all the news that print will fit.
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| notes from underground - societal whispers all the news that print will fit. |
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Saturday, June 02, 2012 np: birds, atmospherics, etc. I'm sitting outside an office in Durham killing time while my wife is trained to work for a company doing GRE prep. I spent this morning alternately reading and policing Ratchet (one of my two dogs) when it came to his Napoleon complex. We sat outside the Whole Foods and he barked and growled at nearly every dog and person who walked by. After being unable to read consistently after awhile, we walked across the street to the stone wall that surrounds the east campus of Duke. Perched on the wall with him under me, he proceeded to lay down and just chill. Perhaps he, too, finds the faux-granola atmosphere of Whole Foods irritating. Admittedly, I had a really good breakfast from their hot bar - bacon, home fries, sauteed spinach, a biscuit and sausage gravy - but giant chains can only do so much to push an earthy demeanor before it just seems completely false. I finished reading The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark while on that wall. I picked this up at Ed McKay's some time ago - Modern Library edition and all that - based mostly on having heard of it before and it's a western, which is a passing fancy for me at times, and you know, just wanting to read. What I got was a novel about frontier justice that gets broken up by large swaths of conversation that could easily be described as Socratic dialogues. I hadn't realized how 'late' this novel was written - 1940 - in terms of its setting and all that, so I guess what I got was a bit of a modernist examination of the western as a genre. The whole novel takes place over the course of about 24 hours and for a book that ostensibly contains 28 characters at its peak, it does a good job of creating depth for a lot of them. The novel ends up exploring all manner of ideas of justice - from the external ideas of what defines justice and who defines it - to the internal struggles of men as they decide if they could have acted in more just ways - not to mention the inherent contradictions in those who act in destructive, callous yet 'gutsy' ways versus those who hang more on convictions but lack the courage to act on it more forcibly.The ending of the novel is left wide open and leaves more casualties than the body count actually implies. When I taught American Literature, I tended to enjoy constructing a unit around the writings of Emerson and Thoreau (mostly "Self-Reliance" and "Resistance to Civil Government" respectively) using also Plato's "Crito," Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and Philip K. Dick's "The Minority Report" as ways to further explore the ideas of justice and how it can be defined. I long had thought of trying to add Melville's Billy Budd into the mix as well and now Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident is something I could easily add in as well. I think it would make for much more fascinating semesters with students if were given a bit more leeway to explore groups of literature that we could tie together with themes. While exploring American Literature (and any other geopolitical grouping) through survey courses is enlightening, especially when an emphasis is placed on how literature influences other literature and artistic movements over time, I wonder if we wouldn't give students more of a service by showing them how literature explores the ideas that we think about most heavily and how those things actually do relate back to us. So, bless her, maybe instead of spending time on Anne Bradstreet's burning house, we could look at writings exploring Puritan ideas of justice and how it influenced the laws of the times. We after often pushed (and rightly so) to make the readings we give students easier to relate to their own lives, but while a lot of teachers push this by trying to locate more modern (and sometimes lesser) literature because it 'relates easier,' why not try to help students see how closely we are connected to the past by choosing more specific pieces of literature that hone in on more easily relatable subjects? You could teach a whole semester on American identity and explore it through slave narratives, Huck Finn, The Great Gatsby and others. It's summer time, which means I want to write more. So this is me attempting, once again, to do so. It doesn't matter what I do with this space, really. It just matters that I do. posted by J. Neas | 6/02/2012 12:08:00 PM
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