March Marches On

For me March marks the beginning of a new semester. I took a two-month hiatus from blogging to write a few papers--two important ones really. One was on American Studies, and the other on Popular Culture. The interesting one, to my mind, was the one on popular culture. I took a number of the important ideas from John Leland's recent book Hip: The History, which I strongly recommend you read. It got to the point, last semester, where the reading journal and the paper writing collapsed upon each other, so I never really documented my reading informally. Check out the link above. Leland, a popular music critic who's written for Rolling Stone, among others, has traced the construct of hip as a series of intersections between Black and White cultures. Rather than oversimplifying it with the sort of binary approach that the white man stole the blues from the black man (which approximates his words -- I liked the book so much, I think I probably plagiarize it at this point without even opening it), Leland traces the concept of hip to racial crossovers and boundaries, connecting, for example, the minstrelsy to jazz and the blues to gangsta rap to white rappers like Eminem. Another book, Wayne Munsen's All Talk about the talkshow in media culture, helped me to draw the connection between amusement parks like Coney Island and the 1990s versions of the talkshow (as well as the more current ones)--but from that I could also connect that to the idea of schadenfreude in present-day reality programs such as American Idol. I think the paper is really pretty decent, actually.

I developed a progress report for my doctoral committee that tells what I've been up to for the last semester. It has links to all my papers for the semester. Insomniacs, click here.

"American Studies: A Not So Unscientific Method”

Brian Attebery

So I’m at this party, and a drunken soldier comes up and starts talking to me. Long story short, he says, “You’re majoring in American Studies? When I was at Notre Dame, that was the major with the highest paid graduates!”

“No Kidding!” I said, foolishly assuming the best. “Yeah, those are the only courses the football players could pass. Hah ha ha ha ha.”

If that fool could read big words, he might have a field day with Attebery’s article, in which he summarizes Henry Nash Smith’s point of view that American Studies, by definition has to be unscientific. He also concurs with “Marxist-Freudian readings of American culture,” which argue that “no study of culture is strictly empirical.” But rather than muddying the waters, Attebery’s argument, I believe, strengthens the theory behind the discipline.

Attebery’s point is that the “feature of the past” American Studies tries to measure “is something particularly accessible through poetry and literary texts.” This, by its very nature, can’t be empirical research.

Leo Marx wrote to Smith that he thought it would be “possible to trace, using the literature as an index, the genesis of the American middle class simply in terms of its self-consciousness, or the consciousness of ‘middleness.’” That’s such an important idea. To me it almost sounds like he views literature as a cultural Rorschach test, a way to measure the inner workings through a certain type of abstract image. Marx was not as interested in the “historical and cultural context” of the literature as he was in the “‘consciousness’ that is formed by the something collective,” whatever “American-ness” there was.

Attebery even spells out Marx’s methodology, or “regimen” for analyzing culture. He wanted to “Isolate the use of industrial-technical themes, metaphors, images in the work of the writer.” Then, he wanted to see how these same themes “fit into the novel, story or poem.” After that, he examined the way the way the writer related his or her own “preoccupations, themes, concepts” with the way the characters behaved “toward the emerging machine age.” Finally, he planned to go back to the “works of art” and try to interpret them in the light of what he had surmised from his work. Attebery points out that Marx’s methodology was “circular,” rather than “an open spiral.”

Marx also dealt with the issue of whether to consider literature in terms of its historical context. Neither Marx nor Smith was inclined to think of literature as “exceptional, an isolated aesthetic object.” Rather, both scholars valued literature because they believed “it is more than ordinarily representative of its time and place.”

Marx and Smith used the methodology of myth and symbol as “interpretive tools to aid them in identifying the structures of thought used by nineteenth-century writers to sort out their own complex and contradictory environment.” One of the key disagreements with their methodology is that the critics are inclined to begin with a foregone conclusion and find evidence for whatever conclusion they believe.

Though Smith and Marx didn’t always agree, they did share the belief that: “The subject matter of American studies is the American mind or consciousness.” Also, “The method for studying this subject involves interpreting artifacts” such as literature. The next is that “the interpreter is himself a product of history.” Another is that the method isn’t flawed—it can “validated by interdisciplinarity.” Finally, they agreed that “literature has a special place in American studies because the literary text articulates its own theory about itself and its time and place.”

Attebery ends by saying that we don’t need to “apologize for American studies.” Instead, we can value it as a “different kind of science, one in which interpretation and cross-disciplinary validation replace prediction and experimental verification.”

“Humor as Rhetoric and Cultural Argument”

Stephen Smith’s 1993 essay from the Journal of American Culture argues that “humor is ‘a part of the interpretation of life’ (Leacock)” and that “humor is usually purposeful and often persuasive” (51). He believes, in fact, that humor is “one of the more effective means of argument and persuasion in popular culture” (51).

His argument, though lofty, is common sense, when I stop to reason it out. He cites Gary Fines argument, for example, that “humor can both build social cohesion by narratively establishing group norms and maintain social control through ridicule to enforce norms and punish deviance” (51). Step into any high school if you don’t believe him. A great popular culture example of this principle is the high school comedy film, which explicitly serves to ridicule those who deviate from the standard behaviors and appearances (thin, heterosexual, etc.). The fact that humor affects the behavior of others is a given, then. Noticing it goes back as far as Freud (though Smith doesn’t mention that here).

Smith moves, then, more specifically to the idea of Southern humor. Citing C. Vann Woodward’s essay on “The Irony of Southern History,” Smith explains the “ironic society” of the South. “[P]articipants in an ironic situation are rarely conscious of the irony, else they would not become its victims,” says Smith (52). Another writer, Olsen, says that “Irony is a state of mind [...] that assumes the presence of a meaning behind or under a given text” (qtd. in Smith 52).

The argument from there is to prove that the South is an ironic society. Smith moves on to describe the literary history of the South (in brief). He attempts to “identify the unique characteristics of contemporary Southern humor, illuminate the distinctive new rhetoric of the new ‘local color’ writers and distinguish it from that of their literary progenitors” (54). In order to do so, Smith examines the work of five contemporary Southern writers who exemplify the characteristics of Southern writing.

South Carolina writer, William Price Fox writes of Doug Broome, characteristic of the “anti-heroes frequently found in contemporary Southern humor” (54). Another characteristic is interaction with a Black character on equal terms (55). Smith describes Southern culture as “constituted by the unique traditions and rituals of the region,” identifying Labor Day as “the highest of holy days” (55). He explains that one Fox novel describes “four [...] sacred rites—dancing, dying, dining and drive-ins” (55). As a narrator, Fox toys with Southern “conservative conformity.” Smith says that “[r]ather than poking fun at the deviants to demonstrate social superiority, as did the early local color writers, Fox and the other contemporary writers of humor” are more likely to construct “a vision of a more tolerant society” (55).

Another writer is Larry L. King (obviously not the fish-faced CNN interviewer), who, notably he says has the same sense of “place” and “people” as Fox. Like other Southern writers, King “writes in first person and identifies with the common folk” (56). The tension is that one always reluctantly must admit to being part redneck, but the ideal would be to be a Good Ol’ Boy. Smith quotes King’s novel, when the protagonist says he still doesn’t like “being called a Redneck…especially when you know in your genes and in the dirty back roads of your mind that you are one—despite having spent years trying not to be” (56). He draws a distinction between “’a Neck of the true plastic Jesus-on-the-dashboard and the pink-rubber-haircurlers-in-the-supermarket variety’ and a higher life from known as a Good Ol’ Boy” (56).

By comparison, columnist Lewis Grizzard’s writing, says Smith, might be “the best example of the rhetoric of Southern humor” because he tends to value the “folks who overcome overwhelming odds” over “the morally superior stance of the Old South Whigs and the New South Bourbons” (56).

Another of the five writers, Florence King, grew up in the Ballston area, right around the corner from here. He describes her stories and narratives as leaning “toward subtle irony” but with some “full-frontal satire” as well, since she wields “her weapon sometimes as a scalpel but more often as a machete” (58). Smith says that Southern women use the language differently than men for four reasons: First, because, traditionally, “writing was work that required no heavy lifting [...] so it came to be seen as women’s work.” Second, “the Pert Plague” made Southern women better storytellers. Third, women are better equipped to handle “the special contradictions of Southern culture.” For example Southern women are expected to “be frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained—all at the same time” (58). Fourth, because they’re used to making conversation at boring debutante balls, their facility with language exceeds men’s. Apparently, Smith is arguing that King’s work demonstrates these principals (though I don’t recall her, for example, attending cotillions in her autobiography).

However, King does define Southern-ness after a fashion, when she says, “Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy….If something intolerable cannot be changed, driven away, or shot, they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it. Conformists to the end, they nonetheless feel affection for any eccentric.” King says that calling someone an eccentric “is the nicest thing any Southerner can say about one of their own” (qtd. in Smith 59).

Finally, Smith discusses Molly Ivins, the famous Texas columnist, saying that Ivins qualifies as a new Southern regionalist because she observes the rules of new Southern rhetoric. Rather than seeing the region as “a homogenous and monolithic culture,” she views Texas as “a mosaic of cultures [...] black, Chicano, Southern, freak, suburban, and shitkicker (Shitkicker is dominant)” (qtd. in Smith 59).

Smith points out that Ivins uses humor to poke fun at some of the most serious issues in Southern culture. She argues that “[r]ace might be the key to understanding the changing order of Southern society,” saying “Once you figure out they are lying to you about race, you start to question everything” (60).

Smith decided to write about these new Southern writers to prove that “the rhetoric of contemporary Southern humor was quite different from that of the past” (62). Applying Bakhtin’s ideas about language, he points out that these writers “provide an effective [...] heteroglossia that lets their characters speak for themselves in their own language” (62). In addition, unlike earlier writers who were conscious or unconscious racists, they “enthusiastically side with their characters in challenging the hegemony of the prevailing hierarchy of class and race” (62).

