidence base is drawn from blackboard
posts, response papers, in-class discussion comments, and anonymous
questionnaires devised specifically for this research project. This reception
study reveals that many white students were provoked into a defensive,
neo-conservative position by Spike Lee’s text.
Unable to empathize with the black characters and accusing Lee of
anti-white racism, many white students failed to see or accept Lee’s
examination of institutional racism and the economic structures that disempower
inner-city African Americans—a message that my African-American students often
understood implicitly. The riot angers the white students because the black
characters turn on Italian pizza shop owner (Sal), whom they see as the most
sympathetic character, ignoring his more racist and paternalistic behavior. Their investment in capitalism and neoliberal
ideology often leads white students to mourn destruction of white-owned
property more than the loss of a “trouble-making” black kid’s life. Thus they miss Lee’s aim to diagnose the
cause of rioting—black feelings of powerlessness, lack of opportunity, and
anger at police brutality.
In order to provoke white students to be more
self-reflexive about their own interpretive biases, I have moved in the past
few years from teaching traditional ethnic literature and film courses to
designing courses which place the literature and film in the context of
critical theories of whiteness by Dyer, Lipsitz, Rogin, Roediger, and Giroux,
and provocative critiques of white power by Malcolm X and James Baldwin. The shift in student response has been quite
marked. With scholarly tools for
examining white points of view in a critical light, white student viewers of Do the Right Thing were more likely to
get past their defensive reaction against black rioters targeting white
property, and to empathize with circumstances that lead to African-American
frustration and feelings of disempowerment.
Thus, I argue that the teaching of African American film and literature
to a largely white student body must be accompanied by a curricular
interrogation of whiteness and other impediments to empathetic
understanding. Educators need to be
fully aware of the blindness to power and to institutional racism that often
hampers white student’s engagement with African American and other non-white
cultures, yet such roadblocks are not insurmountable. White students’ responses were open to change
once they were provided with a “corrective lens” that allowed them to view
white power and their own values critically. Without such a lens, teaching an
ethnic studies course to a largely white student body may simply provide a
colorful dabble in difference that solidifies rather than expands or challenges
racist and privileged ways of seeing the world.