A Canon Canon

As I have described it in my Blogger profile, my dissertation will present "an intellectual history of an infamous, emblematic but still inadequately understood battle in the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s: the 'Great Books' debate at Stanford University."

One of the major ideas I am/will be paying attention to is the idea of canonicity -- literary canons, cultural canons, disciplinary canons.  This is why both E.D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom, the Mutt and Jeff of cultural literacy during the 1980s, are on my reading list.  They are two among many primary sources that I will be using in order to sketch out the broader cultural landscape within which and/or against which the particular debate at Stanford took place.

At some point -- and I haven't quite identified that point yet -- the debate about canons and canonicity shifts from a historic moment that I am examining to a current critical discourse into which I am, as the argot of academe has it, "making an intervention."  This is one of the (many!) tricky methodological challenges of my dissertation.  In order to manage this move -- and I think it will be an oscillation, a move back and forth between what I might call "the historic debate" and "the current debate about the stakes of the debate" -- I need to develop my own canon (or, if I simply must abandon irony for the good of the collective, my own list) of works that address notions of canonicity and cultural value since the 1980s.*

So far, my list includes such authors as John Guillory, Evan Watkins, Walter Benn Michaels, Gerald Graff, and Henry Louis Gates. I should probably add Stanley Fish too.  Lawrence Levine fits here as well -- Highbrow/Lowbrow was published after the Stanford kerfuffle, though very close to it.  And the wonderful anthology edited by David Richter, Falling into Theory,  points toward a number of authors with whom I will need to be in conversation.

But I would be more than happy to hear from our readers (and my blog colleagues!) on this question.  If you can think of other works that ought to be on my radar screen, feel free to add them in the comments section below.
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*Now, my canon on the canon question before the 1980s is an entirely separate list.  So far it includes, among others, guys like Matthew Arnold, F.O. Matthiessen, Leslie Fiedler, Lionel Trilling.  And yes, they are all guys.

Lincoln's Language and its Legacy

A lengthy review article from Adam Gopnik, at the New Yorker, "ANNALS OF BIOGRAPHY: ANGELS AND AGES":

The tendency to obsess over single words and phrases reflects, in part, the semi-divine status of Lincoln in American history. But it also reflects a desire to show that rhetoric and writing were as essential to his career as acts and orders and elections. In the past twenty-five years, and particularly since the publication of Garry Wills’s “Lincoln at Gettysburg” (1992), language and its uses has become a central Lincoln subject. Two prominent strains of rhetoric run through the period—the Biblical and the classical—and political ideas tend to get tinted by whichever of them the speaker uses. Reading Edward Everett’s Gettysburg address, the two-hour set speech that preceded Lincoln’s and was meant to be the real event of the Gettysburg commemoration, one is startled to see how relentlessly classical it is in tone and analogy: Everett goes on and on about Marathon and the Greeks and the Persian invasions, in order to “elevate” Gettysburg and the Union soldiers. Lincoln’s rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in all of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis.

What strikes a newcomer to Lincoln’s speeches, however, is how rare those famous cadences are; their simple, resonant language—“with malice towards none, with charity for all”; the concluding and opening lines of the Gettysburg Address—is memorable in part because there isn’t much of it. The majority of Lincoln’s public utterances are narrowly, sometimes brilliantly, lawyerly—even, on occasion, crafted to give an appearance of inevitability to oratorical conclusions that are not well supported by the chain of reasoning that precedes them. The undramatic, small-print language in which Lincoln offered the Emancipation Proclamation is the most famous instance of his mastery of anti-heroic rhetoric. (Karl Marx said that it reminded him of “ordinary summonses sent by one lawyer to another.”)

But Lincoln believed in legalism. One of his first public speeches, the Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum, in Springfield in 1837, declared a radical insistence on “reason” to be the only acceptable form of public discourse; the cure for the prevalence and epidemic of violence in American life would be “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason”: “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.” Lincoln tempered but never really abandoned that conviction. His rhetorical genius lay in making closely reasoned argument ring with the sound of religious necessity...

Grab a cup of coffe and read it all. It's well done.

