Shakeosphere

Writing for the Week

2018-03-08T09:16:00.002-08:00

You can now find most of the new things I write at The Week. My author page is here: http://theweek.com/authors/blaine-greteman

A piece I wrote on The Nutcracker is here.

A Winter's Tale: Celebrating the Return of the Bald Eagle

2015-02-06T10:52:00.003-08:00

(I originally published this story in Ode Magazine in December 2010. But Ode is now defunct, and I can't find a copy online, so I'm posting it here...).

In the Iowa winter, as the poet Robert Hass wrote, “a farmer’s dreams are narrow,” and autumn sometimes inspires me with a kind of dread as I work in the garden that will soon be buried under a foot of snow. As temperatures drop to -20 Celsius (4 degrees Fahrenheit), it is easy to feel that life has been banished forever. But this winter, as the river that runs past my window becomes a sluggish ice-jam, something miraculous will happen: the bald eagles will return.

To anyone familiar with the giant birds primarily through American patriotic kitsch, the sight may not seem surprising or particularly moving. But after the bald eagle became our national symbol in 1782, Americans quickly and with a grim irony drove it to the brink of extinction. In 1973, two years before I was born, George Laycock chronicled the “impending disappearance of the bald eagle” in a book that details the manifold challenges facing the birds, from pollution to hunting to development. Laycock’s book, The Autumn of the Eagle, ostensibly advocates change, but reads more like a lament for a species that is already gone, complete with data charts and maps showing the extirpation

of the birds from the lower 48 states. From the 1930s to the 1960s, from west Texas to California, hunters developed the bizarre sport of aerial eagle hunting, killing thousands of eagles a year by blasting them with shotguns from the open windows of small airplanes. The practice first emerged as a response to sheep ranchers’ mistaken belief that the birds, which grow nearly four feet long and have a seven-foot wingspan, could

prey on young lambs, a myth akin to the persistent rumors that the birds snatched small children. But it quickly developed into a uniquely American high-octane sport. One legendary hunter, John Casparis, bragged that he could kill 1,000 a year by approaching

an eagle from behind, letting go of his plane’s controls and firing his sawed-off shotgun just before the craft stalled into a dive.

DDT was a far bigger threat. American farmers dumped thousands of tons of the insecticide on their crops each year throughout the 1950s and ’60s, before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring established the link to waning bird populations and helped launch

the American environmental movement. As DDT made its way through the food chain in ever-more-concentrated doses, it caused eagle shells to become thin and the eggs to become sterile. Against fierce industrial opposition, which continues today, the U.S.

banned DDT in 1972 and the birds were protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. But as a child, I never saw an eagle outside a zoo or a dollar bill. In one of Shakespeare’s most beautiful plays, A Winter’s Tale, a character who has just found a lost infant meets another who has just witnessed a death. “You have met with things dying,”

he says, “and I with things newborn,” and the moment shifts the play from tragedy to comedy. The eagle’s return marks a similar narrative shift, a victory for those who spent their Januaries tramping around the frozen Midwest looking for the single eagle’s

nest that remained in Iowa by 1977, holding out hope that the story could be changed if

they could find and protect a viable egg. Even the most optimistic could never have predicted the resiliency of the birds and the ferocity of their comeback. In Iowa, hopeful environmentalists set a goal of 10 or 20 nests by 2010. But exponential population growth took the Department of Wildlife by surprise. Last year, federal staffers lost count at 254 nests, nearly as many as once existed in the entire continental U.S. The birds left the Endangered Species List in 2007. This year, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources spotted 47 new eagle territories and officially stopped trying to count every nest. Busloads of tourists now visit Iowa and Illinois in the winter—a trip that defies both logic and comfort—to go on “eagle safaris” with leaders like Bob Motz. The retired biology teacher from Rock Island, a town on the Illinois border, offers your money back if you don’t see eagles, “and I’ve never had to give it back,” he says. Indeed, although the birds face continuing threats from agricultural runoff and other pollution, it must be pretty easy money these days. On my most recent midwinter walk by the river with my children, I lost track of how many eagles we saw fishing and nesting in trees. As one bird, the size of a small car, wheeled towards us and dove for fish, my three-year-old daughter screamed “don’t eat me!,” but then quickly returned to eating snow and ignoring the birds. Her sense of normalcy, her absence of portentous symbolism, is a real cause for celebration. For me, the eagle’s return is an amazing scene of renewal at the moment of the year that seems most barren and bleak, a reminder that a few dedicated people can change the narrative for a species or an ecosystem. For my children, it's just another reason to look forward to January.

2014-06-18T07:23:00.001-07:00

I just had a fantastic discussion with Phillip Adams at Late Night Live, in Australia. If you don't know the show, you should check it out here.

We were discussing the value of the humanities and the sense of perpetual crisis that grips them. I've recently written about this at The New Republic .

I can't stress these three takeaways strongly enough. 1) Humanities scholars need to fight the cuts to state-supported education that threaten to make the liberal arts, and the pleasures that they bring, the preserve of the rich. 2) In order to do so, humanities scholars need to make sure we're actually engaging a broader public rather than perpetuating our own forms of elitism by writing only highly specialized books for ever narrower audiences. 3) As long as the liberal arts doing their fundamental job by critiquing society and imagining better ways to live, they will be under siege and in crisis by people who want to perpetuate the status quo. We should welcome the debate!

The American Scholar, 2.0

2014-05-10T10:49:00.001-07:00

Delivered at Oklahoma State University, to the inductees of Phi Beta Kappa, May 9, 2014

Phi Beta Kappa, as you know, is an honors society founded to advance the liberal arts and sciences, or the humanities, and promote “freedom of inquiry and expression, disciplinary rigor, breadth of intellectual perspective, the cultivation of skills of deliberation and ethical reflection,” and so I’ve been asked to talk about those goals today – and the role of humanities in our world. It’s a great honor to do so, and I want to thank the chapter at OSU so much for inducting me.

Cassandra, the original humanities scholar, from a 15th century woodcut

I’ll begin by saying that if humanities scholars were a sect, we would worship at the shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual crisis. Recently one of my friends gave me a book called The Poet As Journalist: Life at the New Republic, which was published the year I was born. My friend thought I’d like it because it is by Reed Whittemore, a poet and English professor who, like me, also wrote for The New Republic. But I was more struck that the book begins like this: “I have been an English teacher for nearly thirty years now, [and] have watched the decline of my profession with some sorrow.” I lit a candle at the shrine. In fact, the first book with the title Crisis in the Humanities, was published in 1964, just as my father was graduating with his English degree. Long before that, in August of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a speech called “The American Scholar” to the fledgling Phi Beta Kappa Chapter at Harvard. And even then, he made it clear that the humanities were in crisis. Emerson noted that the scholar must “relinquish display and immediate fame... incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside.... Worse yet, he must accept, — how often! poverty and solitude. For[saking] the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of his own making...” Congratulations, Graduates!

In all seriousness, and if this is possible, the situation of the humanities scholar may be more tenuous now than it was then. A few years after his speech, Emerson would see the passage of the Morrill Land Grant act, which established Colleges across the nation, including OSU, “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes." In this era of privatization and shrinking state support it’s hard to imagine the same thing happening. In our practical society, with its emphasis on the bottom line, to be a liberal arts major is almost an act of civil disobedience. Even President Obama – who most Oklahomans, according to Senator Inhofe, believe is an Islamic Communist – even President Obama has suggested that we should evaluate colleges based on the earnings of their graduates.