Sideshow U.S.A.:

Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination
Rachel Adams

So you’re at the pulled-pork part of the street fair along the North Carolina border. Or, let’s say you’re about to buy a trunkful of illegal fireworks. All the little booths have the same merchandise at roughly the same price. Then your buddy says, “Holy smokes, that one over there has a cashier that’s a bearded lady.” The premise of this book is that you’d go to the booth with the bearded lady because Americans are fascinated by freaks, so fascinated that they display them as cruelly as they do zoo animals. And when a freak isn’t available, they invent one so that people can ooh and aah and feel comforted to know that their own oddities are, well, normal.

Adams points out the significance of our obsession with freaks, notable in a country that seems to be based on acceptance of individuality. It seems contradictory then, to display and gawk at freaks. Are freak shows a celebration of independence or a nudge toward conformity (2)?

Adams looks at the idea of freakishness from a number of perspectives, including the historical, pointing out an important idea that I think applies not just specifically to freakishness but also to other important parts of popular culture. She says that “freakishness is a historically variable quality,” noting that at one time freakishness might have denoted “divine meaning,” whereas “by the nineteenth century freaks had no inherent significance” (5).

Adams deals in her first chapter with the issue of the sideshow “Africans” displayed like zoo animal freaks. Doing so was a way of acting out racism, or in Adams’s words demonstrating a struggle “over cultural authority” (32). The circus show people created a spectacle of “ethnographic freaks” under the pretense of educating people about “African wild men” (32). These side show workers would be fed raw meat and told to grunt and groan as though they could not speak. Ota Benga was one such creation; he had to share a cage with an orangutan. Others, like Ishi, were Native Americans, displayed to huge crowds as missing links to cavemen or the last remaining members of their tribe.

The following chapter is devoted entirely to Tod Browning’s Freaks. I’ve never understood the world’s fascination with that movie. It doesn’t strike me as particularly funny, and I don’t enjoy watching it for its sideshow interest, as I think many viewers do. Probably the best way to view the film is as a story involving human beings—and in part, I think that’s what Adams is getting at in this chapter. She talks about a stage play later created of the film that doesn’t give that same honor to the performers as true humans. One of the most interesting things about this film—which is I think what Browning intended—is the tension the viewer (at least the thinking one) must necessarily feel. Polite people are told not to look at or laugh at the freaks, yet the film requires us to stare. What are we to do?

Adams explains my sentiments in a far more scholarly manner. She says that the photography addresses the capacity these “freaks” have for “the dynamics of normative movement” (68). The film toys with freakishness of size and sexuality of its performers. Most importantly, it includes the audience, reaching out to say you’re “one of us” (85).

The next section deals with “The Queer Fiction of Carson McCullers.” I didn’t realize before I read it that Carson McCullers had been a bisexual woman who was more often in a “triangular” relationship with two men than any other (but she also was with women).

Adams argues that McCullers’s fiction is “populated by freaks” with disabilities that interfere with the formation of “identity” (89). Adams says McCullers connects queer and freaks in her writing, saying that while queer generally refers to “acts that cannot be referred to as heterosexual”, freaks refers to “beings who make all kinds of queer tendencies visible on the body’s surfaces” (90). Both freaks and queers suffer in her stories because they don’t fit in socially. These freaks can be seen, says Adams, as “aspects of the self” (91). They are produced not by nature but by the judgments of the community (91). Adams gives as examples characters in Clock without Hands and Member of the Wedding.

In “Freak Photography,” Adams connects the photography of Diane Arbus with Carson McCullers’s fiction, saying that Arbus’s photographs of “freaks” is “motivated by a knowing appreciation for the waning popular culture of sideshows in America (112). Some of the other contemporary work with “freak” photography is interesting because it parodies the work of original sideshow photographers—as well as that of fashion photographers—by showing “freaks” in poses traditionally reserved for fashion models. Zoe Leonard’s Pin-up #1 (Jennifer Miller does Marilyn Monroe) is a good example; a bearded lady lays nude in a provocative S-pose….beautiful until one notices her beard (136). The photograph draws attention to one’s expectation about beauty.

Another interesting chapter is “From the Sideshow to the Streets: Performing the ‘Secret Self.’” Here, Adams talks about the term freak as it is applied to hippies, the Woodstock scene, drug culture, sex, etc. She discusses the way the term derived its positive connotation from a negative one. Adams also discusses Geek Love.

I don’t think the American fascination with freaks is unique; other cultures do it as well. Maybe it’s just an interesting phenomen. Ho hum.

Brief? Hell!
A Brief History of American Culture
Robert Crunden

Does a historian decide one day, “well, I guess for that next book, I’ll write a little history of American culture? Shouldn’t take me too long. Then I’ll play a couple of sets of tennis and then start the next one…”

Truthfully—isn’t it a trifle presumptuous to imply that all of American culture from its inception can be distilled into just over 300 pages? Well, it’s as impressive as can be to begin with. The rest of us wouldn’t know where to begin. Obviously, Robert Crunden does. In order to be able to finish—and get those two sets of tennis in before lunch time—he had to limit his definition of culture from the wide one that I’m thinking of as I write this (language, customs, dress, music, fashions, religions, fads, etc.) to a very narrow one that seems to be primarily political. Yet, not even he admits that. In the beginning he states that his purpose isn’t to join into any sort of discipline-based theoretical debate on the definition of the word, but he does say “I define culture as creative achievements at any level: classical music as well as commercial innovation, much-admired novels as well as intricate thrillers” (ix). That definition is noteworthy, because it identifies him to those of us in the know as accepting of low culture as well as traditional high culture. But it also seems to suggest that he’s going to take a wide view of culture and look at more than the political world. He specifies further, then, that his definition of American culture is “a peculiar mixture of Christianity, capitalism, and democracy in that order” (ix). So he uses those specific ideas as a lens for looking at America. The result is (for me anyway) a little disappointing.

Nonetheless, the scope is still pretty impressive, starting as it does in merry old England in the late 1500s. Crunden says that really, “American Civilization began in the England of Queen Elizabeth I” (xv). He describes the climate at the time, the lack of freedom of worship that caused “religious disputes” of sufficient stature that they were willing to undertake such a dangerous journey.

In the next section on Boston in the late seventeenth century, Crunden describes John Winthrop, calling him “the most important political figure to make the transition to America” (3). His “city on a hill” metaphor “marked the beginning of American exceptionalism and gave the colony a foreign policy even before it had a town” (4). Crunden says “Anne Hutchinson deserves mention because she was the first woman of importance in America” (7). Roger Williams was also important because he was opposed to mixing religious oaths with secular, state-oriented activities such as swearing-into office. His influence is still felt in that regard.

The second chapter deals with Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century, where Franklin and Cotton Mather are discussed. In chapter three Crunden discusses Virginia, around the same time. It’s not surprising to learn that “Virginia was the first of the colonies to have a permanent settlement but slow to develop a civilized culture” (40).

The book impressively breaks down history into small periods of fifty years or fewer and singles out two or three important figures per period, within a special political (and sometimes literary theme.

Maybe I'll confirm my bias here, but I think the book would have been richer with some discussion of what else was happening culturally. I think to limit the definition of culture the way he did limited the interest of the book. Ho hum.

Graff’s essay, “Promise of American Literature Studies,” from Professing Literature: An Institutional History takes up some of the issues John T and I talked about today. The question Graff tries to answer by writing it is why the study of American literature never became interdisciplinary when it seemed ever poised on doing so. He talks about the changes that took place in various institutions that adopted study of the literature and asks specifically, “Why, when conditions seemed ripe for the creation of a study of culture that would overcome the old compartmentalizations and fragmentations, did such a study not materialize?”

Graff begins, as do many of the other essayists I’ve read, by tracing the history of the field. He says that the notion of interdisciplinary study isn’t new, that by the mid-twentieth century Northrop Frye already protested the many “determinisms in criticism,” such as Marxism, Freudianism, Existentialism, and the like. But Graff says that Frye was wrong to infer that such “conceptual framework[s]” were new, citing Stanley Edgar Hyman’s 1948 survey, which “characterized [...] the organized use of non-literary techniques and bodies of knowledge to obtain insights into literature.” In other words, bringing in theories outside literature to understand the literature was nothing new. But Frye’s work itself, with its “system of myths, modes, and genres,” says Graff, “would make it possible to blur distinctions among literature, religion, popular entertainment, and advertising as expressions of common patterns of mythic identification.” Now, this idea is important as a feature of American studies because it ignores the old focus on high culture and sanctions consideration of elements like popular entertainment and advertising as reasonable areas of study to learn about culture; it expands the idea of culture beyond what people in an ivy-covered building think about.

Come to think of it, this connects to the article about Bakhtin and heteroglossia that I complained the other day was so difficult to understand. Bakhtin says that his novelization theory means that the text written in any number of situations is worthy of study. The traditional novel is an obvious case, but the advertisement text of a copy writer and the text of a Harlequin romance are equally valid as well. That’s the nature of popular culture study.

Anyway, so in the mid-twentieth century, as Randall Jarrell put it, critics became “much better armed than they used to be” with tools of interdisciplinarity. Earlier, in the 1930s, Parrington “thought of scholarship as a science and of criticism as inherently subjectivist.” But it took the next generation of theorists (like Fiedler, Marx, Lewis, Smith, and Matthiessen) to develop the idea of “a literary work as a microcosm of collective psychology or myth” and to make “New Criticism into a method of cultural analysis.”