Writers and Readers, Pens and Texts: An Exhortation for Historians to Read W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

Guest post by Brad Baranowski*

University of Wisconsin-Madison

The late W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitzis that rare sort of book that one ought not read with a pen in hand but will probably have to nonetheless. This is not because the book is in need of a good critical thrashing or that its development is so hard to follow that one must map out its twists and turns in the margins; on the contrary, Sebald draws everything to the fore in the most illustrative and radiant way: by hiding the core themes of the book right in plain sight. Along the way, Sebald ruminates on man’s historicity as well as Europe’s history, making Austerlitz a “must read” for historians of all stripes.

The major motifs of the novel—repressed memories, nonlinear time, presence of the past, and self-exploration—are clear to the reader before he or she can fully articulate this fact. In this way, the reader walks by Jacques Austerlitz’s, the book’s main character, side as he explores the relation of his own history to that of Europe’s and the connection of his own emotions, long thought dead, to the unexplained anxiety attacks and spells of amnesia that plague him. Naturally, this necessitates a different sort of reading than many other novels require. One does not read this book; one simply is with this book. So why did I have recourse to the pen?

The short answer: the book is simply too close, too intense, when the only thing separating the reader from its exegesis of the ways emotions such as sorrow, lose, and other feelings in the lack family subtly structure our daily lives that one must, regrettably, reach for a pen as a way to push it away when the separation afforded by spectacles alone proves inadequate.

I ought not universalize so hastily, writing “one” where “I” might be more appropriate. In fact, it is.

All along, I had resisted the urge to underline a sentence, bracket a passage, star a page, or scribble some notes along the edge. When Austerlitz, who left continental Europe as well as his parent behind as a young boy on a Kindertransport to England in the 1930s, discourses on his relation of past to present in history, on how he doubts the existence of linear time and wonders aloud if events we think already occurred aren’t really just waiting to unfold in the future, my mind leaped from the text and to a dozen or so directions this could be taken if seriously pursued. To jot down a few of my own philosophical speculations next to those of Austerlitz’s seemed the most necessary thing at that moment. And yet, the compulsion was not without its undertow: a voice harkened me back to the text and I left my pen sheathed. So why did I have no recourse to the pen then?

Chalk up the resistance to Sebald’s haunting prose that, in never quite addressing the real matter at hand, perfectly captures the anxiety and depression of Austerlitz, or the photos that add to the silent discussion between reader and writer, or simply the frank but fair assessments of some of Europe’s most iconic buildings—holistically speaking, the book creates a world that one must inhabit before even attempting to map [1]. Thus the pen seemed, at first, an obstacle to this. After all, how could I be a cartographer before even getting my own bearings down?

In the end, I don’t think I accomplished this latter bit—discovering where I was either in the text or in relation to the text. But that did not hurt my reading of Sebald, that is, not until I turned the page on Austerlitz’s awkward yet touching brief romance with Marie who, like the protagonist, is fascinated by European architecture.

The scene is set as the two travel together on the continent. Austerlitz draws distant as the journey wears on, becoming more and more taciturn, less and less approachable by Marie. The present sojourn has a tacit dimension rooted in Austerlitz’s largely repressed and unknown past, traced along similar routes that Marie and he follow. Felt but not seen, absent but also immediate, Austerlitz’s own unresolved, tragedy-scarred history quickly dictates his reception of the historical sites around which Marie guides him. At first, this passes by unconsciously, at least by Austerlitz. Soon, however, the issue is confronted obliquely:

“We stood there a couple of paces apart, like two actors on stage. The color of Marie’s eyes changed as the light dimmed. And once again I tried to explain to her and to myself what incomprehensible feelings had been weighing on me over the last few days; how I kept thinking, like a madman, that there were mysterious signs and portents all around me here; how it even seemed to me as if the silent façades of the buildings knew something ominous about me, how I had always believed I must be alone, and in spite of my longing for her I now felt it more than ever before (Sebald, 216).”

Marie protests these feelings, discarding them as obstacles to Austerlitz’s fulfillment, to his own mental health, and to her relation with him. These entreaties, though heartfelt and understandable by Austerlitz’s reckoning, fail. Here are his thoughts on the matter:

“That evening in Marienbad, said Austerlitz, I could not admit to myself how right everything Marie said was, but today I know why I felt obliged to turn away when anyone came too close to me, I know that I thought this turning away made me safe, and that at the same time I saw myself transformed into a frightful and hideous creature, a man beyond the pale (ibid).”