We can make the case that humanities graduates in fact do very well by these metrics. A recent study of 3 million US residents showed that those who majored in liberal arts earned an average of $2,000 more per year at their peak, compared to peers who majored in professional or pre-professional fields. But the fact remains that this assessment of value would have made Emerson shudder, and it surely isn’t core to why we study the humanities. For Emerson, “the American scholar...is one who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies...has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart.”
Nice work if you can get it!“The Oracles of the human heart” is pretty high flying stuff, but at its base is a good definition of the humanities, and the reason they almost necessarily exist in a state of perpetual crisis. After all, we don’t always want to hear oracles, or the judgments of history. As early as Aeschylus, Cassandra was a kind of oracle – gifted with the power of prophecy, she was able to foretell the fall of Troy, to warn against that very suspicious gift of the big, wooden horse – but she also had the curse of not being believed. She is the original Lady of Perpetual Crisis, and perhaps the original humanities scholar. When the humanities are doing their job – when they are plumbing the depths of history and culture to speak unpopular truths – they frankly should be in crisis.

The word comes from the Greek, krisis (κρίσις), turning point, or the Greek verb krino (κρίνω) "to separate, judge, or decide.” The humanities look at the panorama of history and critique those aspects of the world that outrage our sense of human justice. They separate and analyze the best and worst of what it means to be human.

So what did Emerson think the American scholar should stand for – what truths should this scholar speak? “The American idea,” he said, “is emancipation, to abolish kingcraft, feudalism, black-letter monopoly, it pulls down the gallows, opens the doors of the sea to all emigrants” (“The American Idea," Complete Works, 593). Sadly, those goals have much the same relevance here in 2014 as they did at Harvard in 1837. For all the triumphs of emancipation, "kingship," measured as inequality, is alive and well. And the recent, botched execution in Oklahoma has sadly shown that in at least 32 states we haven’t pulled down the gallows – that in many areas we’ve merely put the gallows behind a curtain.

But isn’t attacking “emancipation, kingcraft, and the gallows,” while opening the door “to all emigrants” a tall order for the humanities? Perhaps. And it is also true that humanities scholars have been as complicit as anyone in their own disappearance from the public eye. In some ways we’ve become too narrow, too specialized, and too reluctant to engage with crisis. But it is also true that humanities scholars have helped lead the great advances in social justice since Emerson gave his speech, from Walt Whitman, giving voice to emancipation, to the student of Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King. When I arrived at OSU in the fall of 1994, I distinctly remember that the fledgling LGBT Club at OSU staged a day of solidarity – a denim day, where you were supposed to wear denim to show your support. When I left my calculus class that day the sidewalks were covered, in response, with really hateful anti- gay graffiti – and I also remember one of my study partners from calculus, as he surveyed the scene, saying that we should take a baseball bat to anyone who dared to come out so publicly on our campus. In that moment, I bit my tongue and withdrew from the duty of crisis. But later that night I wrote, of all things, a poem, reflecting on the moment and my sense of ethical failure, and then I wrote one of my first O’Colly articles, calling on students at OSU to rise above the hate. For a week after, when anyone called my name as I walked across campus, my first instinct was to hit the ground. But as it turned out, the vast majority of those voices were friendly.

I don’t think I personally had much to do with this change, but I think it’s fair to say that the kind of bigotry we encountered then is almost unimaginable on a campus like OSU’s today. I live just up I-35, in a state where gay marriage has been legal for seven years and where one our students, Zach Wahls, has gone from high school quarterback, to Truman scholar, to Daily Show guest and bestselling author of the book My Two Moms, just in the past few years – and will, knock on wood, be a strong Rhodes candidate next year.

Whether you agree with such changes or not, history will judge them. And while many people, from many walks of life, were involved in making them happen, they were led by the liberal arts and sciences -- by the writers, filmmakers, philosophers, and cultural critics who began to show people like me, a straight white kid from rural Oklahoma, the essential humanity of people whose lives were superficially very unlike my own.

So the next time someone asks if you think the humanities are in crisis, you can answer, “I hope so!” Since it was founded in 1776, at a moment of crisis that would begin to define the nation, Phi Beta Kappa has been fostering the debate and ethical inquiry that has guided that process. But we are still not all we can be. As John Milton says, in Areopagitica – his famous defense of free speech, written during the crisis of the English Civil War – “The light which we have gain'd, was giv'n us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.” So welcome to the crisis – and my most sincere congratulations!

Shakespeare and the Pile Drivers: Or Why Digital Humanities Should Be Open and Free

2014-04-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

I was on a panel on digital humanities at the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) in St. Louis recently when the question of access, public input, and crowdsourcing arose. Academics, particularly at a Shakespeare association, can be a funny bunch, and deeply suspicious of the public. That's even true among the relatively small crowd doing work on digital humanities. One member of my panel argued, for example, that projects that encourage public crowdsourcing, for example to transcribe Civil War Diaries or to write biographies of early publishers, threaten to "reproduce the
dominant discourse." I'm summarizing, but the argument was basically this: public contributors skew toward interest in white, male figures, obscuring minorities and women, and this is the fatal flaw in crowdsourcing. The final statement, I think verbatim was, "that may not be a problem for you, but it is for me."

Actually though, I don't see why the "public" discourse is any more a dominating one than the controlled scholarly discourse that flourishes within places like the SAA. Personally, I always get nervous when I hear someone saying that the masses are not really fit to write their own history and that the task is better left in the hands of a scholarly elite.

While we were at SAA in St. Louis, the Shakespeareans shared the hotel with a cosmetics association, and in the same month, the Pile Drivers of South Carolina also held their annual meeting in the same space. Frankly, I bet neither of those gatherings policed hierarchies as rigidly as the SAA. From tuition fees to registration, organizations like this are not necessarily on the side of the angels. More power to DH projects that change that dynamic.

Marvell, Censorship, and the Coffe Shop Crowd

2014-01-23T13:29:00.000-08:00

With permission of University of Iowa Special Collections

The University of Iowa has an especially interesting copy of The Rehearsal Transpros'd, the work that made Andrew Marvell famous (or infamous) when most of his poetry was still unknown or held in private manuscripts.

The Rehearsal Transpros'd (1672) was an attack on Samuel Parker, the Bishop of Oxford -- but more than that, it was a defense of religious freedom and an argument for the the separation of church and state. But Marvell's biting, ironic style is what made it such a sensation and a scandal (you'll notice that Marvell's name doesn't appear on the title page -- he stayed anonymous to stay out of jail). In fact, not only does the Rehearsal, as a product of London's underground press, not include Marvell's name, but it doesn't include the name of a printer or publisher either. More than this, the first edition include a false imprint on the title page, which was all part of Marvell's joke, poking fun at a Samuel Parker for a geographical error made in his own work: "London, Printed for J.D., for the Assigns of John Calvin, at the Signs of the King's Indulgence, on the South Side of Lake Lemane" (the joke is that Parker mistakenly refers to Geneva being on the "rank soil of the south side of Lake Lemane" in his own book, while as Marvell points out, "the lake likes East and West, and Geneva is built on the West side of it").

It doesn't seem like much, but it was just such smart-assed humor that drove the authorities wild, and the censors quickly shut down printing of the book. Luckily for Marvell, King Charles II himself enjoyed the book, and so insisted it be allowed -- but the second issue was printed only with substantial revisions, including the title page pictured above, which removes Marvell's cutting humor.

