<< Occasioned | Front Page | Ridiculous from Today's Perspective >>
Thursday, June 16, 2005
How Literature Registers, Reflects, Represents or Otherwise Transmogrifies Dull Dry History: A Query
Miriam’s derailed my earnest desire to avoid heavy lifting for the time being with an entry (cross-posted to her blog and Cliopatra) on how best to incorporate historical information into English classes. The traditional approach to history in an English course is typically uni-directional. For pedagogical reasons, English-types presume history an unchanging stable scrim onto which they project the complexities of a literary text: “Look, children, look! Labor trouble at the turn-of-the-century! What does Looking Backward say about it? How does Bellamy’s novel allegorize, reflect, register, represent, symbolize or otherwise transmogrify that dull dry history into a capital-A work of Art?"* As Miriam points out, “it’s very easy to slip into the habit of presenting historical background stripped of its own disciplinary signposts--especially when we don’t actually know the debates surrounding our history of choice.” She further “suspect[s] that many of us--[herself] included--present the history as somehow denuded of disagreement, while emphasizing the complexity of the assigned literary works.” Her suspicion’s justified.
When teaching a novel as influential as Looking Backward the problem becomes even thornier: to stick with the scrim-metaphor, now the complex literary work isn’t merely being projected on the scrim, it’s altering its molecular composition. The dim pinks become bright reds and the dark purples pale to lavender as the advent of an evangelical Christian socialism sweeps across the country. Should an English professor foreground the novel-as-impetus-for-cultural-change or the cultural-moment-ripe-for-an-impetuous-novel? (Yes, I desperately need to refresh my German. Or forget it entirely.) Short of resorting to a clumsy New Historicist leveling of all discourses, I’m curious as to how you, dear readers, confront (and confound) these dilemmas in the classroom or your own work. Or do you consider historical and formal questions utterly divorced and English professors only qualified to speak to the latter?
*Could I come up with a clunkier and more unartistic novel to stand as my exemplar of an aesthetic interpretation of an historical moment?
Comments
One way to do it, yes, is to look at the way the novel injects itself into the “real history.” How, say, Bellamy or whoever actually plays a roll in the historical processes of the time.
But, for me, the literariness of the literature is still in second place. Books are only worth reading when books “make something happen.” History -> Lit -> History.
The way I write and teach, my standard move is first to historicize the literature (what is this Belgian Congo deal that H of D is dealing with?) and then, vitally, seek out the literary form of the history - the way the “real history” takes the shape of a story, partakes of literary problems, depends upon concepts of character, plot, movement, etc…
From Congo in the Conrad to the “idea at the back of it,” literary shape of imperialism, or something like that.
This is Said’s method, by and large, and Jameson’s as well…
But I like to think we can learn something from literature itself - and not just literature reframed as a historical source, as something that happened - or didn’t.
Literature is not just history… Maybe in the same way that consciousness isn’t just “life”... Or something like that… Need to maintain the literary as literary - study it as such…
In this sense, all lit becomes for me “theory” - an envisioning, a trying-things-out, a model in a world of models…
My two sense, anyway…
That “books are only worth reading when books make something happen” needs an awfully broad definition of “make something happen” to be remotely justifiable. And I’m fine with that, personally, as some of the books I’ve studied have only been read by fewer than two hundred people ever. (Miriam, I suspect, has studied books an order of magnitude lower on that scale.)
I use a variety of methods, depending on the sort of points I want to make in the classroom or in an essay.
I like CR’s attention to how history itself is made, in the act of writing, to act out certain narratives, social dramas, ritual patterns, etc. Going one step “lower,” so to speak, it can be useful to pay attention to how historical records or “primary documents” themselves embody certain ideas about narrative.
But this runs the New Historical risk of reducing the past to discourse—or worse—to the discursive. (As if “The Cuckoo” or “Take the A Train” can be reduced to semiotics!) So it’s also useful to shift the frame, the background, and the foreground, or to look at the problem as a type of the “bunny-duck” dilemma. Simple framework shouldn’t be snubbed in teaching: the events described in *O Pioneers* wouldn’t be possible without the Homestead Act of 1862. Now, the degree to which one also presents the series of laws, culminating in the Dawes Act, that cleared Native Americans off that hearty pioneering soil is another story.