After reading these words, I picked up my pen and wrote beside them: “Vivid.”

Vivid indeed. Both Austerlitz’s description and, at least to myself, the fact that I could not resist the same urge that had earlier been thwarted brought home in a bright and radiant way the stakes of Sebald’s last work. Austerlitz does a lot of kinds of work for a novel. It subtly interrogates the relation of contemporary Europe to the Holocaust; presents new insight on old issues concerning artistic representation and memory; speculates on the philosophy of history and its dependency on linear notions of time; and even, on top of all this, experiments in matters of style, weaving Sebald’s unique prose around dozens of aptly placed photos, maps, and images.

Yet foremost to me among all the things it is doing is what Austerlitz does to the reader. Maybe this is naïve literary criticism; maybe it is just idiosyncratic or egocentric (depending on how you read me); or possibly I am just dabbling in pop psychology. But regardless if any or none of these statements are the case, I must assert that the most important work a piece of art can perform is how it reforms or transforms its interlocutors, be these viewers or readers.

As the American rhetorician and philosopher Kenneth Burke was right to note: “Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers. . . . These strategies size up the situations, name their structure and outstanding ingredients, and name them in a way that contains an attitude towards them [2].” Once more, they answer questions for the reader without him or her even knowing at first. Pieces of art, and Austerlitz is undoubtedly this, size us up even as we try to size them up. Novels, painting, songs, folklore, dirty jokes—these are agents, doers. One simply cannot interact with them without having a perspective emerge [3].

What Austerlitzdoes is make an intervention on this accord that is as timely as it is personal. In an age where insurance companies are eager to outsource the work of the therapist to that of the druggist, where issues of anxiety, depression, neurosis, and other mental health issues are things to be medicated as if they were ahistoric, timeless issues, Sebald performs a valuable service. Austerlitz is a stand in for anyone who has suffered in silence from the traces of repressed memories, who has looked at the commercials selling happiness through pills only to wonder: is this condition I feel only chemical in make-up? And even if this were the case, that these issues are merely the result of “atoms in the void” (to have resort to a Greek while talking about a German), don’t these atoms at least have a past? Austerlitz’s response: Depression, for all its chemical trappings, is a historical condition in the deepest sense of that term. Sebald’s tour of one man’s relation—or, at times, seeming lack thereof—to his own past shows this in spades. His present is the past, refracted through the layers of repression, reverberating through crippling anxiety and severe despondency.

The pen, then, is more a mark of Sebald’s success to connect readers to a complex set of emotions—past and present, explicit and repressed. Writing in the margins at moments of particular intensity is akin to a psychoanalyst asking you to linger on a slip of the tongue: you are at first slightly embarrassed by the incident, then outright confused at its meaning, only to be fueled by a deeper sense indicated by a perturbed feeling that whatever you just said actually had larger significance.  Drawing out these slippages that had been lodged within the readers own subconscious and allowing them to spill in the form of ink onto it pages for later reflection, this might be the most potent sign of Austerlitz’sgreatness.

Novel writing and reading is likely more than just a therapeutic enterprise. Indeed, its uses extend well beyond this endeavor into the realm of creating usable alternatives—be these anywhere ranging from a policy or an argument about something—for contemporaries to deploy in the task of living. But that does not mean that its ability to draw out and treat the emotions such as Sebald details should be either overlooked or underappreciated. As Austerlitzdepicts the great difficulty in accomplishing this feat, so Sebald reminds the reader that a novelist’s approach to the Socratic injunction of “Know thyself” provide valuable tools for its undertaking. At the very least, Austerlitz places at the forefront of this endeavor what all too often gets relegated to the background: humanity’s historicity. For this reason alone, W.G. Sebald’s final piece is well worth the read, whether or not you can keep the pen out of your hand.

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*Thank you to Andrew Hartman for suggesting that I post something to the USIH blog. Also, thank you to Gregory Jones-Katz for recommending this book to me in the first place.