This is where the Iowa copy gets interesting: here's an enlarged photo:

Although the censors had stepped in, Marvell's work was already the talk of the coffee shops, where the clever, sarcastic title page was clearly part of the appeal. The wag that bought this copy clearly also had access to the first edition, and copied in the original joke. He also went through the copy dutifully restoring other deletions that the censor, Roger L'Estrange, had demanded. But still more interestingly, while the annotator seems to know all about that first edition, he doesn't ever include the author's name -- was Marvell's identity, at this point, still a secret?

At any rate, the secret was out by the following year, when Marvell issued the Rehearsal Transpros'd: The Second Part, with his name on the title page. But Marvell continued to develop his ironic use of the paratext. Here's the title page from the University of Iowa copy of that book:

Notice that he's included a note saying that this edition had been "licensed" by the censors. And above that license, he's included another quote from his opponent: "If you have any thing to object against it, do your worst. You know the Press is open." This was Parker, challenging his opponents -- and by turning Parker's own words against him, once again, Marvell both takes up that challenge and implies that the press is not quite as open, or free, as the Bishops would have us believe.

On the Common Core, Naughty Books, and Ambiguity

2013-11-01T12:43:00.001-07:00

A piece I've written over at The New Republic is getting lots of attention, so I thought I'd just expand on a few things here. I think the ambitions behind the Common Core are good ones, but I agree with Dianne Ravitch and co. that the whole thing was rushed and probably needed more input from those on the ground. Most troubling, I think, is the general tendency in education "reform" right now to reduce everything to some quantifiable metric, including literary complexity. It is a frightening assumption, in so much of our society right now, that if an experience can't be reduced to data it really isn't worthwhile. When we bring this assumption to bear on books or art it compromises the "human" experience at the center of the humanities. In short: it makes our teachers, and our children, less human.

Yes, I understand that some of the metrics used to measure reading complexity are primarily intended to improve comprehension -- and I agree this is a worthy goal for at least one part of our literacy education. I also understand that the standards carefully explain that students should also learn more nuanced reading skills. But the emphasis and the energy behind the Common Core points more in the direction of "comprehension" and quantifiable data than it does in the direction more broadly defined "reading." The CCSSO documentation repeatedly makes it clear that the final goal is better algorithms and metrics, better testing regimes, more failproof systems.

We must recognize that such systems, in both their conceptualization and implementation, often disempower and devalue teachers. The best teaching systems in the world -- like Finland's -- treat teachers as experts in their field and demand their expertise. They then trust teachers to match reading materials to children in a holistic fashion. This is the way it used to be, in some places, in America too. At least that was my lucky experience, growing up in a small, rural school, in a poor community in far western Oklahoma. I was a loudmouth, smartass kid, who was always in trouble for disrupting class. In my 7th grade year, I literally spent every day of the first month in after school detention. But in my 8th-grade year, I got lucky. That's when my English teacher took me aside and said: "you know what, you seem to get this literature we're reading pretty well. Why don't you go over to my bookshelf -- the one over there behind my desk -- and find something else you might like?" She particularly suggested I might want to take a look at The Catcher in the Rye, or maybe Clockwork Orange.

Clockwork Orange? What Jr. High kid today gets to read that book in school? But that teacher let me read all the naughty books -- the books that I, at least, felt like were just a little bit forbidden -- and I loved it. That semester I not only read Clockwork Orange and Catcher in the Rye, but also most of Steinbeck, On the Road, and everything I could find by Kurt Vonnegut. These books gave voice to some of the social discontent I'd begun to feel but never been able to articulate. They resonated with me, and in some very real sense they saved me, or at least saved my teachers from some of my disrupted disaffection.

I never stopped reading, although I did eventually get into Shakespeare and Milton too. I became an English professor so I could teach them all the time. And I hope that some of my students become teachers in a system where they're treated like professionals who can figure out what students would like to read -- what they need to read -- without using some stupid algorithm.

How to COPY a Book Proposal

2013-10-09T07:10:00.000-07:00

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rachel Toor explains "How to Write a Good Book Proposal," and she offers some excellent advice, especially for nonfiction writers and novelists. I'd like to chip in here, though, with something for writers of academic books -- and for writers who'd rather copy a form than construct one from a set of instructions. I probably fall into that later category: give me a formal model (newspaper article, book review, personal essay) and I can usually adapt to it pretty easily, although my eyes glaze over within a paragraph of any guide about "how to" write this or that. It may be a weakness, but it's my weakness.

So, for those of you who share that weakness, I'm posting the book proposal that I sent to Cambridge University Press and that led to my recently published book. Is it a perfect model? I doubt it. But I did copy it from some pretty good models! One caveat: my final book changed quite a bit from this, both in terms of content and organization. But this was good enough to get me in the door.

Childish Things: The Poetics and Politics of Youth in Milton’s England

Book Proposal

Blaine Greteman

Childish Things argues that coming of age in seventeenth-century England was a uniquely poetic and political act. Early modern authors used childhood and maturity to address contentious questions of political representation – about who has a voice and who can speak on his or her own behalf. Writers since Aristotle had described children as creatures of pure mimesis. Naturally embodying the poetic impulse, children imitated the voices of others as they cultivated more authoritative speech and ultimately left childish babble behind. Early-modern educators, playwrights, and poets repeatedly staged this drama, and if we accept Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that the central problem of all politics is knowing “whether the subjects who count in the interlocution...are speaking or just making a noise” it could not fail to be political.

In seventeenth-century England, after all, consent was explicitly figured as voice. Electors “gave their voices,” shouting assent to select their parliamentary representatives, while those whose age or behavior made them incapable of consent were deemed legal infants, from the Latin infans, “voiceless.” Historians like Mark Kishlansky and Derek Hisrt have shown that government by consent became the new paradigm during this dynamic period, and I argue that the threshold between infancy and adulthood accordingly became the focus of special scrutiny and enormous creative energy. Childish Things focuses on printed and manuscript works by Ben Jonson, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and their contemporaries that ask how voice emerges from infancy and how childish speech before that moment complicates ideas of human agency and obligation. In each case, the ability of poets and dramatists to produce and reproduce powerful voices provides an important part of the answer. According to many humanist pedagogues and the men who learned the dramatic arts in their schools, poetry was a discipline that could “embowlden our youth and try their voices,” as one educator put it. This disciplinary function encouraged antitheatrical critics like William Prynne to rail against the similarities between infantilizing dramatic representation and a political system where children could become members of Parliament. But more radical reformers seized on the child’s unruly nature and mimetic responsiveness as a radical resource, a voice of innocence and channel for the divine.

Childish Things suggests that we must understand the distinction between youth and age as a power relation constructed in historically specific discourses and social contexts. Over the last forty years, historians have carefully revised Philippe Aries’ claim in Centuries of Childhood (1962) that childhood did not exist as a distinct phase of life before the later seventeenth century, while retaining his sense that concepts of childhood are culturally determined. I draw on this work as I focus on the tendency of seventeenth-century writers to define children in terms of their mimetic capacities and poetic responsiveness, but I shift the center of gravity to explore the seventeenth-century idea that childhood could persist long after sexual maturation. The cases I examine lie at the outer limits of childishness and extreme precocity, where voters elected twelve-year-olds as Members of Parliament before they could legally vote and theatre impresarios advertised child actors who were actually twenty, thirty, or forty years old. Historians like Paul Griffiths and Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos describe many of these figures as “youths.” But Childish Things demonstrates the many ways they continued to be conceptualized as children and focuses on the moments when they became subjects, speaking their own adult status into being. Poetic and political representation meet in the figure of the child on the cusp of adulthood – the grown boy still playing the woman’s part on stage, the young girl performing as The Lady in Milton’s Maske, the newly-created Adam and Eve making their way through the wider world at the conclusion of Paradise Lost.

