Caresse John
Northern
Illinois Univ.
Reese55@quixnet.net
Title N/A
Trudi Witonsky
Univ. of Wisconsin-Whitewater
The career of Adrienne Rich offers a model of the complex process of diversifying “high” culture. Her initial work, selected by W.H. Auden and published in 1951, exemplified the well-crafted, detached, ironic work of modernist “high” culture. But gradually as a result of her experiences as a mother and a poet, in conjunction with social protests (Civil Rights and anti-war movements), Rich began to include elements of women’s experiences, decidedly “low” (not “universal”) culture. There were many steps in a process of letting go of the canon, and finally the feminist movement legitimized Rich’s eventual rejection of tradition and “male” culture. However, in writing about women’s issues and dialogue with black women in particular, Rich in the early 1980s, revised her relatively binary understanding of gender/tradition, coming to reject identity politics. For a long time now, she has considered her position as an “ancestor,” responsible for the creation of our currently more inclusive yet nonetheless powerful (potentially excluding) “canon.” Her work is again complex in style, in dialogue with the traditional canon (though she incorporates more of the Romantic writers and as a friend noted, the Whitman in her poetry now is not the Whitman of her early years). She’s also very allusive in her engagement with multicultural traditions, and wrestles with the complexity of the negotiation of “high” and “low,” figuring out how to acknowledge the diversity of American identity, and how to pay tribute to influence without appropriation.
Defying Boundaries by
Mastering the “High” and “Low”: Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Series as
Political Intervention
Jane Davis
Iowa State Univ.
The purpose of my presentation is to show that the best selling Easy Rawlins series can be viewed as subversive works that utilize elements of the hard-boiled detective tradition in order to infiltrate ‘entertainment’ with social criticism in the tradition of African American protest literature and postcolonial theory. Specifically, Mosley’s ideology in the Easy Rawlins novels is most clearly illuminated by comparing them with his book What Next? A Memoir Towards World Peace, which I argue reflects beliefs that mirror many of Franz Fanon’s theories, particularly the classic Wretched of the Earth. (To clarify, in What Next? Mosley utilizes his father’s memories of Watts riots to provide a context for his own reflections on 9/11 and to argue that African Americans are especially equipped to both understand the anger against the United States and to try to build peace in the post-9/11 world. Importantly, this work was published by Black Classics Press and not by Mosley’s major commercial publisher and carries inside the front cover ‘warning’ written by Mosley to potential readers that the book is meant for a black audience. Yet, the ideology explicit in the book informs Mosley’s popular fiction.) Both Mosley’s memoir and Fanon’s book argue for the challenges of and the need to turn the downtrodden (i.e., those represented by, among others, Easy’s trigger-happy friend/sidekick Mouse) into agents of change. I argue that Mouse represents not only the ego-identity split-off/disowned self of Easy (who Mosley has stated in interviews he wants to be a ‘heroic’ black male) but also, in Fanoniste terms, Mouse symbolizes the masses who are the only true potential revolutionaries because they (unlike the bourgeoisie and even the proletariat) are outside of the dominant society. Yet, as demonstrated by Mouse’s reckless violence, and his attempts to turn away from this impulse at key moments in later novels in the series, they need to have their consciousness of injustice channeled into constructive action. In this light it is important that Mosley writes that Mouse is the ‘only truly free black person’ Easy has ever known, while Easy, in his investigative work, is often a tool of the power elite. Moreover, since the Easy Rawlins novels depict several decades, starting in the 1930s, they emphasize a continuum of corruption at the highest economic and political levels as a constant in American society, racist law enforcement, poverty, and dispossession. In sum, by analyzing the ways in which the Easy Rawlins novels demonstrate the idea voiced by Mosley in his memoir that African Americans can and should channel their experiences with and knowledge of oppression and violence into a transformative force that can combat injustice and therefore break the cycle that plagues society’s have-nots, I look at how Mosley manipulates a genre often identified naively as ‘mere’ entertainment in order to make powerful social commentary. For purposes of time, I will illustrate my points about the novels with examples drawn primarily (though not exclusively) from Little Yellow Dog, and Little Scarlet and A Red Death.
Advocating the
Personal
Caresse John
Northern Illinois University
What I really want to say is that we, despite our differences in race, class, gender, sexual preference, need our personal voices. We should not be writing without them. In answer to Kauffmann’s question, I would say it is impossible to “write against the grain of individualism” (1158). But it is not impossible to write without our personal voices. For this is what many women and men are taught to do, especially in the field of academia. However, I am for this personal voice. I want to use it, to write with it. I want others to use it and write from it so that I can hear them talking to me and I can talk back. These personal voices are necessary not only for our production of autobiographies, but also in our literary criticism. In fact, I think I am so provoked by Kauffmann because I see the abolishment of personal testimony as injurious to feminist criticism and, especially, to the women within feminist criticism. So instead of proving her wrong, I’d like talk about what personal testimony, within autobiography and within my own literary criticism, has done for me. I’d like to show why personal testimony is indispensable to my career as a student, teacher, and my life as a woman.
Further Information:
Working against Linda Kaufmann’s article “The Long Goodbye: Against Personal Testimony, or An Infant Grifter Grows Up” and with literary work by African American women, I argue and advocate for the use of personal voice, in fiction and in theory. In this paper I look specifically at how Harriet Jacobs, Maya Angelou, and Zora Neale Hurston use their personal voices and how I use my own personal voice in my own writing in order to argue for the use of personal voice (a low culture) to access members of high culture.
Summer Knights: Myth and the Medieval Hero in American Baseball Literature
Adam Kotlarczyk
Northern Illinois Univ.