1. I started Austerlitzon my way back from Paris this summer. After visiting the Bibliothèque nationale de France in all its grotesque splendor, these lines of Sebald were well-received: “In order to reach the Grande Bibliothèque you have to travel through a desolate no-man’s land in one of those robot-driven Métro trains steered by a ghostly voice, or alternatively you have to catch a bus in the place Valhubert and then walk along the wind-swept riverbank towards the hideous, outsize building, the monumental dimensions of which were evidently inspired by the late President’s wish to perpetuate his memory whilst, perhaps because it had to serve this purpose, it was so conceived that it is, as I realized on my first visit, said Austerlitz, both in its outer appearance and inner constitution unwelcoming if not inimical to human beings, and runs counter, on principle, one might say, to the requirements of any true reader. (276)”

2. The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1.

3. Burke recognized an important distinction that is worth flagging. “Many of the things that a poet’s work does for him,” Burke wrote, “are not things that the same work does for us (i.e., there is a difference in act between the poem as being-written and the poem as being-read).” I think that the distinction between these two is more pragmatic than essential: that the effects, say, a piece of literature has on its author can also be channeled by the reader insofar as these authorial effects dialectically structured his or her writing of the text from which readerial effects flow. (A point that Burke would likely agree with, I think.) The usefulness of the distinction, however, is that it alerts the critic to the problems—latent or manifest—that the reader brings to the text, as well as the subtle framing that the text does on these issues, and makes the exploration of these an important factor in any fuller work of criticism. (The Philosophy of Literary Form, 73)

Philip Roth’s Merry Levov as the Return of the Repressed

Philip Roth, aka Nathan Zuckerman

Lately I have been reading Philip Roth novels at night before bed. Although I grew up devouring fiction, I have not been much of a fiction reader since I began graduate school. This shift in my reading habits owes to both utility and taste. As for the former reason, I have come to feel I don’t have enough time to read fiction: there’s simply too much non-fiction—historical, theoretical, political—that must be read in order for me to stay current as a scholar. And to the latter, I have come to almost prefer non-fiction.

But now that I am in the midst of the long march through my manuscript, my brain is simply too tired most nights to read the type of non-fiction I typically consume. Moreover, I have discovered that reading excellent fictional storytelling is inspiration to my own prose. Thus, Philip Roth.

But I must be honest that my turn to Roth novels is not merely escapist. It is rather tinged with scholarly curiosity that was engendered by listening to Michael Kimmage give a fantastic talk at last year’s USIH conference titled, “Philip Roth’s American Tragedy.” The talk was taken from the book Kimmage has coming out this year with Stanford University Press, In History’s Grip: Philip Roth’s Newark Tragedy. If you’d like a preview, I found this article.

Kimmage examines the three books Roth wrote from 1997 to 2000, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman narrates all three books. And they have much else in common, which is why Kimmage treats them as the “Newark Trilogy” or “Newark Tragedy”:

They constitute a "Newark Trilogy," because Newark, New Jersey is central to all three novels. Newark is both a place where characters grow up and live a thematic imperative: it is where history begins for the novels' two Jewish and one African-American protagonists. Each of these protagonists escapes Newark only to find himself in the grip of powerful historical forces. They are thus reduced from powerful men to the playthings of history. In search of emancipation from the past, the heroes of the Newark Trilogy fall into history, and they do so without the protection of a well-defined personal or family history. Looked at together, the Newark Trilogy explores the will to live outside history. By explicating the failure to live outside history, the Newark Trilogy illustrates the mechanics of history itself.

I recently completed American Pastoral. I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize. I assume most of you have read it so I won’t describe the plot in much detail. It’s about Newark Jewish hometown hero Seymour “the Swede” Levov who translates the athletic prowess of his adolescence into success as a businessman, following in his father’s footsteps as a glove manufacturer. Levov moves his wife, the former Miss New Jersey, and his daughter, Merry, to the upscale, mostly Protestant exurb Rimrock. He is living the American Dream. His Thanksgiving dinners, which bring together his Jewish parents and his Catholic in-laws in mutual celebrations of the civil religion, are the American Pastoral. But all of this is disrupted when his daughter Merry becomes militantly antiwar and, at the young age of 16, blows up the Rimrock post office, killing one innocent man. Merry spends the next five years on the run before turning up living on the streets of Newark, a converted Jain whom the Swede determines is mentally ill.