The theorists saw the literature in terms of “thematic dualisms” such as “’Adamic’ innocence versus tragic experience (Lewis); frontier versus city (Smith); pastoral ‘middle landscape’ versus industrial machine (Marx); and male fellowship versus acceptance of social and sexual experience (Fiedler).” The only theorist of the group that was political at all was Matthiessen, who, says Graff, “managed to transform the organic social conservatism of Eliot and the Agrarians into a celebration of the democratic spirit.” His book, American Renaissance, “fused cultural criticism and academic literary history with the New Criticism’s method of explication and its themes of complexity, paradox, and tragic vision.” While Graff observes that it may be weak in its “prolix” analyses of some texts, one of its great strengths is “confronting American literature not only as an academic field but as a problem of cultural destiny.” Matthiessen thought that “American culture’s greatest weakness ‘has continued to be that our so-called educated class knows so little of the country and the people of which it is nominally part.” That idea has a great relevance to the idea of regionalism that John T and I were talking about today. It reminds me of my many international students who think all of America is as diverse and cosmopolitan as the D.C. Metro area and NYC. The East Coast is such a tiny part of the Culture. It’s amazing that that myth has persisted even until the present.

The result of this cultural weakness, though, has been one contributing factor, it seems, to the downfall of the study of American culture—that is that “the theorists’ generalizations about ‘American literature’ rested on a very limited number of works [...] the same number of authors and titles – the contents of a year’s course in the American classics.” Citing Berthoff, Graff says that by ignoring what doesn’t fit on a list of pre-conceived notions, we have “concocted in many cases a language that at its best is cultist and at its worst is jargon.”

Another flaw that’s led to the weakness of the study of our culture has been, as Nina Baym put it, the fact that the current theories of American literature would have one believe that “literature [...] is essentially male.” While that might have worked while women were more effectively marginalized, it’s hard to apply that rule these days.

Finally, though, the discipline itself was marginalized—as other essayists I’ve mentioned have noted. To add it “to the existing departments, which did not have to adapt to them, quarrel with them, or recognize their existence to any sustained degree” was the kiss of death. So that answers the question of why American Studies has never been fully legitimized as the study of a culture. This is actually a very useful article because it began to help with some of the forming ideas I’m having about a paper.

"Bakhtin and Popular Culture”
Mikita Hoy

Good readers make predictions about what they are about to read. See if you can make a prediction about Hoy’s article from its subtitle: “Heterglottal Novelization.” Doesn’t that sound exciting?

Indeed, Hoy’s article delivers on the promise of its subtitle. Her point is to discuss Bakhtin’s theories, since they are useful to apply in interpreting popular culture. His idea of heteroglossia, meaning that a single word can represent many meanings, is applied to popular culture and is the focus of this article.

Hoy discusses Bakhtin’s idea that “the novel is the key form of” the present because of its ability to adapt its language to various situations—from “high culture” to “low” or “popular” culture” (765-766). Hoy argues that Bakhtin’s system of analysis applies not just to novels, but also to “magazines, comedy, advertisements, popular music, art, and fashion, since in their continual interchange and deliberate fusion of high and low styles, politics, parody and pastiche, comic strip and literature, haut couture and street fashion, they constitute a singular shifting dialogism whose rich carnival of discourse” is a part of that sense of “novelness” (766). It sounds to me like what he’s talking about when he says “novelness” is just an overwrought definition of Postmodernity. I’m still left with the “so what?” question. But let’s read on.

Next, Hoy takes up the idea of “Bakhtin and Genre.” She says that Bahktin doesn’t stop at the idea of styles such as “politics, parody, and pastiche” (766). Also important to analysis is whether “the author/artist/designer is Russian or Polish, Jewish or Catholic, male or female,” etc. For Bakhtin, it’s impossible to “identify specific genres beyond” something like “generic wholes,” since apparently too many diverse situations exist among authors. This connects back to the idea of heteroglossia: language cannot be “a static, communicable representation of the speaker’s intention, but a system bearing the weight of centuries of intention” (767). Further, language can be seen as “negating the uniqueness of personal experience” (767). By way of explaining, Hoy cites Sartre in Being and Nothingness: “the ‘meaning’ of my expression always escapes me. I never know if I signify what I wish to signify… As soon as I express myself, I can only guess at the meaning of what I express” (767).

If one were to think of that in specific relationship to the question of whether a place can influence the behavior (like the sense of humor) of a person, Bakhtin’s ideas would seem to support an argument against that fact—if he’s saying that there’s no such thing as a collective idea, then that would prove me wrong, wouldn’t it?

Hoy says that we can see evidence of heteroglossia commonly in popular culture magazines such as Arena and The Face. Unfortunately, these are European magazines, we’re not familiar with. What seems to be important about what she’s saying though is that the “heteroglottal novelization” at work in these magazines takes place when they “obliterate the distinctions, on the written page and, it is suggested, in youth society, between igh-artistic noncommercial and mass-pop-consumerist, between street and Parisian fashions, art and advertising, pop and nonpop, poetry and lyrics, comic strip and literature, the marginal and the mainstream” (768). So that’s what Bakhtin calls HN and what we call the study of pop culture.

In the section on “Popular Culture and Carnival,” Hoy says that the “kind of ironic, self-reflecting parody of the dialogism inherent in language is often the style of the traditional fool, who mocks others’ uses of words by using them himself” (770). Hoy gives the example of Shakespeare’s Fool in King Lear. I’m thinking of John Stewart on the Daily Show.

She goes on to discuss the politicization of carnival, specifically way “the cruder, more bawdy, brawling, more obviously mocking forms of carnival bring everything down to a single level.” Here the example is “the wave of new American comedians epitomized by Andrew Dice Clay, whose ‘Comedy of Hate’ consists in ritualistic abuse of audience members” (773). She connects his comedy with folklore and other old methods, calling it “a carnivalesque performance which realizes the theories of the textual and the linguistic carnivalesque” (773).

Similarly, many punk rockers, says Hoy, built their acts around annoying others. She talks about how political carnivalization “revolves around the destruction of images sacred in other, different, often opposing cultural levels and dialogues” (774). That’s definitely what punk rock was about—but it also sounds a little like dark comedy, particularly when she goes on to say that it “smacks a great deal of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque version of deah, which he applies particularly to Rabelaisian burlesque (‘in…the grotesque [clownish] portrayal of death, the image of death itself takes on humorous aspects…)” (774).

So, Hoy’s article is dry, but it deals with some important aspects of Bakhtin’s theories.

"From the King of Beasts to Clowns in Drag”

“…is a chapter from Janet Davis’s book, The Circus Age: Culture & Society Under the American Big Top, one that doesn’t really deliver on its title. Her premise is that “the world of the circus [is] one of the male gender flux, with androgynous acrobats, gender-bending clowns, players in drag, and animals dressed as men” (143). The zoo, as a site of “athletic [...] manliness,” was created to appeal to men and boys. Davis describes specific elements of the circus and then proves how they are particularly appealing the masculine interests.

Her thesis is certainly not something that one might puzzle out on her own, but after reading it, I’m convinced and not surprised in the least. She describes, for example, how “men [...] sought to reclaim their authority by fortifying the body: they participated in alternative models of male power such as basketball and wrestling or embraced ‘primitive cultural practices, specifically living in the wilderness or hunting wild game” (144). When I read this passage I thought about what are now called “x-treme sports” or vehicles marketed as “off-road” or “outback.” It takes no explanation for us to understand that they’re aimed at men, that they appeal primarily (if not exclusively) to men.

So these pursuits are not new. Davis describes older pursuits—like “Youthful counterparts to the back-to-nature movement like the Boy Scouts of America, the Sons of Daniel Boone, and the Woodcraft Indians.” The first one, obviously, is more familiar to us in modern times than the last ones, but we can still gather what the groups were about. She observes that these groups “enabled white boys to assume a temporary nonwhite identity as they dressed up as Native Americans and learned indigenous crafts and camping and survival skills. These organizations paradoxically helped heighten boys’ own sense of manly whiteness through the act of what Phillip Deloria succinctly calls ‘playing Indian’” (146). John Muir was his own special man’s man, “quietly staging his own remarkable death-defying bodily feats: he walked across much of the United States, fasted constantly and climbed the snow-covered Sierras clad in a woolen shirt, denim pants, and thin shoes” (146).

So, it’s not surprising, says Davis, that in what she calls our “nascent celebrity culture,” early heroes were not men but “adult animal males—Jumbo the elephant, Chiko the ‘gorilla,’ and Rajah the man-eating tiger” (148). These were animals connected “to the ‘masculine’ wilderness” (148). And in their performances, the animals tended to be humanized; they wore dresses and performed human acts. Not only that, but alongside the “humanized animals” were “animalized humans,” so, according to Davis, the situation “highlighted this ambiguity of modern people’s position within the natural world” (152).

It was around this time, not incidentally, that animal welfare became a big issue. Davis blames it lightly on the growing popularity at the time of the theory of evolution. She says that since “evolutionary theory linked human beings and animals to shared biological origins, some circus audience members saw the caged animal as an enslaved human being” (153). I think she’s really off the mark here. That simply isn’t the only reason why people would protest the use of animals in the circus. Animal cruelty is so undeniably apparent in the circus. It doesn’t take a preoccupation with evolution to notice that.

One of the most interesting cases Daily makes between the circus and masculinity is in telling of the children’s books P.T. Barnum wrote, which featured as protagonists young boys “who tracked, captured, or killed wild beasts” (155). His stories capitalized on a cultural myth of sorts, of a young man who could save a crazed circus animal gone berserk at a circus performance. The circus was built around the hunt-n-save fantasies of men and boys. That’s not the only explanation of the animal-gone-wild myth, though. Elsewhere, Davis mentions it in the context of the “curtailed” animal’s being a metaphor for the lynched black man.

Davis finally gets to the point about the drag performers. As early as the 1840s, comedian Robert Stickney performed “The Frolics of My Granny,” dressed as an old woman with a boy on her shoulders (only to be revealed as a single person in a convincing costume. Another performer did “Biddy O’Flaherty.” What’s interesting is that in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, these “’fairies,’ ‘inverts,’ ‘female impersonators,’ and ‘traders’ were more broadly accepted in the first third of the twentieth century than in subsequent decades, in part because contemporary scientific and popular constructions of an intermediate ‘third-sex’ made homosexuals less threatening to male codes” (169).