At times, a basic history of ideas approach can be useful in the classroom. A quick summary of the major points in the 20th century debate among black intellectuals over “nationalism” and “assimilation” can provide helpful background when teaching, say, Amiri Baraka in a poetry survey.
To paraphrase Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler,” you gotta know when to simplify and know when to “teach the conflicts.” Long survey courses bring this to a head. While it’s important to teach students that the long 18th century can’t be simply and statically divided into “Enlightenment” and “Romantic” strains, those sorts of (literary) historical terms are pragmatic starting points (that is, you’ve gotta master the binaries before you deconstruct them, just as you have to master the Julie Andrews version of “My Favorite Things” before you pull a Coltrane on it). While a seminar on the early 19th century novel is going to have to constantly problematize (oy that word!) the notion of the classical, the Enlightenment, the Romantic, etc. I feel that what’s true for how we use literary history narratives is also true for how we use history in general.
I’m with, LB. It’s a judgment call. Sometimes you emphasize the range of views, etc. Sometimes you don’t. And your decision will be motivated by your sense of where important disagreements exist. (Ideally, you make an effort to know and care about these things.) That will be true even of courses in history. No one problematizes everything all the time.
Looking Backward is a great example because it so obviously offers a just so story. (My students frequently deny that it’s a work of art at all.) Among other things, I always ask students to consider how much we should be inclined to credit Bellmay’s view of labor conflict or his implicit view of the Union army in the civil war or just his account of human nature.
"Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!--I know of no reading of another’s experience so startling and informing as this would be.” Thoreau, Walden ("Economy")
So… I guess I don’t agree at all with yer M.O., CR, since I agree with Thoreau that the function of narrative--or, at least, it’s greatest function--is to approach Thoreau’s ‘miracle.’
Still, your history-->literature-->history cycle intrigues, and, to some extent, I think the history (even if only of a moment) of the individual and of the mass as constructed documents/creative acts share more than they shun between them. Before I started working on my new book, a biography/history, I’m sure I shared the “dull, dry history” vs. “Art” prejudice. It does seem like there’s a good basis for this: historical narrative, at least, “works” without great artifice, while the story of the individual cannot really live unless it achieves style; voice. But, as I’ve learned, the vagaries of historical narrative are many, and the living history really only works if you can convey what people thought about what was happening, as well as what actually happened, and record that difference with some degree of narrative tension (to bring that gap back to life). Not to mention, of course, the event/evidentiary combinatorial difficulties of history, which few novelists even attempt (All Praise, William Vollmann).
All of which is to say, in answer to Scott: I think there’s a kind of complexity that goes both ways… I don’t remember who said it, but it’s probably more than one person: a first-rate novelist must be a first-rate social historian. Concommitantly, the first-rate historian must have a strong sense of narrative/character (where character can be a set--though that raises problems of its own). The novelist can no more ignore (or escape) the history of their times than the historian can present the lived experience of a time without knowing both their art--and his.
In the individual case, then, isn’t it a matter of circumstance as to whether you should “foreground the novel-as-impetus-for-cultural-change or the cultural-moment-ripe-for-an-impetuous-novel?”
Excuse me for being blunt, but if this is the case:
for me, the literariness of the literature is still in second place. Books are only worth reading when books “make something happen.” History -> Lit -> History.
then why aren’t you teaching history instead?
Maybe I’m just naive about this, but I would have imagined that an English Literature professor should, as his or her top qualification, give a damn first and foremost about literature as literature. Isn’t that the point?
This is the type of question I might earnestly and urgently ask myself in the weeks before the semester begins. By week three, it’s more likely to be the other way around: how to convince the students that people in books aren’t, like, real.
Teaching literature I think means teaching “formal questions” and literary history also. I’m not understanding how the two could be sensibly separated. If I’m teaching Emma, assuming the students have a workable idea of the social context, I’d rather they spent their limited time reading say The School for Scandal, and A Simple Story, and Waverley, and then read Emma again, before spreading themselves around in other directions. I like courses where immersion in a group of texts that are all busily reading each other produces a nicely organic sense of the individual texts’ horizons and referents and the way these knit together.