As those examples make clear, the poet, pedagogue, and polemicist John Milton is a pivotal figure in this study. “Shall we never grow old enough,” he asked in one of his final political tracts, “to be wise?” It is a typical expression of Milton’s perpetual anxieties about his own maturity and that of the British people, and this book draws broadly from his poetry and prose to parallel Milton’s own development from budding poet to national tutor with the troubled birth and growth of consent in the English polity. At the same time, I show how such development looks back to and arises out of models of childhood staged by Jonson, Shakespeare, the humanists, and the antitheatrical critics who attacked them. For these writers, to speak as a child may simply mean to speak nonsense or to parrot others, but it may also enable one to channel something more powerful than oneself.

Status of the Manuscript

The completed manuscript is approximately 90,000 words, including endnotes, and is ready to be reviewed by the press upon request. A version of the first chapter, “Coming of Age on Stage” is forthcoming in English Literary History (ELH) and a version of the third chapter “‘Perplex’t Paths: Youth and Authority in Milton’s Work,” was published in the Summer 2009 issue of Renaissance Quarterly. I do not plan to publish additional chapters. As a tenure-track professor at the University of Iowa I have ample time to devote to revisions, and as a former writer for TIME magazine I am experienced and efficient at working through the editorial process.

Readership

Childish Things will appeal broadly to students and scholars of early modern English literature, drama, and history. In a recent volume of Renaissance Quarterly the historian Margaret King assessed the existing histories of childhood and noted the need for work that would address “the demarcations made on the spectrum from conception to maturity.” Problem Children helps fill that void. The book’s argumentative spine, tracking the development and definition of consent, will also engage intellectual historians and scholars of the Civil War and legal historians, while its theoretical engagement with Hobbes, Hanna F. Pitkin, Philip Pettit, and John Rawls, will be of interest to students of political philosophy. Shakespeareans and students of the theatre will attend to the new research on child actors, which significantly alters our understanding of the seventeenth-century stage. Finally, with three chapters on John Milton’s poetry and prose, I expect the book to find a particular audience among Milton scholars and be reviewed in journals like Milton Studies and Milton Quarterly.

Related Works

Michael Witmore’s Pretty Creatures (2007) and Edel Lamb’s Performing Childhood (2008) have recently developed the ground Leah Marcus broke with Childhood and Cultural Despair (1978). These books focus on the literary representation and aesthetics of very young children and neonates, establishing the child as central to early-modern poetics. None, however, explores the strange territory at the outer bounds of childhood, and perhaps for that reason no other literary study develops the relationship between the poetics of childhood and the question of consent. Likewise, promising works like Su Fang Ng’s Literature and the Politics of Family (2007) have focused on patriarchal and anti-patriarchal metaphors with an eye to gender and hierarchy, but without attending to children and their conceptual link to issues of mimesis and voice. Likewise, individual authors in my study, especially Milton, have been richly contextualized in terms of their revolutionary moment in works like David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic (1999) and David Loewenstein’s Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries (2007). But it is safe to say that none of these works have considered the politics of childhood. Although Holly Brewer’s legal history, By Birth or Consent (2008), focuses largely on the American context and does not include literary analysis, it shows that such a consideration is due. Childish Things unites discussions of the poetics and politics of youth. It does not simply use poetry and drama to illuminate social movements or testify to a broader discursive moment, but argues that children in form a nexus between poetry and politics, a singular locus for poetry’s disciplinary and transformative power.

Contents

Introduction

“Childhood,” wrote Henry Cuffe in a hugely popular text of 1607, “is the first part and age of a man’s life, wherein their generation and growth is perfected, and this lasteth (for the most part) untill wee be five and twenty.” Cuffe draws on the best authorities, but his parenthesis reflects a fundamental ambiguity about the boundaries of childhood shared across the legal, religious, and educational writings examined in this introduction. Although they often bore full adult responsibilities, no amount of good behavior, maturity, or intelligence could guarantee adult status to children in their teens, twenties, and even thirties. One trespass, however, could do the job instantly. The legal principle of “malitia supplet aetatem,” or malice supplies the age, removed the uncertainty, allowing even the youngest children to be executed as adults if they, like Adam and Eve, possessed the knowledge of good and evil. My introduction traces the overlapping political, religious, and poetic concerns that make malitia supplet aetatem a fundamental pattern in early modern culture from Erasmus to Locke. As individuals enter adult society, they reenact man’s fall with each generation, compromising their newfound voices. The book’s recurring dilemma is the struggle to escape that double bind, to seize the ability to speak without seizing the inheritance of sin.

Chapter 1: Coming of Age on Stage: Jonson’s Epicoene and the Politics of Childhood in Early Stuart England

The same qualities that made the child incapable of rational consent made him the ultimate exemplar of poetic response, and Chapter 1 explores the implications of this dynamic in Epicoene, a play that held its popularity both before the revolution and after the restoration. Discussions of children’s theatre companies have reached a consensus view that the plays’ aesthetic power derived in some part from the boy actors’ diminutive size – an estrangement effect noted by Michael Witmore, Peter Stallybrass, Michael Shapiro, and others. But my research shows that by the time James I took the throne, the actors in London’s children’s theatre companies were often fully grown men performing as children, and in Jonson’s play we can see how their liminality facilitated Stuart theatre’s exploration of the Jacobean subject’s vexed political status.

As grown men performed childhood on stage, they testified to theatre’s disciplinary power even as they enacted a fictional freedom not available outside the theater walls. The young man dressed as the titular “silent woman” of Jonson’s play emblematizes this predicament perfectly: he speaks loudly and constantly as long as he performs his female role, lapsing into true silence only when he is finally revealed as a mature but infantilized man and the play ends. At a time when James countered parliamentary unrest by adopting and expanding the rhetoric of the firm but benevolent father-king, works like Jonson’s asked whether it was possible, or even desirable, to leave childish things behind.

Chapter 2: Minors No Senators: Children, Literature and the Problem of Consent

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was surprisingly common for children under the age of majority to serve in Parliament, where they illuminated in stark relief the same crisis of agency dramatized in plays like Epicoene. In this rarefied space, an infant could legislate for the nation, although outside of Parliament he had no legal authority to speak for himself, an irony the MP for Lichfield, Richard Weston highlighted when he complained “it is not fit, that they should make Laws for the Kingdom, who are not liable to the law.” This chapter shows that for many, like the self-described “scourge” of stage plays William Prynne, such facts revealed disturbing similarities between dramatic and political representation in a country poised between tyranny and liberty. In Minors No Senators, a tract published both early in the Civil War and at the Restoration, Prynne attacked child MPs with strikingly anti-theatrical language that illuminates the broader debate over education, poetry, and politics. Theoretically, the child’s ability to channel the voices of others might offer a vehicle for the people’s will, but the practical effect of using Parliament as a finishing school for elites also indicated the disciplinary and symbolic purpose of England’s chief representative body. Accordingly, as the principal of representation became central to discussions of English governance, the presence of children on the public stages of Parliament and playhouse forced a fundamental question: did the type of representation embodied by the mimetic child demonstrate a failure of agency and consent, or did it indicate of a kind of representation that could operate successfully in the absence of consent? This is not just a political question that can be illuminated by literature, with poets and playwrights shedding light on their culture’s attempts to conceptualize the basis of obligation. Instead, it is a fundamental crux that troubles contemporary claims for poesy’s shaping power and forms a recurring theme in the works of John Milton and his contemporaries in the following chapters.