Well, that’s about enough. More is said—she discusses other fine points, here, but the most important thing to know is her main point, that the circus was devised as a male event.

"The Need for Cultural Studies:

Resisting Intellectuals and Oppositional Public Spheres”
Henry Giroux, et al.

Like eating a big bowl full of bran, reading this article was tough going, though I knew doing so was good for me. Just like bran, the prose was dense and hard to chew, so although it was very short, reading it took forever.

Giroux and his co-authors make the point in this article that academic disciplines are arbitrary and even harmful to the proper application of cultural studies because they “limit discourse.” The study of literary genres, they give as an example, really only became a legitimate area a little more than a hundred years ago. The divisions and classifications of subject areas are not only arbitrary, but also they change according to intellectual fashion.

Disciplines like Women’s Studies, Black Studies as well as (obviously) American Studies and Canadian Studies were developed as interdisciplinary programs “out of the sense that the most important issues were being lost between the rigid boundaries between the disciplines.” American Studies, say the authors, “began with the agenda of retrieving such issues.” The authors also point out, however, that both American and Canadian Studies were “spawned” by “openly political” nationalism,” so they really didn’t begin with the spirit that would engender a truly interdisciplinary and intellectual form of inquiry. So while one would think that these interdisciplinary attempts would have remedied the problem of disciplines, according to Giroux et al., these programs “have failed.” Oftentimes “[p]ractitioners are regarded as dilettantes rather than real scholars and their enterprises are written off as mere fads.”

Giroux and others argue that the present canon “is based upon an hierarchical economy where cultural objects are ranked. Certain of these objects (Shakespeare’s writing, for example) are assumed to be ‘the best’ of western culture; they thus represent, synecdochally, the essence of the culture. It is exactly this symbolic view of culture against which Cultural Studies should fight.” In other words, this new way of viewing the matter at hand shouldn’t rely on the old “truths” just because we’ve always believed them. Instead, “Cultural Studies [...] should be built upon a different economy, one which sees that cultural objects are, in fact, disposed relationally.”

The point, then, should be to develop the kinds of intellectuals who can “provide the moral, political, and pedagogical leadership for those groups which take as their starting point the transformative critique of the conditions of oppression.” These intellectuals, which Giroux et al. call “resisting intellectuals,” “cannot be housed in universities as they are presently structured” because they won’t fit into the expected norm of disciplines.

The authors realize that this stipulation makes their plan impractical, since universities have a vested interest in brokering knowledge the way they do so now. But they do recommend that intellectuals (scholars) not “resign” themselves to the roles universities assign them. In addition, they recommend that “Cultural Studies must develop a self-regulating discourse.” Finally, “Cultural Studies must resist the interests contained in the established academic disciplines and departments.

The proposal they make seems improbable, but since I had to research various American Studies programs to write my own at Union, I learned about how various of them are structured. The one at George Mason University comes to mind—where faculty from a number of disciplines serve on the faculty that teaches cultural studies courses. The American Civilization program at Brown comes to mind as well. And of course the program at Union as well. Giroux and the others are right, though. Any program that steps outside the artificial boundaries education has drawn for itself is immediately suspect; if it isn’t neatly within the waffle-squares of American History or American Literature, the idiots on the hiring committees or the degree granting bodies suddenly develop brain injuries that prevent them from understanding anymore…hmmm….I hate to sound cynical about this essay, which so clearly influenced two important institutions….

Richard Slotkin’s

Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier

How in the hell someone locates the intense detail Slotkin found for this book, I’ll never know. It is as though he revisited the spores of moss on the north side of a tree in 1742 to give us a picture of the sentiment of a certain obscure writer who was trying to capture the feeling of America at the time. It’s a better book than the title makes it seem, though. The general premise—or maybe it’s more accurate to say one of the general premises in this complex tome—is that the Indian captivity narratives helped to create the literature of America and influenced the form of later works.

Slotkin’s ideas rely heavily on myth and symbol, and he begins with the warrant that the “mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called the ‘national character’” (3). Even so, he admits that in America “attitudes toward the idea of a national mythology have been peculiarly ambivalent,” perhaps as a result of the “utopian ideals” of some of the colonists who settled in New England originally (3). I think what he’s getting at is that there hasn’t been a real unified national myth here ever, since so many different voices have been here, so many different utopias represented all at once. Nonetheless, many different groups came here with the idea of starting a new and perfect society. (So much for the criticism that the myth and symbol critics don’t allow for a pluralistic society.)

The specific problem with studying the mythology of America is that certain impossibilities arise with their being any true mythology at all. Slotkin says that it would be reasonable to question whether the myths were truly American at all. Since, obviously, the first real Americans were Indians, their mythologies were their own. So, Slotkin wonders, did they just “Indianize” the European myths? Or did the American mythology just arise from an anglicizing of the new culture? Another problem is that this new culture came about after the invention of the printing press. However, myths come from oral traditions. So when we look at the folklore of America, many times we see invented myths that come from hack writers for quick publication. Finally, says Slotkin, a problem common to the study of myth in any culture is to define it and distinguish “between archetypal myth, folk legends, and artistic mythopoesis” (6). These, he says, are necessary distinctions, before any real study happens.

This discussion of mythology leads specifically to Slotkin’s broad thesis that “the myth of the heroic quest” is “perhaps the most important archetype underlying American cultural mythology” (10). This myth, you may wish to be reminded, is the one in which the hero leaves his everyday activities “to seek the power of the gods in the underworld, the eternal kingdom of death and dreams from which all men emerge” (10). Oftentimes this hero’s quest has to do with a coming-of-age rite of masculinity and these myths are common to most cultures—Slotkin cites as examples the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Beowulf, etc. (11). Eventually, though, we begin to see how the universality of this myth connects with the wilderness and Indian narratives of the colonists.

In the second chapter, “Cannibals and Christians,” Slotkin discusses whether or not people are shaped by the land where they live. This might be especially useful for my argument about place and twentieth and twenty-first century comedians. Slotkin says:
Human cultures on the North American continent, whether they were of European or Indian origin, have been shaped by the interaction of the migrant peoples with the American landscape, the wilderness. The one constant in the American environment has been the wilderness in its varying forms of forest, plain, mountain, and desert. [...] As the American environment was the same for each of the these cultures, one might reasonably expect that in the process of adjusting their lives to the wilderness, each these cultures would acquire certain elements or qualities distinctly derived from and suited to that environment. Differences between them might be accounted for by considering their differing points of cultural and historical origin. (26).
So that’s a pretty important statement. To illustrate, he says that the colonists would see “chaos” in the wilderness, whereas the Indians would see “order” and “a kindred intelligence in all things” (27). On the one hand, he says that people and cultures are shaped by the land where they lived, but on the other hand, the cultures of the people themselves determine their responses and reactions to the land where they live. The equation is two-way, rather than a causal one that determines the other. It’s nonetheless important point of consideration for anyone who is interested in place.

Slotkin goes on, then, to deal with examples of the heroic quest in American literature through history. So “the Puritan model of the heroic quest,” he says, is best typified in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. He notes that the hero in stories like these are “fleeing in solitude from sin-begotten humanity” and that “[a]ctual landscapes are less important than the landscapes of the mind” in such stories (39).

Another era in the history of American literature deals with Indian War Narratives (at least their beginning. Indians, says Slotkin, became associated with the “Spirit of Place” of America—along with fears that they were cannibals or devils (66). Generally, the literature of the time was meant to educate or discourage readers from sinning. The Puritans believed themselves to be the new Israelites, God’s chosen people in the wilderness of the promised land.

The Calvinists also saw the wilderness as a “metaphor for the human mind. Both were dark, with hidden possibilities for good and evil. Through the darkness the Indians flitted like the secret enemy of Christ or like the evil thoughts that plague the mind on the edge of consciousness. Like the devil, Indians struck where the defenses of good were weakest and, having done their deed, retreated to hiding” (77).

And in true Calvinist form, Increase Mather wrote of the Indian Wars that they were the result of “New England’s ‘back-sliding’” (83). So there was definitely a corrective purpose to the literature. The clergy also saw the corrective potential of the captivity narratives when the first ones were published. Extremely popular, they were “the first coherent myth-literature developed in America for American audiences” (95). They were best sellers of the time. Other literature began to imitate the sensationalistic style—for example Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” used similar rhetoric to Rowlandson’s captivity narrative (103).

The Rowlandson narrative itself becomes a kind of archetype (108). “Once in the wilderness condition, the captive is figuratively in hell” (109). The soul’s “regeneration” begins with this “separation, a perception of the distance one has fallen from grace” (thus, evidently the title of the book). So then, the struggle is to make “progress” in captivity “’twenty removes’ from civilization and Christianity” (109). Then, “the return and restoration of the God-wounded sinner marks the conclusion of the captivity,” but “he is restored to his old life with newly opened eyes” (110-111).

Slotkin next discusses in “A Palisade of Language” how the mythology arose around the Indians that they had special powers. Since they seemed able to survive in such difficult circumstances, the settlers had ideas that they had special powers. So for example, some sailor threw an Indian chief’s infant son in a river to see if he knew how to swim instinctually (118-119). But now that they had decided to fight the Indians, they had not only the nature to fear but also the Indians as well. In their horrific fear of the Indians as devils, they began to behave in the way they feared the Indians would (142).