My basic assumption is that it is not helpful to think that historians, who also work in and with language, are engaged in passively representing a pre-linguistic state of affairs called “the past” any more or any less than are writers of fiction: rather what they are doing is making the past, insofar as it’s manifested in verbal form. So as much as possible I discourage discussing generalities with students, preferring to discuss particular texts, the more particular the better, actually. Of course this rule gets broken all the time, but it’s nice to have something to live up to.
I wriggle out of specific dilemmas to do with History by pointing at the campus library, where students are always welcome to go if they want to know anything worth the knowing.
CR, I almost agree with your statement that “for me, the literariness of the literature is still in second place. Books are only worth reading when books ‘make something happen.’ History -> Lit -> History.” Pedagogically, as well as in my work, I too more from history to literature to history, but I lack the discipline to stop, so it’s more like:
Historical Moment #1 -> Literary Text #1 -> Historical Moment #1 (Revised) -> Literary Text #1 (Reconsidered) -> Historical Moment #1 (Revised & Reconsidered) -> Literary Text #2 -> ad infinitum
My problem is that the artificial restraints of the classroom situation force me out of that cycle and into an artificial one in which the literary work represents the end of what, unfortunately, because an overly deterministic historical context. But that’s only in the classroom.
Joel, you and the others who’ve said it are right to claim that “a first-rate novelist must be a first-rate social historian. Concommitantly, the first-rate historian must have a strong sense of narrative/character (where character can be a set--though that raises problems of its own).” No one who genuinely enjoys, say, Eliot’s Middlemarch or any other realist or naturalist novel--although whether most naturalists were “first-rate” social historians is open to debate--would deny that a strong sense of social history subtends most novels. The difference between Eliot and Bellamy, for example, is that the social history to which Eliot alludes to and creates--more on that in a moment--is incorporated, almost subsumed, by the narrative; Bellamy’s occurs in the exposition, and the narrative, what little there is, occupies the first and last chapters of the book. More on this in a moment.
Tim, the idea that successful novels create and contain the social history required to understand them--and I’m being a bit of a Jaussian here--but that even invented social histories bear a relation to the world of the author responsible for them, thus the need for literary critics to be historicists of a sort. I don’t think there’s any way to study literature as literature--at least, there’s no way to study the novel as literature--without being an historicist. That’s why CR’s account of how he works and teaches strikes me as honest and responsible.
Sean and LB, this speakst to the crux of my question: “A quick summary of the major points in the 20th century debate among black intellectuals over ‘nationalism’ and ‘assimilation’ can provide helpful background when teaching, say, Amiri Baraka in a poetry survey.” More often than not, introducing these sorts of debates reduces the literary work to a gloss on them; in the students’ minds, the works become little more than a political or polemical statement. To speak of the background--and here I’m rehashing 20-year-old debates about New Historicism--implies that the literature occupies the foreground. As a pedagogical move in an English class, obviously that’ll be the case. But history, in students’ minds, has the gravity of its capital-H compatriot, such that any mention of the situations to which an author refers becomes a gravity-well into which all arguments about the literary text must, necessarily, descend. How do you present the historical material in the classroom without turning all the students into crypto-materialists?
Laura, you describe how you avoid this dilemma, but I wonder if your emphasis on pointing to particular texts doesn’t sometimes create a highly-focused idea of an historical moment that bears little relation to the broader swath of history at that particular moment. For example, when I taught Looking Backward, the students got an excellent introduction to the debates about Christian socialism, but to do that adequately I had to exclude a whole slew of other debates, so much so that by quarter’s end I genuinely felt as if I had done the students a disservice. The next quarter I consciously and regularly reminded them that the scope of our investigations was very, very narrow; but when I talked to a history T.A. who happened to have two of my students in one of his classes, he suggested that I’d created two loud-mouth ideologues who “knew” what was really going on and weren’t at all impressed with claims to the contrary. (As you can see, as theoretical as these issues are for me, they’re also incredibly practical.)