Chapter 3: ‘Perplex’t Paths’: Youth and Authority in Milton’s Early Work

Not all reformers attempted to sever the link between poetic and political representation. The kind of authoritative consent Prynne envisioned was problematic, in part, because the period’s broad conceptualization of childhood made it difficult to explain when youths became properly adult. Prynne dodged the question by declaring that legislators should be “Old Men” of at least fifty. But Milton was never one to step lightly away from a limen, and in early works like Comus he takes up the question of how children on the cusp of adulthood become free individuals with the authority to shape their own destinies. In works that prefigure his educational tracts and play a performative role in his own maturation, Milton suggests that only a daring engagement of the child’s passionate and sensuous nature allows a powerful, adult voice to emerge.

This is a peculiarly poetic process, immersing the child in a world of delights that she echoes, resists, and transforms; as the voice becomes authoritative, the human will comes into its own. This proleptic moment, in which voice outstrips the will, generates the central anxiety in Milton’s early works. The youth who speaks before gaining the right to judge his own words may echo the wrong things, recognizing the malice of his will only after innocence cannot be recalled. As I demonstrate this dynamic in early works like Ad Patrem, Sonnet 7, and Comus, I also address a lacuna in Milton studies. Recent revisionary biographical work by Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns has suggested that Milton began his career as a conservative with high-church leanings, embracing “Laudian Arminianism and Laudian style” before gradually becoming radicalized. But until Childish Things we have had no clear discussion of the role Milton’s poetry itself played in this developmental process, as a young author found his voice through a process that generated his later radicalism.

Chapter 4: ‘Children of Reviving Libertie’: The Radical Politics of the Well-Disciplined Child

Milton’s career usefully complicates the dominant account of Renaissance humanist education as a disciplinary, conformist force popularized by scholars like Lisa Jardine, Anthony Grafton, and Richard Halpern. This chapter begins by exploring the ways that Milton, Comenius, and other mid-century reformers adapted humanist pedagogical theories and concepts of childhood to revolutionary use. Both Comenius and Milton develop the humanistic goal of willing submission into a radical discipline, but while Comenius attempts to purge his program of the poetic error that had long troubled humanist pedagogues, Milton insists that these dark materials are the very stuff of virtue. Milton’s singular departure from the pedagogical tradition drives not only Of Education, but also polemical works including Eikonoklastes, Areopagitica, The Readie and Easie Way, and his epic First and Second Defense of the English People.

In such works, he draws on metaphors of childhood and wardship as he encourages his countrymen to prove that their liberty is not, as he puts it in the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, merely “a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to coz’n babies.” Milton describes a people who lack a voice but who possess a radical capacity for growth and change, and a more complete understanding of his pedagogical model forces a reassessment of his infamous elitism. Milton certainly believes that the nation in wardship needs “a potent tutor, an overseer, a faithful and courageous superintendent of your affairs.” But whether he sets himself or Cromwell up in this guardian position, he clearly intends it to be temporary, and I conclude by arguing that his prose works both describe and constitute a poetic education that can make the people “fittest to chuse” for themselves. The phrase is taken from The Readie and Easie Way, written on the eve of Restoration when Milton’s estimation of the people’s actual readiness is at its nadir. Even here, however, Milton continues to suggest that his own words may raise them up as “children of reviving libertie.”

Chapter 5: ‘Something of Gratitude’: Hobbes’ Prodigal Fictions

While Milton employs concepts of childhood and development to construct a model of political change, Hobbes uses the child’s vacated agency as the model subjectivity for a system of political stasis. Almost no critical attention has been paid to the role of children in Hobbes’s system, although in Leviathan and elsewhere the philosopher makes it clear that “the Child’s consent” to receive nourishment from its mother precedes all other social agreements. How and when does the child demonstrate this consent? Such questions go to the heart of mid-century debates over obligation and whether social relations derive from consent and contract or altruism and patronage.

Critical neglect of Hobbes’ children started early. In De Cive, Hobbes suggests that to understand how contract operates in the state of nature we should “consider men as though they were suddenly sprung from the earth (like mushrooms) as adults right now.” Beginning from such a position, Hobbes can explain with almost mathematical precision how obligation arises from conquest and contract as men make rational choices to preserve themselves. But children lack a fully developed rational faculty, and both Royalist and Republican critics attacked Hobbes for eliding them from his account. Surely their obligation to parents demonstrated the principal role of love, nurture, and lineage in the state? I argue that Hobbes developed his answer over the course of his career, fundamentally altering his definitions of “reason” and “choice” as he reconfigures parental nurture and filial gratitude as a contractual exchange. Mimetic and irrational, the child who can become obligated through no rational decision or act becomes a perfect figure for theorizing the obligation of the masses of men who never exercise a real voice in the political system to which they owe allegiance.

Chapter 6: ‘Unexperienc’t Thought’: Filial Affect and Education in England

Through Satan, Milton depicts the failure of the Hobbesian psychology of contract and of the static worldview it requires; Satan attempts to elide filial ties by proposing that the angels may be “self-begot,” and when he finally does acknowledge the Father’s gifts he can only experience gratitude as debt, love as a system of exchange. I argue that Adam and Eve demonstrate Milton’s alternative, their experience of obligation drawn from humanistic conceptions of childhood and the poet’s own radical pedagogy. This final chapter not only offers a new way of reading Paradise Lost in the context of the many contemporary works depicting Adam and Eve as children, but also refigures our notion of the poem’s notorious disciplinary and hierarchical tendencies.

Paradise Lost has earned a reputation for bullying, from Stanley Fish’s depiction of the poem as a hectoring schoolmaster to Mary Nyquist’s influential argument that it enacts a form of female subjectivity that will be endlessly reiterated in future novels where heroines learn “the value of submitting desire to the paternal law” (123). But Milton leverages notions of childhood and familial nurture to elucidate forms of obligation without subjection, suggesting that a society of truly paradisal freedom might be constructed on the filial principal of fealty to God’s image written on the heart. The difference from Nyquist’s model is subtle but essential, as Milton himself recognized as early as The Reason of Church Government, where he argued that God is no “schoolmaster of perishable rites, but a most indulgent father governing his Church as a family of sons in their discreet age.” Paradise Lost depicts and enacts such governance, an education via echoes and mirrors that serves as a revolutionary resource and a path to adult voice. As Adam and Eve wander out of Eden with the world all before them Milton suggests that, for God’s children, this education is never complete.

School's in, Book's Out!

2013-08-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

My own kids head off to their first day of school tomorrow...and my book about children and the history of using literature to educate them just came out today. How's that for a segue? And how's this for a marketing pitch, oh loyal reader (for I suspect you are fit, though very few)? Cambridge University Press has given me a link to a 20% discount code for the book, which you can find here. That's right -- using that link, the book will only run you a cool $76! It's not cheap, but if you buy a copy, and bring it to me, I will sign it with my standard-issue Renaissance-scholar feather quill.

Cloudy With a Chance of Pain...

2013-08-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

Illustration from our article in THE, August 15, 2013

I have a new article on MOOCs in today's Times Higher Education.

This was a new kind of publication for me -- I co-wrote it with my old friend from Oxford, David Roberts, who now works in international development for the U.S. Government. It started off as a brainstorming session about where MOOCs could take the university, then evolved into a Swiftian satire of higher ed, and then finally took its printed form as an opinion piece. As it makes it clear, MOOCs still have a lot to learn -- but we also think they could add a nice shot of innovation to a system that could use it.

The process of writing it, on the other hand, was another confirmation of an idea my network research has been emphasizing a lot: that authorship is nearly always complex, multiple, and in some ways bureaucratic, rather than singular and romantic!