Really, from there we move from the captivity narrative to developing more of a hero of the Indian, world-wide. It helps that the English start writing about the Indian as a hero. Slotkin later goes on to discuss the yeoman farmer; he becomes the heroized frontier American. Later, it is the cowboy of the dime novel. I would go on at length here with support, but I need to spend more time reading than writing, since the semester is dwindling away. This is a good

Stuffed Shirts
“Between Individualism and Fragmentation:
American Culture and the New Literary

Studies of Race and Gender”

I have to admit I skimmed past the first half of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s article, thinking that I had already read it about eight times already (by other authors). She discusses the “battle, which pits conservatives against liberals and is [...] leading, directly or indirectly, to the replacement of a long uncontested hegemony of white, male authors, by a plurality of women, African-Americans, and members of various minority or marginalized groups.” She goes on to discuss the awakenings among the various marginalized groups that this group of old, white men who are the Authors of American Literature couldn’t possibly speak for them or represent their corner of the culture. Ultimately, says Fox-Genovese, our concept of the American culture as a whole is confused because we can’t “understand the pattern of marginalized cultures in relation to each other as well in relation to the canonical culture, and, especially, the relation between the canonical culture and the ideal of a national culture.”

When she gets to this idea, I perk up. Forgive me for not maintaining my excitement at the notion that diversity is a great idea. If you don’t know me and you’re reading this, please don’t mistake me for a Ralph Reed devotee. The fact is, I am lucky enough to live in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where people from every country in the world are represented within five square miles of me. Not only that, but it is my great pleasure to teach students from all those countries at Northern Virginia Community College. When I step outside this idyllic place—like, for example, when I go to Cincinnati for school—I become a rabid proponent of the tenets of diversity, believe you me, and I miss seeing and hearing people from other places. A person has to live among a population that resembles Hitler’s Nazi youth to be reminded (no offense to my Cincinnatian friends, but it’s true).

Anyway, what I like about Fox-Genovese is that she doesn’t stop at the observation that there’s more to American Literature than Melville, Cooper, and Thoreau (and all those other guys)—oh, and Emily Dickinson. She doesn’t stop at the inclusion of Alice Walker and Langston Hughes. She understands and makes the case for the way Stowe and Cather and Jacobs were marginalized. But she expresses the concern that I have always had for these discussions. Essentially, she’s saying that by isolating these writers into little ghettos of diversity (my term), we marginalize them all over again; we do nothing to explain their relationships to our culture as a whole. In effect, we’re excluding them the very same way they were excluded always.

As I read the last half of this article closely, I began to think of it in terms of a grossly oversimplified metaphor. If American literature is a shirt, heretofore, it’s been a blue button-down oxford, like the kind from Brooks Brothers. That’s been the only kind there is, end of story (except maybe the pink one they got out for Emily Dickinson). Opening up the field to these previously marginalized writers has meant, essentially, lifting the dress code. So sometimes we see greens, yellows, garish shades of chartreuse and orange, and even the occasional Hawaiian print. Not only that, but they’re different cuts of shirt—from camp shirt to v-neck to tank top to halter top. The purists probably frown on having all those colors and all that skin showing; they would feel much more comfortable if we grouped like shirts with like shirts—or at least all the oxfords with the oxfords and those godawful Hawaiian prints on the luau deck. The point is, segregation is an archaic idea, in culture and in literature. I think that that’s what Fox-Genovese is getting at.

Fox-Genovese cites T.S. Eliot’s famous argument that “we cannot hope to understand culture if we thoughtlessly identify it with individual experience. Culture, he might have said, cannot be reduced to autobiography. Instead, he said that the culture of the individual is dependent on the culture of the whole society to which that group of class belongs. Therefore it is the culture of the society that is fundamental.” She goes on to say that because it is important to study culture as representative of a group and not to marginalize, “the most compelling results of the new literary studies of race and gender point back, albeit in new terms, toward the older paradigm of American Studies as some combination of history and literature.”

I think she is right; in many ways I think that many of these originating texts in American Studies are very solid. They require the kind of updating that Fox-Genovese is doing in her essay, but the historical approach that allows a critic to look at the culture as a whole is important. She reminds us at the end that we should not be ashamed that our culture is “the product of historical struggles that have been won by some and lost by others. Such are the consequences of power.” That may mean that “their views would prevail” at present, but it doesn’t mean that the views of previously marginalized groups have to be silenced forever.

The danger of being too sensitive about our dark and violent past, I fear, is that we erase it, the way the Ministry of Information does in Orwell’s 1984, when past events don’t jibe with the present interpretation of history. In all, I think Fox-Genovese makes a very cogent argument for inclusion of diverse viewpoints and a sensible way of thinking about America.

Staying Awake for Henry Nash Smith
Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth

Henry Nash Smith’s book is one of THE quintessential American Studies books. Dear God, how I tried to like it. I promise that I’ll like other ones in the future. I’m afraid that not liking Bercovitch and Smith will mark me as some sort of American Studies weakling—but fear not! I’ll have plenty of good things to say about Richard Slotkin soon enough. Staying awake for Henry Nash Smith should be evidence enough of my commitment.

Let’s orient Smith within the American Studies timeline. Parrington, Perry Miller, and F.O. Matthiesen came first. Leo Marx was Smith’s student. Bercovitch and Slotkin followed much later. Writing in the late 1940s, Smith begins by explaining his reliance on myth and symbol as important elements of “intellectual construction” of his “collective representations.” He further explains that he doesn’t mean to imply that there’s any “empirical” evidence to support the use of myths and symbols as strategies for interpreting and understanding culture, but rather that “they exist on a different plane” because they “exert a decided influence on practical affairs” (XI).

The first section of the book is actually pretty good. Smith states as his purpose to examine “the impact of the West, the vacant continent beyond the frontier, on the consciousness of Americans” so that he can determine its effect on “the literature and social thought down to Turner’s formulation of it” (4). It’s at once a remarkable purpose because of its interdisciplinary nature.

Smith begins by saying that early in America’s history the image of the Western frontier was of an evil place. Michael Wigglesworth described it in 1662 as “a ‘devil’s den,’

A waste and howling wilderness,
Where none inhabited
But hellish fiends, and brutish men
That devils worshiped. (4)

But by the eighteenth century, that image of the place as evil had diminished. The West was still a mystery, though, since the frontier belonged to the French.

Smith spends some time talking about what, historically, the country’s original leaders viewed as the future for America. Jefferson’s idea was that the at some point, “North America would be peopled by descendants of the original English colonists,” but when the Louisiana Purchase occurred, he thought that the property west of the Mississippi “should be turned into an Indian reservation for at least fifty years.” Jefferson thought that that property should be reserved, that “(e)migrants should be forbidden to cross the river ‘until we shall have filled up all the vacant country on this side’” (15).

Instead, though, the exploration of the region occurred (largely during Jefferson’s presidency), and according to Smith, the “importance of the Lewis and Clark expedition lay on the level of imagination: it was drama, it was the enactment of a myth that embodied the future. It gave tangible substance to what had been merely an idea, and established the image of a highway across the continent so firmly in the minds of Americans that repeated failures could not shake it” (17). From there, populating the whole continent became inevitable. The discovery of the Oregon Trail and people began moving West (18).

When Lewis and Clark reached the West coast, they reignited a dream of finding “a passage to India” (19). Columbus, you may recall, had been looking for India and its spices to trade. And the seventeenth century colonists had sought this passage, sending explorers west from Virginia with the thought that India could only be a matter of ten days’ travel past the Alleghenies (19).

The interesting part of this curiosity of a passage to India was its impracticality. Trade from the passage would never have been possible until the mid-nineteenth century, when the railroad was built cross country. But Smith points out that “the idea of a passage to India, with its associated images of fabulous wealth, of ivory and apes and peacocks, led a vigorous existence on the level of imagination entirely apart from its practicability” (22). This is an important historic mythic belief in American history, great evidence of the kind of idea that guides the policies and actions of people in a way that, in retrospect, we can see is impractical or inexplicable. It’s a great example of the myth-and-symbol school’s working well.

A little later, the notion of trade with the Orient became less impractical. Thomas Hart Benton was a great proponent of American expansionism; he believed that “trade with the Orient [would] emancipate the United States from its dependence on Europe” and that the U.S. would “go on to nationalize their character by establishing a system of commerce adapted to their geographical position and free from European interference” (26).

Now a very interesting point about Benton was that he was much influenced by Montesquieu, believing that “a republican government could not survive too great an extension of its boundaries” (26). Thus, it was his idea that the people who settled the West coast would form their own nation. But, he said, that territorial change wouldn’t “hamper American commercial expansion into the Orient because the new Pacific republic” would be an ally to the U.S. against all the European powers (26). So, obviously, Benton didn’t have his way because one of the reasons why the decision was made to keep the U.S. together, risking having a republican government with such large boundaries, was to resist the powerful forces of the old country in Europe.

Benton was important for many reasons. He was responsible for the railroads being built. He wanted the federal government to build the tracks and then lease them to private operators of trains (27). However, he finally had to turn to private capitalists to build them (after he could get no support from the government) (31).

Smith next takes up William Gilpin, who followed Benton as an expansionist. The important thing to know about Gilpin was that he was instrumental not just in encouraging westward expansion but he also encouraged study of physical geography. In fact, he thought that German geographer Alexander von Humboldt’s idea of the “isothermal zodiac” was justification for “the westward course of the empire” (39). Not only that, but, Gilpin thought, “If the earth is the final arbiter of human destinies then the student of society should direct his gaze toward nature rather than history.” Now this is an important idea—particularly judging from what comes next. Smith summarizes his thought still more: “The important thing about man is not his past, but his biological adjustment to his milieu which is a matter of the present and of the future” (41). So that is an important idea, essentially that the way people adjust to the place where they are determines the way they act. This has much to do with the idea of SPACE AND PLACE.