A few things:
Sorry - think I threw some folks off with awkward wording in my second paragraph: I meant that in the original post, in the hist->lit->hist mode, literariness is in second place. For me, always lit in first… I’m not of the school that thinks the only books worth reading are those which made something happen…
In other words, I meant to say, “But for me, in the mode that Scott describes, the literariness of literature is always in second place...” and so on
Sorry - I’m a new dad of a week, and super sleep deprived…
So I move lit-hist-lit rather than hist-lit-hist. This is essential, I think…
And in response to Luther’s thought that this might amount to the reduction of history to discourse - I don’t think so, not as long as you work with a sense that the way you’re coming at the problem isn’t the only way - just one way. “the idea at the back of it” (or lack thereof) isn’t the only thing to say about the Belgian Congo - but it’s an important thing - and something that literature has a better chance of showing us in all its horrific depth than any other medium.
So that’s what I teach, write about… Literature has a better shot of showing us something about, say, the way we experience time in modernity (under capitalism or what you will) than any other form… And it’s the form that I teach, because that’s where the action is…
(In a certain sense, I think this orientation separates the wheat from the chaff in terms of “literary theory” as well… But that’s another story… As I said in my first comment, I’d put Said and Jameson both on the lit-hist-lit list, at least when they are/were at their best...)
Congratulations, CR, on your new baby, and thank you for the clarification.
Scott wrote:
Laura, you describe how you avoid this dilemma, but I wonder if your emphasis on pointing to particular texts doesn’t sometimes create a highly-focused idea of an historical moment that bears little relation to the broader swath of history at that particular moment
I suppose it probably does create, er, that, Scott, about a literary-historical moment. I bloody hope it does. It’s not my job to teach great swathes of history independent from literature, fortunately.
Laura, I hope you didn’t take that as a cheap swipe, because I didn’t mean it as such. I know as well as you that teaching history isn’t what we’re paid to do, but when doing our job requires we misrepresent the complexity of an historical moment in order to represent the complexity of a literary text’s engagement with that historical moment, well, Scholar-Scott gets annoyed with Teacher-Scott and the rest of me suffers the sour belly.
Scott, something is bothering me about this simple/complex binary you keep bringing up. The real issue is whether you teach a particular interpretation about a historical moment in order to open up interpretative questions about a given text. This is something that even history professors do (i.e., read a particular primary document in the context of an accepted or assumed interpretation of an historical moment).
There is nothing being “misrepresented” here, provided students are told that history, like literature, is open to interpretation. As teachers, we can’t spend all our time covering all the possible interpretative bases. For example, if we teach Pynchon’s *Vineland*, we’ll want to teach our students about the “conservative reaction” of the 1980s, even if the National Review might take issue with certain interpretive assumptions we might make in presenting that background.
Ultimately, though, I’m not even sure that many of us offer clear-cut interpretations of history or literature in our classes. Most of the time, I introduce history in terms of a debate. (i.e., “In the 1980s, President Reagan’s policy raised questions about the legacy of the New Deal and Civil Rights Movement.")
In surveys and lower-level classes, that’s about as much history as I might offer; in advanced undergraduate classes, that’s still as much history as I’ll introduce (I hate to lecture). Instead, I’ll just send the students off to give presentations of issues of historical (or generic or biographical or theoretical) context.
But my main point is this: reading literature as part of an historical process that we’ve already interpreted for the class is not simplifying or misrepresenting the subject. If we begin teaching by raising every possible question concerning assumptions and foundations, we’ll never get a class off the ground.
It’s OK, Scott, I didn’t take it as a cheap swipe, or a costly one either for that matter. I may have sounded a bit cranky because to tell the truth I’m a trifle envious of people who are in charge of classrooms where there’s time and space for considering this question.
When you say “misrepresent the complexity of the historical moment”, I’m taking you to mean misrepresentation largely by oversimplifying matters, ironing out kinks and reversals in favour of presenting something clear and digestible. That’s mostly the form that the issue of how our studied book intersects with the moment of its publication tends to take in my classes. I try to steer clear of doling out quick summaries of major points whenever possible. In practice this means correcting factual misconceptions whenever I’m made aware of them, answering direct questions on specific matters, and not intervening any other way.
This para of CV’s says it well:
And in response to Luther’s thought that this might amount to the reduction of history to discourse - I don’t think so, not as long as you work with a sense that the way you’re coming at the problem isn’t the only way - just one way. “the idea at the back of it” (or lack thereof) isn’t the only thing to say about the Belgian Congo - but it’s an important thing - and something that literature has a better chance of showing us in all its horrific depth than any other medium
If a reading list can be selected so that separate texts are invited to show different depths on the same subject, or moment or whatever, that helps a lot; in principle i feel it’s more desirable to have students learn the value of going in deep on a narrow segment, experience they can then apply to other narrow segments, than to inadvertently transmit to them the notion that they’ve covered all the angles.