In the midst of writing the chapters of my book on the sixties, I found Roth’s historical allusions compelling. This, of course, is Kimmage’s point:

The "Newark trilogy" rests on three claims about history. The first is history's malevolent force. The second is that postwar America is an experiment in the evasion of history. America offers the seductive promise that history can be escaped, and at no time was this promise more widespread and believable (to Americans) than in the years between 1945 and the late 1960's, between the Second World War and the Vietnam War, the "thirty glorious years," as they are called in France. If history is destruction, America suggests that it can also be security and stability and, with luck, prosperity. If history is malevolent, postwar America held out the prospect that history could be sweet and rewarding, all that is contained in the simplest meaning of the title, American Pastoral. Where can a poor immigrant family go but up in America? In its promise of good fortune, America is offering a dangerous illusion, and the three protagonists of the "Newark Trilogy" remake themselves in the image of a benign history. They share the illusion that they can live for the future without fitting themselves and their families into the past, the illusion that they can be what they wish to be, whatever new creation they choose out of the bottomless American possibilities. One protagonist is born black and lives as a white man. Another is born to Jewish poverty in Newark and makes a living pretending to be Abraham Lincoln. A third is born Jewish but is known as the Swede. This Nordic hero's mastery of American success is so complete that his background disappears from his name and his physical appearance. This is the third claim that the "Newark trilogy" makes about history. Those who try to escape it are punished with even greater zeal by the moody gods of history.

I agree entirely with Kimmage’s analysis here. By this, Merry Levov, a caricature of the "bad" sixties, represents the return of the repressed. She is the punishment that the Swede must suffer for seeking to evade history, for seeking shelter from history in the American Pastoral. Roth, through literature, theorizes history. What can literature offer history?

The current issue of the London Review of Books includes one of Perry Anderson's typically expansive and brilliant essays (is there a better living historical essayist?), this one on the work of Carlo Ginzburg, whom many of you might know as the author of The Cheese and the Worms. Anderson argues that Ginzburg’s hyper-attention to epistemology might be thought strange given his micro-historical approach. But Anderson contends that Ginzburg’s interest in epistemology stems from his wish to bracket off history from literature, even though he finds the latter compelling as historical theory. Anderson writes:

What might explain this? A more compelling answer lies in the sources of Ginzburg’s historical sensibility. His first ambitions, he has told us, were literary. He has also said that once he turned to history, his permanent inspiration became Auerbach’s Mimesis, the reconstruction by a literary scholar of the path to modern realism, from the Odyssey to Virginia Woolf, whose route included Ammianus, Gregory of Tours, Saint-Simon, historians and memorialists along with poets and novelists. Literature thus both preceded history in Ginzburg’s cursus, and has always thereafter lain adjacent to it. There is a long tradition of the practice of history as a branch of literature, but what this has usually meant is either a studied elegance (or unbridled flamboyance) of style – Gibbon or Michelet – closer to works of imagination than of record, or the quasi-reproduction of literary genres in the construction of narratives: for obvious reasons, epic and tragedy – Motley or Deutscher – more frequently than comedy or romance.

The bearing of literature on history, however, is of a different order for Ginzburg, and is original to him. In his work, literature is taken not as a standard of styles, nor a repertoire of genres, but as a tool of knowledge. In one essay after another, he has insisted that what novelists or poets can bring to an objective study of the past are cognitive instruments: techniques of estrangement as social critique in Tolstoy, free direct style as passage to a new interiority in Stendhal, ellipsis as at once suspender and accelerator of time in Flaubert, unmediated visualisation as access to fresh insight in Proust. But, of course, these are instruments to be found within what remain fictions. It is from this standpoint, quite specific to Ginzburg, that the modern scepticism that would erase the boundary between history and fiction altogether – Hayden White, already criticised by Momigliano, is the King Charles’s Head here – becomes such a bugbear. Not so much because it looms large in the discipline, but because it threatens the integrity of one conjugation of literature and history with false proximity to another, deleterious one.

Additional thoughts on the relationship between literature and historical thinking?

Children’s Literature as Intellectual History

Because of my research interests in education, I would guess I am more familiar with the scholarship on children’s literature than many intellectual historians. Most of the work on children’s literature seems to come from American Studiers or from researchers housed in colleges of education, or, increasingly, from the new and growing interdisciplinary field of “childhood studies,” spearheaded by the program at Rutgers University-Camden. I am currently reading a book from the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies: Michelle Ann Abate, Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism.

