Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction in Today's Classroom
242
Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular American Fiction in Today's Classroom
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Overview
The essays in this collection presume that the popular is here to stay and that its instructive implications are not merely noteworthy, but richly nuanced and deeply compelling. They address a broad variety of issues concerning canonicity, literature, genre, and the classroom, as its contributors teach everything from Stephen King and Lady Gaga to nineteenth-century dime novels and the 1852 best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
It is no secret that teaching popular texts fuels controversies about the value of cultural studies, the alleged relaxation of aesthetic standards, and the possible “dumbing down” of Americans. By implicitly and explicitly addressing such contentious issues, these essays invite a broader conversation about the place of the popular not only in higher education but in the reading lives of all Americans.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609383749 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 242 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Teaching Tainted Lit
Popular American Fiction in Today's Classroom
By Janet G. Casey
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-374-9
CHAPTER 1
Nineteenth-Century Popular Texts and Canon Considerations
"Lippard represents a drastically different literary project. ... and his work exposes students to a different publication history."
— MELISSA GNIADEK, "'You Will Observe ...': Letting Lippard Teach"
"Reflecting the ideals of a newly established democracy, 'popularity' was a major criterion for what made literature good, not evidence of its aesthetic inferiority as it is today. ... Studying popular literature and using 'popularity' as a category of analysis is possibly more true to American reading choices and modes of interpretation in the nineteenth century than is the sole study of what we now regard to be the classics. ..."
— RANDI LYNN TANGLEN, "'Canons of Nineteenth-Century American Literature': How to Use Literature Circles to Teach Popular, Underrepresented, and Canonical Literary Traditions"
"You Will Observe ..."
Letting Lippard Teach
MELISSA GNIADEK
GEORGE LIPPARD is a nineteenth-century popular author who captures students' attention. His cultivation of a dramatic self-image, his ongoing exchanges with his critics, his invention of myths (like the legend of the Liberty Bell) for a nation searching for a past, and his commitment to exposing corruption and inequality all challenge any preconceptions that students might have about nineteenth-century authors. Similarly, his sensational stories and particular brand of melodrama unsettle students' ideas about what nineteenth-century American literature looks like. While many of Lippard's sprawling serialized novels are too long to be read in a typical undergraduate course, shorter works like 'Bel of Prairie Eden (1848), republished in Jesse Alemán and Shelley Streeby's collection, Empire and the Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (2007), provide rich opportunities to bring antebellum serialized sensation fiction into the classroom. This essay will draw on experiences teaching this particular text in two different contexts — in a survey of American literature to 1860 and in a course explicitly concerned with gothic nineteenth-century American literature — in order to consider how a text like 'Bel might be positioned and repositioned. It will ultimately suggest that not only does 'Bel of Prairie Eden provide opportunities to employ familiar historicist reading practices, resulting in productive conversations about empire, race, gender, and print culture, but also that a text like 'Bel instructs students to consider how the text works on readers through its directives to "observe." It encourages students to consider questions of aesthetics and representation in ways that speak to critical concerns currently motivating and reshaping the study of nineteenth-century American literature.
* * *
'Bel of Prairie Eden was published serially in the Boston weekly Uncle Sam before being published in its entirety by Boston's Hotchkiss & Co. The novel is set in Texas and Mexico in the years surrounding the United States' annexation of Texas in 1845. It tells a story of revenge between two families, one American and one Mexican. The American Grywin family has moved into the Republic of Texas following the collapse of their Philadelphia bank. Years earlier Isabel Grywin had refused Don Antonio's suit when he was the attaché of the Mexican legation in Washington, DC. Don Antonio seeks revenge for this at the same time that Mexico seeks to reclaim Texas in 1842, making the link between families and land clear. Invading the Grywin family's Texas homestead, Prairie Eden, Don Antonio drugs and rapes 'Bel, hangs her father, and later kills her younger brother. 'Bel's older brother John spends years seeking revenge for these atrocities, eventually killing Don Antonio's father and wooing his sister Isora, whose honor he plans to ruin as Don Antonio had ruined 'Bel's. John also tells Isora of the wrongs done to his family without revealing the identity of his enemy so that she, unknowingly, comes to despise her own brother. While Don Antonio is clearly evil, John replicates his wrongs, complicating the novel's stance toward these families and, consequently, toward the territories that they represent. Though Lippard himself supported expansion into western lands as a way to provide opportunities for the white working classes and generally supported the US cause in the war with Mexico, 'Bel of Prairie Eden takes a more ambivalent stance toward the war than many of his other writings. In 'Bel, Shelley Streeby writes, Lippard's "utopia for redeemed labor becomes a haunted homestead in the Texas borderlands."