Amazon.edu

2013-08-09T08:13:00.001-07:00

(cross posted at Stanford CMEMS)

I seem to have a special skill for choosing doomed professions.

In my first real job, I was a journalist, writing for Time magazine in London, and each Monday we'd eagerly check out the news stands on the Strand so we could see how our cover stacked up against our chief competitor, Newsweek.

Now Newsweek exists only as a digital ghost, sold yet again, last week, to a new machine, while the magazine's former owner, The Washington Post, has been snapped up by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

I got out just in time, leaving the newsroom for the classroom while Jeff Bezos still looked like a loveable Muppet rather than a demented bond villain.

Now MOOCs threaten to do to universities what Amazon and Co. did to print. In a previous blog, I suggested that the humanities needed to go local to survive and thrive in the age of MOOCs. Since then, I've taught a Shakespeare class that was essentially an anti-MOOC. It was tiny, rather than massive. It was local rather than global. And we mostly went offline and into the archives, the theatre, and the workshop, to understand how Shakespeare's works continue to live in our communities.

These are my reflections on what happened, what worked, what could be improved, and why such a model will be more necessary than ever once Amazon.edu starts granting degrees.

A little background: I've taught study abroad classes at Cambridge and Oxford, and I always tried to root them deeply in a sense of place, so that we weren't simply transplanting a class from a U.S. campus to a more distant one. As a student, though, I never really had the money to take such trips, and so this summer, I had an idea: what if I offered the equivalent of a study abroad trip right here in Iowa City, where I teach at the University of Iowa? The class would be Shakespeare -- but we would try to study Shakespeare in a way he could only be studied here.

So we read the plays -- but rather than spending all our time in the classroom discussing them, we spent most of our time learning about how they lived in our community. When we read Romeo and Juliet, we took a trip to the University's Center for the Book, where we met Emily Martin, a book artist whose pop-up edition of the play won a prize this summer at the Designer Bookbinders International Competition, hosted by Oxford's Bodleian Library. Emily showed my students how to make a book, and they asked her questions about why she chose Romeo and Juliet, what it meant to her, and how she interpreted certain key moments. When we read The Merchant of Venice, we visited the Iowa Women's Archives, where my students found evidence from the various early 20th century Women's Shakespeare Clubs who had read the play, and how their readings changed before and after World War II. For Hamlet, we held a round table discussion with the director and actors of the local Summer Shakespeare Festival, who were staging the play and who were still working through interpretive issues in their rehearsals. For other plays, we visited Special Collections to look at early editions and fine press republications, and along the way my students made some fantastic discoveries, some entirely unrelated to Shakespeare.

At the library of Salisbury House, in Des Moines, for example, we found a first edition of Newton's Optics, annotated by his contemporary and fellow Royal Society member John Harris.

(courtesy Salisbury House, Des Moines, IA)

The class worked beautifully for keeping the students, and their professor, engaged and inquiring. With finds like the Newton edition, it probably also worked as my most effective integration of research and teaching.

And this was enhanced by collaborative projects, such was a class wiki page where we documented our findings and maintained our bibliography (I pulled these photographs off the Wiki page, where my students had curated them).

(courtesy Salisbury House, Des Moines, IA)

This is also where I saw some room for improvement. In teaching the class again, I would want to make the collaborative class project a larger part of the grade and the focus. But this requires establishing criteria for grading and evaluation that are far outside our normal paradigms. I can usually spot an A paper, or a C, within the first few paragraphs. But evaluating a student's contribution to a wiki page or a visit to the archives is a good deal trickier. Grading, I think, might need to shift to a more holistic portfolio approach -- such as some honors programs have already implemented -- and I'll admit that I'm not exactly sure how that would work. Finally, a class like this really needs to be made anew each year; it is impossible to work from a standard syllabus if you must organize interviews, round table discussions, and artist visits, because even within a single community the available resources will constantly change.

That would be a challenge. But if faculty really are going to argue that what we do can't be replaced by a massive, standardized, computer class, it is probably time to put up or shut up. In short, most of us already do some version of this localized, anti-MOOC teaching every time we lead a robust class discussion. But going forward we will actually probably need to work a lot harder to make sure what happens in our classes really can't happen anywhere else.

De Doctrina Mellifera

2013-07-17T06:05:00.001-07:00

Initially, one of the most initially terrifying components of my degree at Oxford was the prospect of working with John Carey -- the legendary Merton Chair of English who translated Milton's De Doctrina Christiana and wrote books on John Donne and many others. Fortunately this was only terrifying until our first meeting, where I found him warm and helpful -- if a little bemused by the ragged and jet-lagged Okie who had wandered into his office. He eventually became my thesis supervisor, and for years now I've enjoyed the chance to catch up with him on return trips to England, where I hear about the next book he will publish (forthcoming fall 2013: a memoir). He has always been a model of academic engagement that is never narrow, that always pushes past the little bubble that always threatens to engulf your life when you find yourself writing about seventeenth-century hermeticism or the Socinian heresy.

But until this summer, I've never had a chance to visit his home from home, the cottage in the Cotswolds where he maintains a fantastic garden and keeps bees. And so, until this summer, I didn't know of his fantastic double life as a purveyor of fine foods!

If you look closely at the label of that "Cotswold Honey," you'll see it's produced by author of John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art, and William Golding: The Man Who Wrote the Lord of the Flies. John tells me he produces around 200 pounds of honey in a good year, and his garden is truly a thing to behold -- far from the weedy, Darwinian survival of the fittest that goes on in my plot.

Eat your heart out, Harold Bloom!

Summer of Shakespeare

2013-06-21T10:38:00.000-07:00

It seems everyone's talking and writing about Josh Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, so I got into the act too, with my colleague Adam Hooks. You can find our discussion about Shakespeare, Superheroes, and Sequels, here.

In any event, it has been very much a summer of Shakespeare for me. I've just finished a summer course with the theme "Study Abroad in Iowa," which took us around the state and the town, meeting book artists, curators, and actors. And we discovered the all important Grant Wood connection!

No, not THAT, Grant Wood connection ---->

But a real one: Grant Wood designed the original entrance to the Shakespeare Garden in Marion, Iowa (now part of Cedar Rapids). Unfortunately, the pavilion he designed is gone -- but the garden is still there, as one of my fantastic students discovered for herself, with a project documenting Shakespeare's flora.

A Blog About Crayfish, Bacon, and Wine (But not about Food)

2013-05-14T19:00:00.002-07:00

(crossposted at Stanford University CMEMS)

I hate the name "locavore," perhaps because its so often used by foodies -- who generally seem to me like slimmed down versions of Ben Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon. But in principle, as another character in Jonson's play notes, "the motion's good, and of the spirit." And if locally sourced food is a good idea, then why not locally sourced scholarship too?

For the last few years, at least, that's been my principle, and so while I continue to make my yearly pilgrimage to the British Library and Bodleian, I also try never to miss an opportunity to duck into libraries and special collections that lie off the beaten path.

This partly reflects Thoreau's idea that we should be "the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher of [our] own oceans." I've written about how this has inflected my teaching of Shakespeare, because such collections allow us to understand how such authors have shaped the histories of our institutions and communities. But beyond this, it really is possible to find hidden treasures in smaller, regional collections. Such collections were often cobbled together with limited resources, meaning that the books are less likely to be the pristine copies we're used to seeing in the Bodleian, and more likely to be battered, well-used, and bibliographically more interesting.

[Fig. 1: Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

So when I was giving a talk at LSU recently, I made my way over to the lovely Hill Memorial Library, where the collections did not disappoint on either local or bibliographical interest. Where but Baton Rouge could one find "The Rendell Rhoades Crayfish Collection?" And what, pray tell, would one find in said collection?