That baseball literature has secured so little critical attention may be in part a product of our cultural association of games with the frivolous – an association that has worked its way even into our language, since anyone who is serious in our culture is decidedly not “playing games.” It may also be a product of our cultural ambivalence toward myth. Modern scholarship, with books like Deeanne Westbrook’s 1996 Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth has only begun to unearth the massive potential in this heretofore minimized genre. The game itself is modeled, after all, on the archetypal “monomyth” that has been told and retold since The Epic of Gilgamesh, for it is at its heart a game featuring, as Charles F. Springwood and others have pointed out, a “metaphorical journey away from home, and then back again.”
Baseball novels are populated with heroic and mythical characters, but they are frequently faulted and even morally ambiguous. Yet this is not a purely American innovation. Just as the game of baseball did not spring up overnight in Cooperstown (despite our own myths claiming otherwise) but rather evolved out of English stickball games, so too do the heroes of American baseball literature evolve out of pre-existing figures, participating in a much larger literary tradition.
“Summer Knights: Myth and the Medieval Hero in American Baseball Literature” examines two prominent baseball novels, Malamud’s The Natural and Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, finding in them the characteristics most strongly associated with heroic tales of the late medieval period. Like Gawain and the Green Knight, baseball literature uses games (gomnez, in Middle English) to provide a wide range of literary conceits that inhabit the fringes of our cultural conscience. These flawed heroes, their unique journeys, and their medieval forebears together contribute to form a distinctly American mythopoetic.
Caresse John
Northern
A Literary Folk
Tale: George Sand’s La Petite Fadette
Marcy Farrell
PhD Candidate, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Folklore and fairy tales
are often seen as belonging to “low” culture, understood as best suited
for the uneducated classes, children, young girls, or other such unsophisticated
audiences. Yet, they seem to come into vogue at fairly regular intervals,
particularly at moments when communities of authors and artists take an
interest in social and political questions.
Within the tradition of French
letters, literary folk and fairy tales have been part of “modern,” intellectually
progressive artistic movements since the seventeenth century.
Many authors have drawn from the popular, oral tradition in
order to create works of “high” art. George Sand did so in the nineteenth century
with her romans champêtres,
or “rustic novels,” which depict the décor and traditions of the peasantry
in her beloved region of
“Low” Literature as a Gateway to
the Canon:
Adaptations of Shakespeare for Children
Karley Adney
Northern
A debate currently
raging in academia is whether or not children’s literature is even worthy
of critical attention. The answer
to that question is simple: yes. In
his article “Poetics and Practicality: Children’s Literature and Theory
in
This paper seeks to provide a fresh examination of the intersection between the canon and a field gaining more power and respect in academia; this paper focuses on children’s literature, but with Shakespeare at its core. Using a perspective that others have not (with the exception of work done on the Charles and Mary Lamb), I draw on prefaces and introductions to discuss the contexts created for readers when Shakespeare and literature for children intersect. Texts under discussion range from the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare (1807) to Tina Packer’s Tales from Shakespeare (2004). These texts deserve attention because, although they may be considered part of “low” culture, they help to usher child readers into “high” literature and culture.
Megan Early Alter
Univ. of
W.B. Yeats once told a young James Joyce that “[Arthur] Symons has always wished to commit some great sin, but he has never been able get beyond the ballet girls.” Interestingly, Yeats’s diminution of his friend’s personal and professional obsession has become, for all purposes, an ersatz model for assessing Symons’s work. Critics past and present seem to concur with Yeats: Symons never did get past the ballet girls, and his poetry and prose suffered for it. During his lifetime Symons was largely reviled by the literary establishment for his penchant to poeticize and legitimate music hall culture, dancers, and prostitutes. (In fact, his poetry publisher, Leonard Smithers was best known as a pornographer). Anthologized today as a quintessential example of a fin-de-siecle Decadent writer preoccupied with artifice and lurid fleshy sensations, Symons’s poetry is understood primarily as an exercise in self-indulgent voyeurism. Setting aside his treatises on Decadence and Symbolism, Symons’s prose similarly is denigrated as embarrassingly over-informative about his own sexual fascinations. In fact, the bulk of Symons’s writings, copious reflections on the intersections between performance’s ephemerality and literature’s challenge to capture the emotions and sensations created in the spectator by performance, warrant closer examination.
Symons’s aesthetic inspections of the theatre, and more significantly, of performing women are particularly
interesting for their self-conscious preoccupations with the intersections
between performance and literature. This paper proposes to look at Symons’s admittedly
prurient writings on ballet and acting--as manifested through fascinated
sketches of dancers and actresses that appeared in Star and his own short-lived
Performance studies scholar Jane C. Desmond has commented that critical work that accounts for the performing body should “…call for an engagement with the tensions between the figurative and the abstract, and between the narrative and the nonnarrative” (Meaning in Motion, 3). “Scholar of the music halls” (qtd in Beckson, Arthur Symons: a Life, 75) Arthur Symons may not be the first to come to mind to do this work, given his reputation as a glamourizer of the tawdry. However, his aesthetic vision importantly recognizes performance as an expressive medium uniquely different from text, the difficulties inherent in transcribing the particularities of performance into language, and the female performer’s body as the central site for critical attention. That Symons’ perspective incorporates paradox makes it all the more fitting that he ‘tested’ these literary experiments in the form of daily theatrical reviews for the popular press. This paper will focus on Symons’s impressions of the female performer as simultaneously material and symbolic. Critic for the Pall Mall Gazette Henry Cust called Symons “dirty-minded…and squalid.” With the aid of time, distance, and subsequent literary experiments aiding current consideration, it is more appropriate to argue that Symons offered a proto-modern sensibility to a reading public that thought they were reading about a lecher’s take on can-can girls.