A novel like 'Bel, then, provides opportunities for introducing students to the popular literature that surrounded the US-Mexico war and to a writer like Lippard, and also to challenge their conception of the canon in radical ways. This has been one goal of the survey course in which I teach the novel — a goal that the students themselves introduce on the first day of class when I ask them to write down the first thing that they think of when they hear the words "American literature." We then go around the room and make a list of responses, indicating when an author, text, or concept is mentioned multiple times. Not surprisingly, responses generally involve writers that students have become familiar with in high school. Mark Twain is usually mentioned several times, as are John Steinbeck and William Faulkner. Edgar Allan Poe shows up occasionally. Herman Melville sometimes makes an appearance. Events like "the Revolution" and related concepts of liberty and freedom sometimes show up. If anything from before "the Revolution" is mentioned it is inevitably "the Puritans."
When we have finished compiling our list, students are generally quick to realize that most of the texts mentioned are from the twentieth century and that most of the authors are white men known for their novels. They begin to deepen the list themselves, mentioning whatever female, African American, Asian American, or Native American writers they can think of, all while marveling at the lack of diversity generated from their initial responses. But, of course, they cannot generally conceive of the existence of an author like Lippard, whose work lies far outside the boundaries of even the most diverse high school or undergraduate reading. As we move through the semester and students are introduced to unfamiliar voices like that of Lydia Maria Child alongside more familiar voices, from Frederick Douglass to Edgar Allan Poe, the historical reception of texts — discussion about what becomes canonical, how, and why — becomes an important part of our conversation. For example, students are always surprised to discover that Moby-Dick was not well received when it was first published. And they are always surprised to find that authors like George Lippard existed and were wildly popular. But what is just as surprising to students is how familiar aspects of a text like 'Bel of Prairie Eden seem, even though its very existence is unexpected. While they are generally amused and disoriented by the narrative's tone, by its dramatic scenes and "heaving bosoms," they are quick to remark that it reminds them of a soap opera, providing opportunities to talk about the serial form, about the gaze, about voyeurism, and about popular genres over time. Just as the survey as a whole belies their expectations about the literature of the period, 'Bel of Prairie Eden is different from what students might expect of "American literature." Yet they are also intrigued by its familiar qualities.
* * *
When I have taught 'Bel in my American Literature to 1860 course it has appeared toward the end of the semester. I have drawn attention to issues of print culture throughout the course, so Lippard represents a kind of climax regarding that particular theme. For example, when we read Anne Bradstreet poems we look at digital images of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) so that students can think about how the poems reprinted in our anthology originally appeared. They think about the various legitimating prefaces placed before Bradstreet's poems and about how the addition of poems about family and domestic concerns in a second, posthumous edition changes the collection as a whole. By the time we encounter Lippard we have read parts of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and have looked at facsimiles of the original text, discussing the role of its "radical typography." And we have jumped ahead temporally to Emily Dickinson. We look at facsimiles of her fascicles, discussing the material history of her poems and the limited ways in which they circulated during her lifetime at the same time that we close read them. Throughout the semester we address the themes of cross-cultural contact, colonial violence, community, nation, and race that might be expected in such a survey, but we also think about how texts first appeared and why that might matter. When we approach 'Bel, then, the text can be situated historically — for example, through debates about territory and slavery surrounding the US-Mexico war — in a way that connects Lippard to other authors that we have read and other historical problems that we have encountered. But it can also be positioned within conversations about print culture, as well as conversations about genre and about historical reception. Lippard represents a literary project drastically different from anyone else encountered during the semester, and his work exposes students to a different publication history. Indeed, any discussion of Lippard's work needs to situate his writing within the context of the explosion of newspapers and story papers in the antebellum period. Awareness of the exuberance of print culture during this period can, in turn, help students to resituate writers like Poe, Thoreau, and Dickinson within a dynamic world of print.
To that end, I try to bring students to a rare manuscript library during the class period before we begin to discuss 'Bel of Prairie Eden, if at all possible. This allows them to see what newspapers, story papers, gift books, and novels looked like during the period when Lippard was writing and helps to make more of a reality the concept of seriality — a concept that is familiar due to the current popularity of television serials — as it was experienced in the nineteenth century. (When it is not possible to view such archival materials in person, any number of online databases can stand in.) While we cannot see how 'Bel of Prairie Eden itself originally appeared, showing students how other works by popular mid-century authors were first published enables them to keep in mind that the cliffhangers and narrative leaps within 'Bel are related to a particular print history. For example, showing students how Uncle Tom's Cabin first appeared in serial form in the National Era gives them a chance to see a more familiar novel in its original context.