One thing about the historiography on children’s literature that leaves me unsatisfied is that there are few compelling notions about why children’s literature is important. That children’s literature is, in fact, important, is inarguable, I suppose, to the degree that it is not argued. Perhaps intellectual historians are better situated to offer answers?

Take Abate’s book, about children’s literature produced by conservatives since the 1990s. She argues that right-wing children’s literature—William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, Terri Birkett’s Truax (an anti-environmentalist parody of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax), Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series for children, Lynne Cheney’s picture books, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids, etc.—needs to be considered as part and parcel of the larger Christian Right counterculture. She writes: “Although children’s literature has often espoused didactic lessons, offered conservative morals, and even contained political themes, the new crop of books for young readers that began appearing in the early 1990s did so in a new and far more overt way” (4). She contends that these recent conservative children’s books contain “the broad spectrum of subjects that comprise the U.S. culture wars…” (4)

Although Abate adds an important component to the rapidly growing historiography on recent American conservatism, she does little to explain the importance of children’s literature, other than to show that adults consider it important. But again, this is common. Even the best addition to this historiography, Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, does little, from my vantage point, to explain why scholars should pay attention to children’s literature. Mickenberg is quite right to say that children’s literature is potentially influential given its vast audience—a “ready market provided by school libraries.” And she provides tons of fun material from leftist children’s book authors, such as by M. Boland, whose “ABC for Martin” (1931) began with the following clever refrain: “A stands for Armaments—war-mongerers’ pride; B is for Bolshie, the thorn in their side.” (Now that’s poetry!) But still…

Like in the history of education, it seems clear that the history of children’s literature pivots from Robert Hine’s oft-repeated quote: “What society wants its children to know reveals what that society wants itself to be.” But this sentiment is about adults. What does reading literature do to children? What do children make of literature? Personally, I think growing up reading literature made me a much more empathetic person, someone much more likely to root for the underdog. Perhaps this was due to the literature put into my hands by my mother, a high school English teacher with decidedly liberal sympathies. Or perhaps this was due to the very genre of literature, the very act of reading literature.

In a recent review of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Robin Blackburn takes issue with Moyn’s argument that human rights were invented in the 1970s. Moyn contends that using the framework of human rights to explain political or intellectual history prior to the 1970s is at best anachronistic, at worst a teleological cover for imperialistic impulses of humanitarian interventionists. Blackburn finds a good deal to like about this contention, but maintains that not everyone who fought for rights since the Age of Revolution did so in the name of state power and, as such, often did so in the cause of individual, even "human" rights. Blackburn disagrees with Moyn because he explicitly has in mind abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who never tied his disdain for slavery to state power. Quite to the contrary, he disavowed the Constitution as a guarantor of slavery. (This seems to come directly from Blackburn’s new book, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights.)

How does this detour into human rights history relate to children’s literature? Blackburn writes:

We can agree that fictitious lineages help no one. Nevertheless, if the first law of history is that the past is always another country, the second is that it is never beyond the reach of the present. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (2007) sees the appeal to subjective ‘rights’ as a product of the new print culture of the 18th century, arguing that the wider identifications encouraged by the novel endowed readers with a new sensibility and sensitivity to suffering. She traces the emergence of a concern with ‘human rights’ as much to the psychology of the novel reader as to the arguments of the philosophers—with Rousseau, as philosopher-novelist scoring on both counts. While the political pamphlet appealed to the reasoning faculty, the novel or poem encourages the reader to imagine herself or himself in the situation of another. It directly aroused sympathy and de-familiarized oppression... The reader could be invited to identify with those unlike themselves.

Does something akin to this explain the recent importance of children’s literature?

Scholars tend to argue that, for most of its history, children’s literature was inherently conservative in its didactic approach to instilling proper behavior. Only recently has children’s literature more openly explored issues that arouse empathy, or the relativistic side of morality. Thus, Abate argues recent right-wing children’s literature is anti-modern in harkening back to a bygone era and that, as such, it fails to arouse empathy.