Smith next takes up Whitman’s idea of Manifest Destiny, which connects neatly with Gilpin’s idea, essentially the same thing. Whitman said, “the poet of America ‘incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes’” (qtd. in Smith 44). Smith says Whitman set out “to sing the whole continent.” Whitman himself said that Leaves of Grass was for “the trans-Mississippi region, for the Great Plains, for the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific slope” (45). The idea of the discussion of Whitman is to demonstrate that he mythicized America as a nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The second section of the book deals with the “sons of Leatherstocking.” How it does drone on. In the beginning of the chapter, “Daniel Boone: Empire Builder or Philosopher of Primitivism?” Smith discusses Francis Parkman’s journal when he was staying Lake George. Parkman describes it as a nice place for gentlemen, “but now, for the most part, it is occupied by a race of boors about as uncouth, mean, and stupid as the hobs they seem chiefly to delight in” (51). Smith takes issue with the “class bias underlying the judgment,” noting that it “was one of the dominant forces shaping the nineteenth century attitudes toward the West” (51). However, when Parkman moved away from the agricultural east out into the forest in the West, his opinions seem to have changed about nature (52). Historians call this phenomenon—when “young gentlemen of leisure” amused themselves in the “slightly decadent cult of wilderness and savagery”—primitivism (52). As a result of his primitivism, Parkman opposed any development or civilization of the west. Such an opposition to progress was unusual.

Daniel Boone is difficult to categorize because of the conflicting myths about him. Was he the kind of guy who would reject developing in the interest of preserving the wild, or did he want to civilize his new surroundings and work to get along with all kinds of people?
Smith goes on to compare Boone with Cooper’s Leatherstocking, and while he notes a number of surface similarities, he notes far more differences.

Smith next takes up the idea of “The Innocence and Wildness of Nature,” citing Cooper’s description of Leatherstocking, that “he could at any instant open his heart to God without having to strip it of the cares and wickedness of the settlements” (71). In other words, living in nature gave him a certain purity. Smith says, “Civilization is pernicious also because it interposes a veil of superficiality between the individual and the natural objects of experience” (72).

To illustrate these points of nature, Smith brings up the work of an obscure Kentuckian writer, Charles W. Webber, who “tried and failed to construct an interpretation of the Western wilderness within the framework of primitivism” (72). Smith calls his brand of writing “pompous” and “moralistic.” But at the time, he was considered to be a talent and was compared with Melville (76).

The early generation of these “fictional Wild West heroes,” says Smith, “were primarily symbols of anarchic freedom” (81). The next generation might be typified by stories of Kit Carson, which Smiths says were a part of a body of work called “steam literature” because the books were “printed on the newly introduced rotary steam presses” (87).

From there, into the mid-nineteenth century came the advent of the dime novel. Erasmus Beadle was one famous author who produced many of the “subliterary” form (90). The books were produced in a large-scale, almost assembly line fashion. Writers “could turn out a thousand words an hour for twelve hours at a stretch (91). Unbelievable!! Characters in these books were everyday heroes, low class, so that the audience could relate to them.

Dime novels also had heroines. A classic way of introducing a less-than-passive woman character who could ride a horse and shoot a gun was to have an Indian woman who could ride and shoot well—and then to learn that she had been captured and was really white (112). That would legitimize her in the views of the audience. Great device! Women could also be strong and powerful—but only if their motive was vengeance (115).

The next section is called “The Garden of the World.” This part opens up with a quotation from de Crevecoeur. Here Smith discusses “the agrarian philosophy,” which dictates that “agriculture is the only source of real wealth; that every man has a natural right to land; that labor expended in cultivating the earth confers a valid title to it,” etc. (126). The wide expanse of the West offered so much promise because, as far as Franklin and Crevecoeur believed, “the waiting West promised an indefinite expansion of a simple agricultural society became the most certain guarantee that the United States would for a long age maintain its republican institutions. Not for many centuries would the vacant lands be filled and an overcrowded population fall into the depravity of crowded Europe” (128).

In another chapter, Smith takes up “The Yeoman ideal,” which he viewed as the “fusion of eighteenth century agrarian theory with the observation of American experience beyond the Alleghenies” (135). The yeoman farmer was “the hero of a myth, of the myth of mid-nineteenth-century America” (135). To own land gave independence the likes of which had been impossible in Europe (136).

The South, however, was “actively hostile to the yeoman ideal” (145). A slave-oriented society with enormous plantations was a different kind of society. Even the humor was different. Smith says that Southwestern humor used “its own striking symbols,” ones which later went on to have “important consequences for American literature” (in the work of Mark Twain, for example) (145). However, the South seemed to fit outside the descriptions Smith had given heretofore of what constituted America.

Smith notes that the idea of the agrarian idea stuck around for a long time. In fact, he notes that perhaps one of the most interesting parts of studying the intellectual history of the U.S. is to observe how slowly the idea dissipated, even in the face of the growth of the industrial age (159). What finally began to erode the reliance on agriculture was the arrival of the steam engine in the Mississippi valley (160).

The Homestead Act had been a mid-nineteenth-century attempt to have a utopian, agrarian country, but it generally failed; what succeeded better was the railroad (190). One reason Smith gives is that the agrarian society was not in keeping with the speed of the industrial revolution, which is certainly true. However, he also speculates that “early efforts to deal with the agricultural West in literature prove that the frontier farmer could not be made into an acceptable hero [...] At the same time his low social status made it impossible to elaborate his gentility” (215).

The study of stages of civilization were understood in Europe to be related to a succession in time. However, people began to believe of the U.S. that “one could examine side by side the social states that were believed to have followed one another in the long history of the Old World” (219). William Darby, author of the 1918 Emigrant’s Guide, wrote “New Orleans represented the summit of cultivation, refinement, and luxury. The plantations of the lower Mississippi likewise offered ‘all that art, aided by wealth, can produce’” (219). But west from there, “along the Sabine, the way of life of the scattered inhabitants suggested ‘the utmost verge of inhabited earth, and the earliest dawn of improvement’” (219).

A little later (and at the merciful end), Smith writes of Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Smith believes Turner’s to be the most important piece of writing about the West. Directed against two main schools of historians at the time, the essay disputes both the idea that American history should be interpreted through the lens of slavery and that American history should be interpreted as outgrowths of British institutions. Turner, in fact as an undergrad, gave a speech where he announced that the age of kings and aristocrats was over, proclaiming the newest age of humanity—specifically of farmers—begun (252).

Smith notes that the fact that our society has such strong roots in agrarianism makes for strong political biases. For one, we tend to have a “covert distrust of the city and of everything connected with industry” (260). If that sounded archaic a year or two ago, the recent presidential election should have settled that question for any present-day disbelievers! Further, says Smith, the “agrarian tradition has also made it difficult for Americans to think of themselves as members of a world community because it has affirmed that the destiny of this country leads her away from Europe toward the agricultural interior of the continent” (260).

Smith definitely answers some questions about individualism among Americans, and he has some good things that I might to apply to discussions of space and place. I still have to prop my eyes open when I read.

Why Does Everybody Hate Feminists?
Susan Gubar’s “What Ails Feminist Criticism?”

Here’s why everybody hates feminists: they’re so divisive. We’ve come to know them for dividing the genders, but in this article, Susan Gubar demonstrates the way feminists have come to be divisive even among themselves, in the groupings within feminists, so the Latina feminists protest that when feminists say “we,” they can’t possibly be speaking for ALL feministas (889), or (as Gayatri Spivak says) when privileged first-world feminists publish their treatises, they should hide under the shame that they are typed by “cheap labor” of third-world women (890). I don’t know where Spivak works, but academics I know can’t afford to pay third-world typists to work on their books.

Nonetheless, I understand her point. I understand tenets of feminism, and I do agree with a number of things that Gubar says here, particularly when she talks about some of the more modern applications of feminist criticism, pretty interesting stuff (that seems to be more linguistics than anything else). However, I don’t know that it’s helped the marginalized groups that much to fight the good fight, the way the feminists have done it since the 1960s.

Anyway, Gubar’s idea in her essay “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” is to remind us that feminism is alive and well. If I were her, I would be concerned if I had to do that. In fact, I think Gubar is aware of the fact that her discipline is troubled. The way she ends the essay is the giveaway. Quoting Braidotti, Gubar says she wishes that “feminism would shed its saddening, dogmatic mode to rediscover the merrymaking of a movement that aims to change life” (902). Does anyone remember any “merrymaking”? She suggests that the best thing to do would be to “heal feminist discourse of the infirmities that made us cranky with one another” (902). Frankly, it’s refreshing to hear a realistic discussion of the “infirmities.”

Gubar first analyzes the stages of feminist criticism. Early critics, in the stage called “critique,” examined male writers’ treatments of women characters’ actions and imagery related to women (882). This method still remains an important one, but a second stage followed, called “gynocritics,” in which women critics tried to find “previously neglected” women writers. In the third phase (in the 1980s), which Gubar calls “the engendering of differences,” critics began to pay attention “to images not only of femininity but also of masculinity” as well as of homosexuality in a way they had not before (884). The idea of deconstructing gender and sexuality is important to feminism, I think. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, as soon as feminists started to be aware of the fluidity of gender and sexuality, they opened up so many more philosophical possibilities. That change in beliefs wasn’t a weakening of the philosophy—it was a strengthening, because it wasn’t a foolish and divisive dichotomy anymore.

But also in this part, Gubar discusses bell hooks in the context of her discussion of the word woman as referring only to the white kind (886) as well as the race and ethnicity issues discussed above. I want to say that I fully support these ideas—and they were radical and fascinating at the time. But now? I think that they make the field of feminism too divisive rather than practical as a twenty-first century ideology. Somehow that undoes the interesting growth potential that the reconsideration of gender and sexuality had opened.

Near the end of the article Gubar discusses some of the criticism of women writers, explaining the way rhetorical strategies of women writers are different than men writers. I find that kind of analysis fascinating, but as I write this, I wonder about the value of that kind of analysis. What good does it do us to know how different men are from women (and the reverse)? It seems to me that it just throws another log on the fire of disagreement. I suppose ignoring differences doesn’t make it any better. I just find that other forms of criticism can be so much more fruitful. I don’t hate feminists, but I’d rather be in a room full of people that don’t have so many beefs with each other.

How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
THAT’S NOT FUNNY.