Though we cannot read 'Bel in a story paper, I often ask students to read half of the novel for the first class spent discussing the text, intentionally leaving them at a dramatic "cliffhanger" to replicate the experience of reading serially. That first class discussion is generally spent establishing some context for the novel. In addition to a brief introduction to Lippard, we discuss the critical reception of such popular fiction. I provide a handout with some key quotations from Michael Denning's Mechanic Accents (1987) and David S. Reynolds's Beneath the American Renaissance (1988; republished 2011). The publication dates of Denning's and Reynolds's books alert students to the fact that these types of popular, sensational texts began to receive critical attention not so very long ago, and we talk a bit about the recovery work involved in bringing texts like 'Bel of Prairie Eden into critical and classroom conversations. Reynolds, for example, shows that "major" writers like Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, and Dickinson were in dialogue with all kinds of "minor" writers and popular forms. He writes that "delving beneath the American Renaissance occurs in two senses: analysis of the process by which hitherto neglected popular modes and stereotypes were imported into literary texts; and discovery of a number of forgotten writings which, while often raw, possess a surprising energy and complexity that make them worthy of study on their own." Reynolds further writes that "an understanding of the antebellum context questions the long-held notion that American authors were marginal figures in a society that offered few literary materials. The truth may well be that, far from being estranged from their context, they were in large part created by it." As we discuss Reynolds's main arguments, I encourage students to reconsider the word "beneath" in his title, given the complex picture of American literature we have been developing over the course of the semester. What types of hierarchies does that concept reinforce and on what are those hierarchies based? If questions about what makes something "literature" are discussed from the beginning of the semester, students are primed to insert 'Bel into these ongoing conversations. They are eager to recognize and discuss conventional literary conceptions of "high" and "low" literature, and they are often equally willing to consider upsetting such hierarchies.
It is also necessary, of course, to spend time alerting students to the novel's historical context as well as to its place in literary history. This might be accomplished through a brief historical reading on the US-Mexico war or a handout with an annotated timeline and thorough discussion of that material in class. In my case, teaching this text in Texas meant giving students the opportunity to reach back to the Texas history that many of them had learned in elementary and high school. I allowed them to take the lead in narrating the main historical events mentioned in the text, including the battles of the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto, filling in gaps as necessary. Including a text like 'Bel in such a survey can, then, obviously help to expose students to the diverse geographies of American literature, moving beyond the focus on New England that often continues to dominate surveys of early periods of American literature. During the same decades when Nathaniel Hawthorne fictionalized the Puritan past in his familiar novels and short stories, Philadelphia-based Lippard drew on the history of other spaces in 'Bel, in which Cortés's sixteenth-century invasion of Mexico is collapsed with the nineteenth-century US invasion of Mexico through scenes in which a reader first "watches" Winfield Scott and then Cortés arrive in Vera Cruz, or what would become Vera Cruz.
"Mapping" the novel on the board as a class, collectively working to diagram the text's various characters and their relationships, is a helpful way to reinforce its geographies and historical conflicts and allow students to begin to investigate its cultural work. 'Bel, like Lippard's other novels, has a deep cast of characters, some of whom disappear and later reappear in disguise, and it can be easy for students to confuse some of them. Diagramming the characters and their relationships at the outset allows students to clarify any confusion regarding characters or plot points. But the diagram inevitably does more complicated work as well. As students name individual characters and indicate their relationships to other characters, they also note that many of the characters are recognizable "types." They identify the dark, foreign villain, the effeminate, angelic boy who will clearly be among the first characters to die, the virginal, wronged women who, they quickly realize, operate as metonyms for the land that is also passing back and forth between men in the text. And even as they point to the "types" at play, students use this diagram to begin to grapple with how types are blurred. They note that John's beauty is described as "Satanic." They note that over the course of the novel he becomes "Juan," and they grapple with what to make of that fact. They note that while Harry's (who is also sometimes called Henry) face had "so much of woman in its every outline,'" Bel cross-dresses as a monk, so that gender is repeatedly destabilized. In other words, the simple act of ensuring that everyone understands who the characters are and what happens in the text serves to expose key mechanisms of this type of sensation fiction and begins to prompt more complicated readings of the text as a whole.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Teaching Tainted Lit by Janet G. Casey. Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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