One analogy: when I studied music, I was taught basic Western normative ideas about scales, harmony, melody, chords, etc. I studied that for years and years before other, more experimental, ideas were introduced.
Sometimes I feel that undergraduate education works best when we follow that model: master the tradition, and then teach the controversies and debates. I’d rather have students live with Aristotle’s definition of tragedy for awhile before I pre-empt it all by giving them a history of the problems with Aristotle’s arguments.
Teaching the controversies, in some ways, is simplifying as well: we play Devil’s Advocate, or teach the critiques, without allowing the class themselves to think critically about what we’re doing. It’s like teaching a kid to play “The Girl from Ipanema”—but before they learn the chord forms, we tell them that’s it’s OK to play “out” whenever they want.
It sounds as if Laura would’ve been one of my favorite instructors. Establishing a context through primary texts was always the approach that impressed me most, both as student and as reader. (As good a critic as Jerome McGann is, I’ve learned most from his chronologically ordered “Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse”.) That was true with history itself, since historical overviews so often simplify and familiarize the complex, uncertain, and alien. Literature teachers have a special edge since at least some of their primary texts are likely to carry non-contextual pleasures with them.
To put it another way, literary studies seem to me (at their best) a place where history is practiced through Henry Thoreau’s miracle, and his miracle becomes something less vacantly sentimental than endless self-validation or Sally Struthers gazing at African children.
How well this approach works given the pressures of individual classes and careers, or with readers and students other than myself, is another matter.
Excellent comments and pointers all, but I want to focus on a few.
LB, you say If we begin teaching by raising every possible question concerning assumptions and foundations, we’ll never get a class off the ground. We can’t, as you’ve said, question all assumptions lest the class fall prey to the demons of enthusiastic undergraduate nihilism; however, we’ve all also taught students who, for largely pragmatic reasons I’ll address in a moment, have found “their” system and are sticking to it. They’ve thought through their system and its implications before and, because they’re often enrolled in five or six classes, come to the understandable conclusion that systems-already-thought-through are superior to potentially treacherous unfamiliar ones. (This “superiority” often, as I’ve implied, stems from what they’ve come to consider “excellent time-management skills.") Now, you may argue that these students aren’t the ones we should concern ourselves with cultivating but--I say with misplaced vanity--since I was one such student, I’m invested in whatever process abets the creation of intellectually flexible students.
When, as LB says, we read literature as part of an historical process that we’ve already interpreted for the class we’re not simplifying or misrepresenting the subject, I can only wonder whether--his sound and admirable intentions notwithstanding--he’s not handing his students an interpretive model that they’ll take elsewhere...including places it doesn’t belong. (I don’t mean that as an attack; or if I do, I’m attacking the student I once was and not LB.) That’s why the direct presentation of a slice of history and the direct application of particular literary interpretations of it leaves me with the shudders: irrespective of the professor’s intentions, the students will acquire a bit of “narrow” knowledge without any idea how it’s been narrowed; the appeal of that narrow knowledge, i.e. the illusion of expertise we confer to them, is often so alluring they’d rather endlessly elaborate its complexity than start anew...or, even worse, they’ll be unable to start anew because they don’t know how this narrow knowledge was created in the first place.
I may’ve missed my train there, so let me put it another way: when you write a dissertation, everything from alignment of the fender on the “redesigned” Ford Mustang to the latest episode of Lost is analogous to something in your dissertation. This “dissertation intoxication” dominates your life (as well as your relationships with the poor fools who suffer your presence). Writ small, this is the experience students have in LB’s, Sean’s, Laura’s and my own classrooms.