The answer, in short, is that the collection holds basically every book that's ever mentioned a crayfish, crocodile, or crustacean, from (pseudo?) Ovid's fragmentary poem on the art of fishing, Halieutica, in a lovely 1556 edition, to Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1651). Rhoades was an aquaculture pioneer and obviously something of an eccentric (he also collected thousands of books on croquet, which are held at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, in Ohio).

[Fig. 2: Conrad Gessner, Halieuticon, hoc est De piscibus libellus, multo quam ante hac emendatior & scholijs illustratus (Zurich, 1556), title page, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

It only takes a single mention of crustacea to make the collection, and in fact Ovid's fragment doesn't contain any, but it is part of a polyglot edition that includes treatises on fishing and marine life in German and Latin, including the wonderful De Piscibus Marinus by Gulielmus Rondeletius (Guillaume Rondelet), a professor of medicine at Montpellier. Rondelet, who dissected his own infant son to determine the cause of his death, was an often controversial figure. But before his death in 1566 (supposedly from a surfeit of figs) he was responsible both for the anatomy theatre in Montpellier and for the fields of ichthyological and botanical research as they developed into real sciences, led by his students. From a literary perspective, it is fascinating to see Ovid's fragmentary poem paired, in the same edition, with Rondelet's taxonomic approach.

[Fig. 3: Conrad Gessner, Halieuticon, hoc est De piscibus libellus, multo quam ante hac emendatior & scholijs illustratus (Zurich, 1556), sig. F3v, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

On a side note, "crocodili" is the closest the book comes to the gators that I was told, by my gracious but perhaps malingering hosts, inhabit the University Lakes. Who knows: they do have a tiger, which you can watch here.

[Fig. 4: Conrad Gessner, Halieuticon, hoc est De piscibus libellus, multo quam ante hac emendatior & scholijs illustratus (Zurich, 1556), sig. B3v, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University]

Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum also made the collection for its brief discussion of whether crustaceans were insects or fish.

[Fig. 5: Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1651), 189, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University].

A book on the subjectivity and sexuality of early modern crayfish would seem to be in order. But the most interesting thing about the Bacon volume had nothing to do with crustaceans or fish of any kind. The Bacon book is well used -- it contains pasted-in pages, some torn pages, and a big, bold, stain:

[Fig. 6: Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (London, 1651), 9, Courtesy of Special Collections, LSU Libraries, Louisiana State University].

What is that? I might normally guess ink, except there are no ink marks anywhere else in the volume -- no sign that a reader was pouring over it with pen poised. Might the text itself offer a clue? Here, Bacon describes an experiment in which one sets a candle inside a shallow bowl of "spirit of wine," or aqua vita -- probably a highly distilled, and flammable, brandy. This allows Bacon to observe the effect of one flame upon another. And did a reader, following along at home, replicate the experiment? Perhaps I'm being fanciful, but I can't help but think that stain looks about right for a drop of distilled wine, hurriedly wiped from the page (the wipe mark goes down and from left to right, so that the stain tapers off at the word "remains").

Besides being of obvious local interest, in other words, the Rhoades Crayfish Collection is also a great resource in the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science, perhaps offering us a chance to see how books not only recorded that history, but participated in it.

Thanks very much to all the fantastic people in the LSU English Department, and the Department of Women's and Gender Studies, for showing me such a fantastic time!

The End of Affirmative Action as We Know it? (And I Feel Ambivalent)

2013-04-04T07:20:00.000-07:00

This Spring the Supreme Court will rule on two affirmative action cases that may end affirmative action as we know it. For those of us unabashedly liberal professorial types committed to increasing diversity on college campuses and reducing inequality in our educational system, this may in fact be a moment of great opportunity, as I argue at The New Republic.

In the classroom as in the courts: never waste a crisis!

Why the Humanities Must Go Local in a Global Age

2013-03-13T21:09:00.000-07:00

(Cross posted at Stanford CMEMS)
Why, in the age of MOOCS and the Internet, should students continue to enroll in my courses and others like them? Why pay tuition for a Shakespeare class at Iowa when professor from a shiny Ivy league school will teach it to you for free? These were some of the questions I tried to answer this weekend at the first Annual Des Moines Humanities Festival at Salisbury House in Des Moines. It was a great day, with Jim Leach, a native Iowan and the chairman of the NEH, in attendance to discuss his own education in the humanistic three-R's ("In Iowa," he deadpanned, "that's readin', writin', and wrastlin'").

[Courtesy University of Iowa Women's Archive]

The theme was "Collectors, Collections, and Collecting," and my own talk was called "Why the Humanities Must Go Local in a Global Age." As we've all heard by now, MOOCS are going to put us all out of a job. A single course can enroll 100,000 students or more, and when it comes to delivering information, traditional lecture courses simply can't compete, no matter how large we make them or how often we teach them: if I taught large lecture classes with 120 students, twice a semester, it would take me 208 years to teach as many students as one Coursera professor can reach with a single course. In terms of delivering information, that's a productivity increase of 83,000%; by comparison, a modern John Deere tractor, compared to plowing with a team of horses, increases efficiency by a factor of 1,500%.

So it seems inevitable that students wanting such an education will soon seek it online. But before humanities professors pack up our jalopies and head to California, like John Steinbeck's Joads did after the tractor took their land, I suggested that we might take another lesson from the family farm -- which has recently found new life thanks to the booming "locavore" movement taking root in restaurants and farmer's markets across the country.

When teaching Shakespeare, for example, what can we offer locally that's totally unique? The answer goes to the nature of the humanities themselves, sending us into the archives, not in search of some unchanging Shakespeare whose "eternal summer shall not fade," but in search of a Shakespeare that has put down roots, and grown, in the Iowa soil.

As an exercise in discovering this local Shakespeare, I'm teaching a class this summer called "Study Abroad -- in Iowa," in which students will research the local archives, curate exhibitions on their findings, and hold panel discussions with local book artists and performers who draw on Shakespeare's work. To get some idea of the kinds of materials they'd be working with, I took my own trip to the University of Iowa Special Collections, where I pulled up various works, old an new.

Above, for example, is a picture of the scrapbook of the Marion, Iowa, Shakespeare Club, founded in the 1890s for the "Intellectual improvement" of Marion's citizens.

The women, who hailed Shakespeare as "The Bard of the Cornfields," gathered to have tea, to read Shakespeare, discuss the plays, and compose their own original poems, as well as debating the duties of citizenship. In other words, Shakespeare was (and is) part of their broader civic engagement.

Eventually, club members built a “Shakespeare Garden” in Marion’s Ellis park, which became a focal point for community restoration efforts after the historic floods of 2008. In a newspaper article about the rebuilding, one club member said that the group had moved away from their original insistence on plants that grew in Shakespeare's own garden in Stratford, and that their plantings now included flowers that thrive more readily in Iowa's own climate.

Here's another example of a locally remade Shakespeare, by the book artist Emily Martin.

[Courtesy University of Iowa Special Collections]

This is an edition of Romeo and Juliet, but as you see in the picture below, it is an unusual one. Martin specializes in pop up books, and here she's chosen one line of text selected to represent each act of the play.

[Courtesy University of Iowa Special Collections]

On these side leaves (the pillars of the castle) we find variations of the Chorus' opening lines:

Two households, both alike in dignity

In fair Verona where we lay our scene.

From ancient grudge to break new mutiny

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. (1-4)

As she moves through the play, Martin inserts modern equivalents for Verona: "fair Bosnia," "fair Israel," "fair Rwanda," "fair America," as well as her own commentary.