Keep Your Trap Shut, Heidi –or–
“From Minstrel Shows to the World’s Fair: The Birth of Aunt Jemima”

Manring’s chapter (from his 1998 Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima) is interesting to discuss in the light of what I’ve been reading about myth and symbol. Manring discusses how Aunt Jemima’s picture found it’s way to the pancake mix box and thus become a symbol of comfort and good food for many of us—and because of such clever marketing, a myth developed about around a kernel of truth in her life, sort of the way a pearl develops around a grain of sand.

Chris Rutt had the idea of creating a pancake mix. It was the end of the nineteenth century, when, as Manring says, “the cheap and rapid production of paper bags” revolutionized the retail business because it allowed for the transportation and easy sale of prepared foods for the first time (63). He knew better than to call his product just “pancake mix,” so (as the story goes, anyway) he went to a minstrel show.

Manring details the order of events there, which I have detailed elsewhere (when I talked about Amos ‘n’ Andy), but in this show, Manring speculates that Rutt probably saw a white actor in drag—dressed as Aunt Jemima and singing a song about her. Rutt probably realized that she was “southern hospitality personified” and chose to use her as a sort of mascot (61). Manring makes a point of saying that it wasn’t coincidence that made Aunt Jemima so appealing to Rutt, but rather that he was wise enough to tap “into major trends in the nation’s popular culture and industry” (62).

Manring goes on to talk about what purpose minstrelsy served in American culture. Having gained enormous popularity in the 1840s, minstrel shows “were still common in American theaters throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and continued in some places even in the years following World War II” (66). That’s a surprisingly long time! Regarding the purpose it served, though, Manring says that the “blackface minstrelsy balanced an envy of the supposedly pastoral, indolent lives of southern African Americans with an ostensibly realistic mocking of African-American mannerisms and speech—it was both an act of love and theft” (66). I think this is an interesting analysis (though I’m not entirely sure the love in the act would be entirely clear to the Black people who saw it). Another important point Manring makes is that “this staging of the pejorative quality of blackness was really an act of creating whiteness, reminding white audiences that regardless of whatever trials they faced at work or home, they were uplifted by their race” (66). In other words, it was a way for white people to pull themselves up to stand on the broken shoulders of the already downtrodden. Nice.

The article moves from there to what happened after Rutt sold his product to another manufacturer, R.T. Davis, and the process Davis used to make the pancake mix a national brand. The key was to find a real person to represent Aunt Jemima. Nancy Green was the original; she had been born a slave in Kentucky. Manring explains “she greeted guests and cooked pancakes, all the while singing and telling stories of life on the plantation.” The motto under her picture was “I’se in town, honey” (75). Oy. As I mentioned, any number of myths developed around Green—some aided by her own storytelling skills, evidently. However, what’s remarkable is that no one figured out that Aunt Jemima might be offensive to anyone for another 120 or so years. The symbolic power of Aunt Jemima was still so strong more than a century later, I remember that (white) people I knew thought it was downright mean-spirited of blacks to dispute Aunt Jemima’s picture on the box of pancake mix. They couldn’t see past the symbol to see how strongly that image contributed to their own marginalizing of the race. It’s an interesting issue.

I think one question that could be asked about this whole discussion is whether or not there might be some value in embracing the symbol (as well as the myth)—sort of the way queer culture embraced Hitler’s pink triangle assignation. Maybe Aunt Jemima is a valuable remembrance, in the spirit of “never forget, never repeat.” I don’t know. The interesting part of the below-the-surface racial tension in America right now is that it is nearly impossible for a white person to offer an opinion…so maybe I should keep my mouth shut.

Melvin Patrick Ely’s Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy

Blame it on the excess of the holidays: I never thought of ideas in the popular culture as tastes of fruit before today. But when I was trying to place the phenomenon of Amos ‘n’ Andy in American popular culture for myself, it began to seem to me like a kind of fruit that I’ve been tasting for much of my life, but I just now learned the name and detailed information about its nutrition.

I say this because I recognized jokes from A&A: In fact, I thought my grandfather had made up the line, “Well, I guess it’s time for my weekly bath, whether I need it or not.” No indeed. The line (or one like it) comes from the radio show. In the same way, I’d heard my mom’s friend, Helen say “That’s re-gusting,” my whole life, thinking that was her own euphemism. Who knew these came from A&A?

Really, it is this very sense—of tasting the fruit and finding out later about the name—that makes studying popular culture so interesting to me. That’s how we know that A&A was an important cultural influence—well, maybe that’s not the important measure. Ely, in fact, offers many other more compelling reasons.

The show sprang from the roots of minstrel shows, which followed a specific pattern or form:

The first act offered a minstrel chorus, whose comic endmen bounced much of their humor off the interlocutor. Jokes, eccentric dances, and songs sung by one or more soloists. Then came the second part of the production, an “olio” or mini-variety show consisting of non-blackface novelty acts and a “stump speech” on some topic of current interest; a blackface comedian delivered the speech, using abundant malapropisms and exaggerated gestures. The show concluded with a one-act blackface farce relying heavily on slapstick humor. (29)

Bill Kersands was one of the first minstrels. He used the burnt cork to make what now has become the familiar, exaggerated black-face with exaggerated lips (34).

Correll and Gorsden started much like Kersands. They created an act as Sam and Henry but had to change the names to syndicate it; choosing new names for the characters was a studied effort. They told several different stories about how the did it, but most importantly, “Amos” and “Andy” were carefully chosen to represent realistic names for the kinds of people they would have been.

The show was immensely popular on the fledgling medium of radio; it was impossible to know how popular the show was, since no mechanism was in place to count listeners so early in the history of the medium. However, Correll and Gorsden found out their popularity when they began to make personal appearances as A&A. One show they did was interesting as an effort towards humor: they performed their act on stage in character, but without makeup, stunning audiences with “the incongruity between the men’s Caucasian appearance and their ‘Negro’ speech” (62). That was an interesting comedy experiment.

A&A was interesting for a number of reasons. For one, the show depicted Black characters in professional roles. There were Black doctors and lawyers for example. Also, for the longest time, Correll and Gosden did all the voices, but since they didn’t like to do women’s voices, they just did men’s. So in order to create female characters, they had to do scenes where existing male characters talked to their wives on the telephone or just rely on reported speech.

Later on, Correll and Gosden did hire actors to play supporting roles in the show; in this case, it was primarily Black actors. The show thus became a very large employer of Blacks in Hollywood. Finally, it became a show that was televised and for which an all black cast was hired—except white supporting actors (for the first time).

Ultimately, it was a much protested show, and for good reason. If you believe its opponents, the kind of humor involved was that which made the audience think of Black people as fools, not as capable, smart human beings. Though black professional people were depicted, they were shown as subordinate to white people—an unfortunate message to audiences who are decisionmakers of the future.

Ely does a great job with this book—he manages to show the brilliance of the humor somehow without disrespecting a whole culture; he has a great sense of the metaphor I started with—the savoring of a certain kind of fruit, which, perhaps if we tasted much of it these days, would be a trifle sour.

Owen Aldridge Can Study a Broad and Come up with a Bore
“American Burlesque at Home and Abroad:
Together With the Etymology of Go-Go Girl”

This article was somewhat of a disappointment. The title sounded promising, didn’t it? Written in 1971, the essay (from the Journal of Popular Culture) seems to exist only to catalog entertainment practices (and then not always in the most vivid detail). Aldridge’s introduction is a state-the-obvious statement about the identifying factor of American burlesque: “the striptease” 565). Clearly his introductory information was not reason enough to read his article!

Aldridge does, however, tell an interesting etymological tale of the origin of the go-go dancer. A British film of the 1950s, Whiskey Galore, was a literal translation of a French phrase, whiskey a go-go; Aldridge explains that “go-go is an adverbial expression meaning without limit” (566). This was around the time of the evolution of the discotheque, many of which were fashionably named Whiskey a Go-go.

Around the same time “the method of social dancing among the young generation underwent a sudden change—when dances such as the slow, the tango and the rumba, which under optimum conditions were danced cheek to cheek, were replaced by others in which each partner effectively danced as an individual with no bodily contact” (567). Aldridge gives as an example “the twist.” So the new clubs opened with young women dancing these new dances that no longer required a partner, and the dances became associated with the new, fashionable club names.

Conveniently around this same time, a fashion designer designed a kind of hot pants called a monokini, which were like ledern hosen, worn with no shirt underneath; evidently they made great go-go girl costumes.

Aldridge also describes the four stages of “the standard routine” of a striptease. The “’flash’ or entrance; the ‘parade’ or promenade back and forth fully clothed; the ‘tease’ or progressive disrobing; and finally the ‘strip’ or final stage of denuding that is, as far as local authorities permit” (569). He explains that American dancers do the “bump and grind,” which can be traced to the “hootchee-cootchee” from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (569).

Here’s where the article truly reveals its anachronistic nature: Aldridge explains that in the U.S., dancers are likely to be so young as in their early 20s, but that “many continue to perform in their 40s and even later.” On the other hand, “In Europe very few are older than 25” (569). I can’t speak for Europe, but I would say it’s quite unlikely our strippers are older than 30.

That’s about it for the article. He really is just cataloging some information, not writing an intense analysis of any kind. Ho hum.

The Culture Industry Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno must have been a lot of laughs at parties. What else can be said of a theorist whose claim is that “liking” a piece of “commercial music” is just another way of saying a person is “familiar” with it? Adorno explains, “He can neither escape impotence nor decide between the offerings where everything is so completely identical that preference in fact depends merely on biographical details or on the situation in which things are heard” (30). In other words, the consumer of popular music is stuck between rock-n-roll and a hard place in choosing sounds that are indistinguishable from each other. And for that matter, how jaded is a person who claims that all mass culture is “fundamentally adaptation,” done with a “monopolistic filter” (67)? In a discussion on “Free Will,” this Adorno asserts that he has “no hobby,” but those pursuits he follows in his leisure he undertakes, “without exception, very seriously” (188). No doubt! It would be easy to make a joke on type here—one pictures Cloris Leachman’s Germanic nurse in High Anxiety, the sort of “you vill haf fun and you vil like it” type. That is how I picture Adorno at a party.

