Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature I:
Chicago’s Role in the Evolution of Midwestern
Literature
Session Coordinator:
David D. Anderson
“Fair-y
Tale: The Wizard’s Souvenir”
Molly McQuade
Neil Harris has written of
the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in
Fairgoers had a
sense of evanescence even during
the
height of the exposition . . . Aware of the White
city’s
brevity, many visitors responded with urgency
to
the challenge of remembering it . . . Various techniques
could
capture and preserve the fair’s essence for permanent
evocation.
One act of fair
commemoration was committed by a newfound writer in
For with his close
collaborator, the artist W. W. Denslow, Baum explored
new approaches to book design and illustration that evoked with parodic clarity the fair’s White City in Oz’s Emerald City,
and the ragtag tumult of the fair’s carnivalesque
Midway Plaisance in the outlying exurbs of Oz. Baum
took the fair’s gigantic scale and shrank it down to a portable metonymy in his
critique of American commodity worship. In this metonymy, the Golden Doorway of
the fair’s Transportation Building, famously designed by Louis Sullivan,
reappeared, thanks to Denslow, as the quaintly
guarded gateway to the Emerald City; and the glitter of the multi-colored
electric fountains in the fair’s Court of Honor re-emerged in Dorothy’s Emerald
City bedroom as but one little green fountain spewing gusts and gouts of a
merely green perfume. In these ways and others did Baum salute his escape from
the genre of nineteenth-century fair (and nineteenth-century city).
To compare a map of Oz
with one of the fair reveals further kinships and contrasts. The map of Baum’s
imagined “Land of Oz” marks the internecine struggles, for example, of rival
powers and their often tacitly colonial underlings to claim territory and,
sometimes, aspire beyond, here evoking the notoriously patronized, implicitly
colonial “ethnographic” exhibits of the Midway. For Baum, plots of land
substitute for the fair’s plazas, its Midway, and its constitutionally massive
exhibition buildings: each fair schloss
monumentalizes territory, upward and onward, in a symbolism quite foreign to
the mind that conjured Oz. Nevertheless, Baum’s wish to map a land in words and
pictures does testify, still, to his preoccupation with an acred
outlay.
He shared that
preoccupation with post-Fire Chicagoans, once singed of their possessions,
facing an uncommonly flat land divested of former verticality, and seeking a
towering revenge in amassed commodity. His illustrated book pages, saturated
with a color range then novel in children’s publishing, heap up a compensatory
plenty to Fire survivors, even while mocking the very same. Baum’s land is
notoriously green, in part, as the Chicago Plan would be when setting out to
reform an urban geography. But, secreted away in the verdancy
of Baum’s terrain, are those ferocious “Midway” factions and their nonstop scrapping
for commodity.
As I will argue, Baum’s
“Oz” souvenir volume was composed to bolt the premises, quell the scrapping,
and resettle the territory of genre.
Ecoliterature and Chicago: Sara Paretsky and
Sandra Steingraber
Mary C. Obuchowski
When two fine but very different writers reach a point of
convergence, especially in regard to social issues, it is as if a new star
lights up in the universe. Sara Paretsky, in her lively mysteries, explores a range of
injustices, corruption, and just plain criminal behavior. Her targets include businesses, insurance
companies, religious institutions, homelessness, abuse of women and children,
prison conditions, racial prejudice, and pollution of the environment. It is this latter topic, in one case, the
effects of toxic conditions within a factory, and in another, contamination of
agricultural products, that dominates two of her novels. In her fiction, through the perspective of an
outraged, volatile investigator named V. I. Warshawski,
that Paretsky shows the origins of some of kinds of
environmental harm that originate in Chicago (although surely they are not
exclusive to that city). Sandra Steingraber, in her nonfiction Living Downstream, discusses the movement and effects,
particularly in regard to cancer, of those contaminants as they leave the
manufacturing centers and travel through water, air, and living entities to
damage animals and human beings. These
women, who probably are not even acquainted, together make a powerful argument
for consciousness of the consequences of our life style.
Chicago,
Ecology, Social Progressivism: Thomas
Wood Stevens’s Historical
Pageant of l917 and the Place of US Ecojustice
Robert B. Mellin
High
and Low Art in Ethnic Chicago: Adam
Langer’s Geography Lessons in Crossing
California
Marilyn J. Atlas
Crossing California, Adam Langer’s first
novel, is a memorable contemporary epic - - Jewish, Black, Midwestern, and
extremely geographic, it is set in Chicago’s West Roger’s Park during the Iran
Hostage Crisis, l979-1981, and explores adults and teens who mirror the
confusion, disruption, idealism and corruption of the times. Filled with images of popular culture, the
novel examines the role of a city in the creation of families and
individuals.