And now that I’ve written it down like that, I’m nearly convinced it’s exactly what we ought to cultivate in our classrooms. If I seem confused, well, I am and I’m not. (This is result of honestly asking questions you don’t already know the answer to.) I think where I’m headed is here:
First, how do you communicate to students the process of selection behind the class--the one whose euphoria fills the syllabus with topical works--without, in their eyes, handing them its Key to All Mythologies? Second, how do you juggle their understanding of the contingent nature of the conclusions drawn by the skills you teach them and the process by which you’ve ensured that a particular skill set will result in a particular conclusion. I.e. analyzing The Odyssey in a class on red-baiting in the ‘40s and ‘50s won’t help them sharpen their close-reading skills (but it’ll turn ‘em all into effective little sophists).
(If you’ve thought to yourself, Damn, Scott think about these matters too much, you’re not alone. I obsess over syllabus-creation and classroom tactics far more than is warranted or healthy.)
First, how do you communicate to students the process of selection behind the class--the one whose euphoria fills the syllabus with topical works--without, in their eyes, handing them its Key to All Mythologies?
By telling it to them. That’s only fair. It would be fun to have a Casaubon in the class, IMO - if terrifying.
To my mind, to put the question as shall we teach about literature or shall we teach about history is like saying, shall we teach about DNA or shall we teach about RNA —it seems to me that the two strands are tightly coupled in literary texts. How could one understand, for instance, the nineteenth century novel, in which debt continually acts as a tempo devise (from Trollope to Dostoevsky), without explaining debt—which worked very differently back in the pre-credit card age? The techniques of literature is saturated in history itself. And that strikes me as true about even the purest literature—Un coup de des, Finnegan’s Wake. In the Wake, when Joyce replies to Wyndham Lewis, is that history—or literature? I don’t see the sense in separating these things.
Scott writes, “That’s why the direct presentation of a slice of history and the direct application of particular literary interpretations of it leaves me with the shudders: irrespective of the professor’s intentions, the students will acquire a bit of ‘narrow’ knowledge without any idea how it’s been narrowed.”
I have to disagree. In the classroom, we’re modeling certain methods of literary study. There are times to show the students how to do certain forms of historical research. But there are also times where you model for them the work of rubbing a text against a context and seeing what sparks.
I’m lucky to have done much of my teaching training in freshman composition classes, where I was able to use literature to teach students how to write. These classes are in no way about the profession of literary study. The main goal is to teach critical thinking and analytic writing skills: observe closely, identify a pattern, identify deviations, interpret the significances of those patterns and deviations, and organize your findings in a clear essay.
Given those modest goals (!), I’ve found myself teaching, say, *Oroonoko*. Once we begin, as a class, to identify certain patterns underlying Behn’s physical description of Oroonoko (i.e., he’s a dark-colored European, physically), we can begin discussing what’s really at issue: race or royalty? Is Oroonoko first and foremost an *African* or an African *king* (or is he a prince?)? This is when I might provide some contextual details about Behn, the English Civil War, and regicide.
Have I already “digested” this history for them? Of course. But what I’ve also done is to show them that certain literary patterns cannot be fully explained by appeals to other details in the text, that historical or cultural context is necessary for a broad understanding of any human artifact. Showing them the importance of such research, demonstrating the fruits of research, is useful in psyching them up to go out and do the research themselves.
For me, that’s one of the differences between lower and upper level English courses. Your American Lit 1865 to present or British Lit medieval to 1800 surveys shouldn’t ask students to do much, if any, first-hand historical research. There’s barely enough time to digest the sheer vastness of literary history being tossed at them (medieval to 1800!!!).
But once students find themselves in, say, the early Romantic poetry seminar, then they can be asked to start doing some contextual work themselves (or—I should add—they should be asked to be more saavy about methodology in general; historicism is just one of several possible contexts a student should experiment with).
I’m not sure, in the end, if this actually responds to Scott’s concerns about my previous post. To return to my music analogy, text and context in the classroom are like standards for the student to memorize, live with, wrap his/her brain around, test out, improvise on, etc. So they read some poems, and you tell them, “At this time, there was a debate about nationalism and assimilation among these various poets. How do you see the poems responding to such concerns?” Is the context digested? Again, yes. But the point here is to get the students to practice riffing on that context, bouncing the different poems, their tropes and forms and patterns, off the sounding board of that cultural debate. (Of course, this is a different sort of historicism than the one that makes *King Lear* respond to a particular pamphlet about monkey hypnotism handed out outside the Globe after the second performance of the play.)