Reading his book is much like mandated fun. In other words, it isn’t. Susan Sontag compared a book of Adorno’s essays to “a whole shelf of books on literature.” She is probably right, particularly if we stoop to heft the words-per-paragraph. It isn’t just the number—it’s the weight of the words. I unabashedly admit that full passages, pages even, passed by without my having the vaguest comprehension. “What the hell is he talking about,” I wondered, eyelids flagging, trying to find passages, portions, pages that might come in handy later on in papers—because, let’s face it, Adorno is (literally) a heavyweight. Quoting him in a paper is a good thing to do. So I had to slog through these 200 pages. It took me a week or two of agony.

The contextual essay in the beginning helped. Here J.M. Bernstein wrote about Adorno’s points in his essays. For example, he defined some key concepts such as “culture industry,” which in Bernstein’s words “involves the production of works for reproduction and mass consumption, thereby organizing ‘free’ time, the remnant domain of freedom under capital in accordance with the same principles of exchange and equivalence that reign in the sphere of production outside leisure” (4). Now, this definition is important because of the way it connects to popular culture. What Adorno termed “leisure” and we might call “free time,” is when he sees that we might have a use for popular culture. Now, it seems to me that in the present era, popular culture has become so much more important because we have more leisure time. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that more of us have more leisure time. The rich always had it (Adorno would be quick to point this out, I’m sure). But the average person, the bourgeois class, has enough of it in the common era that it has become an industry.

Bernstein explains more of Adorno’s ideas about the culture industry, saying that “the triumph of advertising [...] is that consumers feel compelled to buy even though they see through” the tricks of the advertiser and know they are being tricked (12). This is where Adorno’s definition of irrationality becomes relevant. Rather than being a typical definition where we might seem “wholly disconnected from individual” goals and needs , it would be in situations where one’s own interest “is pushed to extremes so as to become illogical” (13). I could see how this might be reflected in cases of intense consumerism where people pursue wanting things longer after they need them and long after the things cease to be good for them.

Moving right along, though, Adorno’s first essay is a catchy little title, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” I had a hard time gathering what he meant by a fetish here. It is in this essay where Adorno equates liking with familiarity (30); he really seems to be complaining about the state of popular music. But even he admits that the “complaints about declining taste” in music have been longstanding. Adorno traces back to Plato’s Republic, where in Book III Plato “bans ‘the harmonies expressive of sorrow’ as well as the ‘soft’ harmonies” (31). Ultimately, Plato reminds the citizens of the republic about the serious effects music can have.

Here’s an obscure reference, relevant to only a few music fans who liked electronica of the early 1990s. A group called The Pop Will Eat Itself sampled a section of a evangelical radio preacher’s sermon for the length of the first cut of their CD, The Cure for Sanity. On “PWEI Against the Moral Majority,” the preacher actually speaks on this very topic: “What is the truth about Rock music? Music is a powerful and perhaps the most powerful medium in the world. Music: Plato said when the music of a society changes, the whole society will change. Aristotle, a contemporary of Plato, said when music changes there should be laws to govern the nature and the character of that music. Lenin said the best and the quickest way to undermine any society is through its music. Music, ladies and gentlemen, is a gift of God. It was given by man to offer praises to God and to lift us up to him and to exalt him. And so we can touch the tender resources of our heart and of our mind. Satan has taken music and he has counterfeited it, convoluted it, twisted it, exploited it and now he’s using it to hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer, hammer a message into the mind and the lifestyle of this generation.”

So what is the connection? There’s a fetishistic liking to popular music, one that the modern moral majority likens to a satanic delight. That’s fetishistic, to be sure. It’s a guilty pleasure, I guess. Sure enough, a little later Adorno says of popular music that he’s referring to “the specifically aesthetic” and “forbidden allurements” as well as “sensual gaiety” (31). In our consumer society, “the listener is converted [...] into the acquiescent purchaser” (31). But Adorno also defines the idea of a fetish value according to Marx’s idea of the concept. He explains that when one fetishizes music, the act of acquisition becomes more important than the music itself so then, according to Adorno, the “consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert,” not the music or the musicians (38).

Adorno also argues against any sort of communication between the two “spheres” of music, popular or “light music” and “the higher type.” He explains that they “do not hang together in such a way that the lower could serve as a sort of popular introduction to the higher, or that higher could renew its lost collective strength by borrowing from the lower” (35).

True to form, though, Adorno concludes from his analysis that “musical analysis has today decayed as fundamentally as musical charm and has its parody in the stubborn counting of beats.” But not to be undone by his own gloominess, he adds that “the golden age of taste has dawned at the very moment in which taste no longer exists” (40). Ah, Theodor! You cad!

It’s not enough for Adorno to say that our taste has disappeared. He critiques our “psychological household” as well. When we consume popular music, he explains, we are confirmed in our “neurotic stupidity” (47). Thus, “The assent to hit songs and debased cultural goods belongs to the same complex of symptoms as do those faces of which one no longer knows whether the film has alienated them from reality or reality has alienated them from the film” (47). That gorgeous sentence goes on—actually it says “as they wrench open a great formless mouth with shining teeth in a voracious smile, while the tired eyes are wretched and lost above.” I told you Adorno was a load of laughs. He clearly wants us to know that popular music has a “power over its victims” (48).

The mechanism at work is, Adorno says, a “neurotic mechanism of stupidity in listening” which causes “regressive listeners” who “again and again with stubborn malice [...] demand the one dish they have once been served” (51). Nice. I do follow him here, though. Tune in any Top 40 radio station for two hours and you’ll know the words to all the popular songs. The same kind of truth applies, I guess, to the discussion I have with students about poetry being similar to (sometimes the same as) song lyrics; the difference is whether the poem or lyrics endure.

A very interesting point Adorno makes about this regressive listening is that it is “always ready to degenerate into rage” (56). He explains, “If one knows that he is basically marking time, the rage is directed primarily against everything which could disavow the modernity of being with-it and up-to-date and reveal how little has in fact changed” (56). That speaks to much about the phenomenon of popular music. For one, it seems to address the very notion of adolescence. Rage and adolescence feel connected to me. It also pulls in the need to be up-to-date and hip that popular music requires. Interesting.

On to the next essay, “The Schema of Mass Culture.” I won’t spend a great deal of time here. This is the essay where Adorno argues that culture has a “commercial character” (61). In this commercial culture, we learn to develop a certain reverence for products as a result of advertising (63).

In mass culture, the ideal is adaptation, says Adorno, so the “digest has become a particularly popular fofrm of literary distribution and the average film now boasts of its similarity with the successful prototype rather than trying to conceal the fact” (67).
The result of this kind of culture is that the “individual becomes a nihilist. Anything that cannot be recognized, subsumed, and verified he regrets as idiocy or ideology, as subjective in the derogatory sense” (85).

I see where Adorno’s theories are limited by when they were written when he says that mass culture “only recognizes refined people.” His reasoning is that “even the language of the street kids that can never be reproduced too realistic merely serves to ensure that the laughing viewer is never is never tempted to use any such language himself” (92). Fer shizzle, my Thizzle.

Now the next essay, “Culture Industry, Reconsidered,” is just what it looks like. Here he adds to what he said before and emphasizes a few points. For instance, Adorno wants us to remember that the “culture industry misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce, and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable” (99). It seems to me that he’s working overtime here NOT to sound like a communist. Another interesting idea in this essay is that “the culture industry exists in the ‘service’ of third persons,” and “its ideology makes use of the star system.” The result is that the “more dehumanized its methods of operation and content, the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heart-throbs” (101).

I didn’t have a lot to say about “Culture and Administration.” The following chapter, “Freudian Theory and The Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” is much more interesting. Here he’s talking about “American fascist agitators,” which is always a boatload of fun, whether or not I’m having to wrestle with Adorno’s hefty sentences. He begins with the explanation that social sciences have studied “American fascist agitators” carefully. Their studies have shown that most present-day agitators’ attacks are “ad hominem,” psychological in origin instead of “rational” (132). He says “our would-be Hitlers” intend to create “crowds bent on violent action without any sensible political aim, and to create the atmosphere of the pogrom” (133). This is “the psychology of the masses,” a useful term not just to use when we’re talking about fascists, but also when we’re talking about controlling behavior with popular culture. I don’t like to think of Michael Moore’s methods in teerms of fascism, but his work fits into this category as well.

Adorno says that the interesting part of Freud’s approach to this topic is that he consideres not just the psychology of groups but also “which psychological forces result in the transformation of individuals into a mass” (135). Freud theorized that, “If the individuals in the group are combined into a unity, there must surely be something to unite them” (qtd in Adorno 135). Of course he blamed that bond on the libido, but Adorno points out that Hitler was aware of that connection as well and capitalized upon it—the connection would be through identification (136).

So then these groups and agitators tend to be similar; for example Leo Lowenthal demonstrated that “one of the favorite devices of fascist agitators” was to “compare out-groups, all foreigners and partially refugees and Jews, with low animals and vermin” (147). This is certainly something we’ve all seen done.

The next essay is “How to Look at Television.” I was disappointed with this one, having thought it would be better than it actually is. One point Adorno makes is that television has an affect on “various layers of the spectator’s personality” (158).

He also says that “the archetypes of present popular culture were set comparatively early in the development of middle-class society” (159). They were set in the eighteenth century and have remained since then. No wonder so many of us have sunk in then!!

Really that’s about it for that one. The next one is “Transparencies on Film.” Here Adorno says that “fictional characters never resemble their empirical counterparts no matter how minutely they are described” (179). In addition, even though a film tries to be realistic, it isn’t always, so there might not always be a feeling of immediacy in film (179).

The last two, “Free Time” and “Resolution,” I just don’t have much to say about. I found Adorno unbelievably boring as I said. I hope he was worth the unreal amount of time I spent on him!