But if this is true—that conservative children’s literature fails to invite readers to identify with those unlike themselves—then what explains its popularity? What explains the millions of copies sold? I suppose there is one of three answers to this perplexing question. 1) Empathy is an overrated component of recent children’s literature, which does not, after all, act like the 18th century novel. 2) Conservative literature does, in fact, arouse empathy, just not for liberal academics like Abate. 3) American conservatives are decidedly un-empathetic and don’t want their children to evince sympathy for those who suffer.

My guess is some complex combination of all three is at play here. But this leads me back around to my original question: Why is children’s literature important? Is it merely a synecdoche for adult concerns?

Children’s Literature as Intellectual History

Because of my research interests in education, I would guess I am more familiar with the scholarship on children’s literature than many intellectual historians. Most of the work on children’s literature seems to come from American Studiers or from researchers housed in colleges of education, or, increasingly, from the new and growing interdisciplinary field of “childhood studies,” spearheaded by the program at Rutgers University-Camden. I am currently reading a book from the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies: Michelle Ann Abate, Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism.

One thing about the historiography on children’s literature that leaves me unsatisfied is that there are few compelling notions about why children’s literature is important. That children’s literature is, in fact, important, is inarguable, I suppose, to the degree that it is not argued. Perhaps intellectual historians are better situated to offer answers?

Take Abate’s book, about children’s literature produced by conservatives since the 1990s. She argues that right-wing children’s literature—William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, Terri Birkett’s Truax (an anti-environmentalist parody of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax), Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series for children, Lynne Cheney’s picture books, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids, etc.—needs to be considered as part and parcel of the larger Christian Right counterculture. She writes: “Although children’s literature has often espoused didactic lessons, offered conservative morals, and even contained political themes, the new crop of books for young readers that began appearing in the early 1990s did so in a new and far more overt way” (4). She contends that these recent conservative children’s books contain “the broad spectrum of subjects that comprise the U.S. culture wars…” (4)

Although Abate adds an important component to the rapidly growing historiography on recent American conservatism, she does little to explain the importance of children’s literature, other than to show that adults consider it important. But again, this is common. Even the best addition to this historiography, Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, does little, from my vantage point, to explain why scholars should pay attention to children’s literature. Mickenberg is quite right to say that children’s literature is potentially influential given its vast audience—a “ready market provided by school libraries.” And she provides tons of fun material from leftist children’s book authors, such as by M. Boland, whose “ABC for Martin” (1931) began with the following clever refrain: “A stands for Armaments—war-mongerers’ pride; B is for Bolshie, the thorn in their side.” (Now that’s poetry!) But still…

Like in the history of education, it seems clear that the history of children’s literature pivots from Robert Hine’s oft-repeated quote: “What society wants its children to know reveals what that society wants itself to be.” But this sentiment is about adults. What does reading literature do to children? What do children make of literature? Personally, I think growing up reading literature made me a much more empathetic person, someone much more likely to root for the underdog. Perhaps this was due to the literature put into my hands by my mother, a high school English teacher with decidedly liberal sympathies. Or perhaps this was due to the very genre of literature, the very act of reading literature.

In a recent review of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Robin Blackburn takes issue with Moyn’s argument that human rights were invented in the 1970s. Moyn contends that using the framework of human rights to explain political or intellectual history prior to the 1970s is at best anachronistic, at worst a teleological cover for imperialistic impulses of humanitarian interventionists. Blackburn finds a good deal to like about this contention, but maintains that not everyone who fought for rights since the Age of Revolution did so in the name of state power and, as such, often did so in the cause of individual, even "human" rights. Blackburn disagrees with Moyn because he explicitly has in mind abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who never tied his disdain for slavery to state power. Quite to the contrary, he disavowed the Constitution as a guarantor of slavery. (This seems to come directly from Blackburn’s new book, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights.)

How does this detour into human rights history relate to children’s literature? Blackburn writes:

We can agree that fictitious lineages help no one. Nevertheless, if the first law of history is that the past is always another country, the second is that it is never beyond the reach of the present. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (2007) sees the appeal to subjective ‘rights’ as a product of the new print culture of the 18th century, arguing that the wider identifications encouraged by the novel endowed readers with a new sensibility and sensitivity to suffering. She traces the emergence of a concern with ‘human rights’ as much to the psychology of the novel reader as to the arguments of the philosophers—with Rousseau, as philosopher-novelist scoring on both counts. While the political pamphlet appealed to the reasoning faculty, the novel or poem encourages the reader to imagine herself or himself in the situation of another. It directly aroused sympathy and de-familiarized oppression... The reader could be invited to identify with those unlike themselves.

Does something akin to this explain the recent importance of children’s literature?

Scholars tend to argue that, for most of its history, children’s literature was inherently conservative in its didactic approach to instilling proper behavior. Only recently has children’s literature more openly explored issues that arouse empathy, or the relativistic side of morality. Thus, Abate argues recent right-wing children’s literature is anti-modern in harkening back to a bygone era and that, as such, it fails to arouse empathy.

But if this is true—that conservative children’s literature fails to invite readers to identify with those unlike themselves—then what explains its popularity? What explains the millions of copies sold? I suppose there is one of three answers to this perplexing question. 1) Empathy is an overrated component of recent children’s literature, which does not, after all, act like the 18th century novel. 2) Conservative literature does, in fact, arouse empathy, just not for liberal academics like Abate. 3) American conservatives are decidedly un-empathetic and don’t want their children to evince sympathy for those who suffer.

My guess is some complex combination of all three is at play here. But this leads me back around to my original question: Why is children’s literature important? Is it merely a synecdoche for adult concerns?

Intellectual History in the New York Times Book Review

Just one of my "hey this is cool" posts:

I was listening to the podcast of the New York Times Book Review this morning and was intrigued by the review of "'Mightier Than the Sword,' David S. Reynolds’s informative account of the writing, reception and modern reputation of 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin.'" In particular, I thought it was interesting to discuss the book as a literary work--something that drew praise contemporaneously but within the last fifty years or so has brought derision. Also intriguing is Reynolds' discussion of the international reception of the book. It sounds a bit, though, like Reynolds' is too in abeyance to the book. Henry James may have seen it as a boy, but did it shape his aesthetic imagination, the reviewer Andrew Delbanco asks.

Not mentioned in the review, this topic also intrigues me in the sense of how African Americans have related to the character of "Uncle Tom" over the years. He has not always been derided in the way one would suspect, given the connotations the name has. I remember reading something about this a year or so ago. If I stumble across it, I'll pass along the link.

Intellectual History in the New York Times Book Review

Just one of my "hey this is cool" posts:

I was listening to the podcast of the New York Times Book Review this morning and was intrigued by the review of "'Mightier Than the Sword,' David S. Reynolds’s informative account of the writing, reception and modern reputation of 'Uncle Tom’s Cabin.'" In particular, I thought it was interesting to discuss the book as a literary work--something that drew praise contemporaneously but within the last fifty years or so has brought derision. Also intriguing is Reynolds' discussion of the international reception of the book. It sounds a bit, though, like Reynolds' is too in abeyance to the book. Henry James may have seen it as a boy, but did it shape his aesthetic imagination, the reviewer Andrew Delbanco asks.

Not mentioned in the review, this topic also intrigues me in the sense of how African Americans have related to the character of "Uncle Tom" over the years. He has not always been derided in the way one would suspect, given the connotations the name has. I remember reading something about this a year or so ago. If I stumble across it, I'll pass along the link.

Is African American literature a function of the Jim Crow era?

Kenneth Warren, one of our plenary speakers at last semester's USIH conference, posted an article in today's Chronicle offering the argument for his new book, What Was African American Literature?--that African American literature no longer exists because it responded particularly to the issues of the segregation/Jim Crow period. He suggests that today black writers are more naturally a part of their class rather than their race and that their literature should be organized based on genre.

I'm still thinking about his argument. Race and class have been bound up in ways that are difficult to disentangle throughout our country's existence. Warren's argument seems to be a function of the question of whether or not African Americans are really more American than they are black, a question that has been perennially raised by black intellectuals. I think the themes he traces within black literature from the Jim Crow period are interesting and compelling, but I don't know that that removes the possibility of a contemporary African American literature that is both black and American and, depending on the content, part of a particular class or a diaspora or many other potential investigations.

Warren's first paragraph:

I'd like to make a claim that runs counter to much of literary scholarship. Historically speaking, the collective enterprise we call African-American or black literature is of recent vintage—in fact, it's just a little more than a century old. Further, it has already come to an end. And the latter is a fact we should neither regret nor lament.