In brief, I hope to facilitate such experiences of adaptation and reclamation for my own students, too. With our emphasis on historicizing and analyzing early modern works, scholars like myself sometimes hesitate to embrace such heritage, or fail even to see it. But taking our students into the archives in this way can help demonstrate the great insight of humanism and the humanities -- that when we're reading Shakespeare we're not really processing information (in a way that we can broadcast over the web) so much as discovering ourselves and our relationship to others, past, present, and future.

First Annual Des Moines Humanities Festival

2013-03-05T09:03:00.002-08:00

This Saturday I'll be speaking at the first annual Des Moines Humanities Festival, at Salisbury House in Des Moines. Organized by the Olberman Center's Teresa Mangum and Salisbury House's Director, Eric Smith. The Des Moines Register writes about the event and interviews Eric here. The event's theme is "Collectors, Collections, and Collecting," and the picture of Native American artifacts reproduced here comes from Salisbury House, which also holds a wide array of Shakespeareana and early books.

I'll be talking about the way Iowans have read, collected, and remade Shakespeare from some of the earliest settlers to 2012, when Iowa City book artist Emily Martin produced a fantastic pop-up version of Romeo and Juliet to enter in a bookbinding competition sponsored by Oxford University's Bodleian Library. If you happen to be in Des Moines -- and why wouldn't you be!? -- you should get a ticket and check out the festival, which includes a lunch, reception, and brilliant talks by all us "big thinkers" (as the Register describes the speakers!).

Hell is for Commuters and Kings

2013-02-18T20:11:00.001-08:00

"I can smile, and smile, and park while I smile" -- those, or something like them, were the famous words of Shakespeare's villain Richard III. As you may have heard, archaeologists recently discovered his bones under a municipal parking lot in England, and I've just co-written a newspaper article with Jeff Porter and Adam Hooks, my colleagues at Iowa, on the discovery here!

Reckoning with Big Data in Little Classrooms

2013-01-25T14:10:00.000-08:00

(cross-posted at the Stanford CMEMS)

How much do we know about the students we teach? How much should we know? Our optimistically named "Spring" semester has just started at the University of Iowa, and this semester I asked my students to complete an online pre-course survey (through Surveygizmo.com) to find out more about their goals, their preparation, and their reasons for taking my Milton class. Some of the results were really surprising, others were disheartening, and all of them challenged me to rethink my syllabus and my approach.

Which raises a question: literary scholars like Franco Moretti have proclaimed that the age of "big data" will change the way we do literary research -- but should it also change the way we teach? It strikes me that the typical university English classroom is in many ways a data poor environment. Or rather, it is an environment rich in data that we never quantify: we constantly gauge our students' reactions -- we even collect their evaluations at the end of the semester -- but then after gaining an impressionistic sense of those evaluations, they usually go into a drawer.

So what do you learn from surveying an incoming class like mine and then crunching the numbers?

In this case, that most of my students (63%) feel their research skills are their weakest academic area, as well as that 51% of them have never had a university class in early modern literature, including Shakespeare.

And then there's this:

Remember, these are mostly English majors, in Iowa City, the only UNESCO City of Literature in the United States, a place where we erect sculptures of books and literally have poems engraved into the sidewalks. Yet a third of my students read books for less than 30 minutes per day -- and this led to a frank and, hopefully, productive discussion with them about how they'll have to change their reading habits to do well in a class on Milton.

Now for another unexpected result, but one that will be less likely to depress your spirits:

When asked what would improve the English courses they've taken so far, more students said "More theory discussion" (34.3%) than any other category -- although "more discussion of close reading" was a close second. I think the conventional wisdom in my department is that students have lost interest in theory (after all, it's pretty tough to digest Heidegger in 20 minutes a day!). But that response was strong enough to revise my syllabus: as I told my students, the critical history of Paradise Lost is in some sense the history of critical theory, and it is a history I'll be happy to explore with them.

I know that many of us probably consider teaching to be a bit like dancing or conducting an orchestra -- an art exempt from the age of big data. Of course, we used to think of baseball like that too, before Billy Beane showed what could be done with sabermetrics. And this makes me wonder what might be gained, and lost, if we mined our classrooms for data in the same way we're beginning to mine the archive.

Young Milton

2012-12-31T08:21:00.000-08:00

At long last, Oxford University Press today publishes Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-42. Edward Jones, the editor of Milton Quarterly and sleuth responsible for dozens of new records related to Milton's life, conceived and edited the volume. Most of the essays come from the "Young Milton" conference at Worcester College, Oxford, in 2009. Although I didn't attend that conference I was fortunately able to contribute an essay on Milton's Mask (which most people know as Comus, although Milton never called it that). The book looks lovely, and it contributes to a major reassessment of Milton's early work and the mode of "authorship" that it represents. Unfortunately it is also $100.00 ... but maybe we can look forward to a paperback or digital version soon?

The Bard of the Cornfields

2012-12-18T20:10:00.002-08:00

This summer I'm teaching a class on Shakespeare with the theme "Study Abroad -- In Iowa." In years past I've taught summer courses in Oxford and Cambridge, always exploring the connections between authors like Milton and Shakespeare and the places in which they lived and worked. For this class I thought we would turn that concept on its head, exploring the meaning of Shakespeare, contemporary and historical, closer to home. How have Iowans read Shakespeare throughout their history, and how has their reading shaped the state we inhabit today? What resources do we have to study Shakespeare that truly are unique to this place, and how might place figure into our reading of the plays and poems? As universities across the country embrace Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) -- which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing -- it will be important to ask what we can do in our smaller, local classrooms that can't be done anywhere else.

For my class, we'll spend time researching in the university library's special collections (which holds a second folio and much other Shakespeareana). We'll also meet with the actors and director of the local Riverside Shakespeare Festival and take a field trip to Des Moines to visit Salisbury House, a replica Tudor mansion, complete with rare book library, built by Carl Weeks, the eccentric "cosmetics king," who had the materials for his Xanadu shipped over from England during the 1920s.

Today I spent some time in the Iowa Women's Archives, which we'll also visit. What I found shows in some pretty concrete ways how Shakespeare is built into the material fabric of Iowa and the diverse ways that Iowa's women have responded to his work.

First I called up the scrapbook of the Marion, Iowa, Shakespeare Club, which was established in 1909, for the purpose of the "Intellectual improvement" of Marion's citizens.

As an etiological poem (pictured above) on the group explains:

“Eight there were of the dear ‘Old Guard’

When the Shakespeare Club was born,

And the Harvest Moon rose full in the East

O’er Iowa’s golden corn.”

As the moon rose, the group gathered to discuss a whole series of plays: the first was Romeo and Juliet, followed by The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, and As You Like It.

According to their meeting minutes, the women memorized passages, analyzed characters, composed original poems, as well as debating the duties of citizenship and such hot button issues as whether the local school should provide cups for children.

Although its goal was intellectual improvement, the Marion Shakespeare Club was not open to all comers. The “Constitution and Bylaws” state, under Article III, section 1, that “The membership of this club shall be limited to fifteen in number.”

It continues:

2. All members shall be elected and selected by the club.

3. All elections must be unanimous.

4. The membership fee shall be One Dollar per year.”

After the first year, a clipping from the local paper in Jan. 3 1910 announced that “The Shakespeare club is well pleased with the progress that has been made in the study of the beautiful English which the poet employs, and the next regular meeting will be held Jan 6....The club will attend in a body the Merchant of Venice matinee on Tuesday afternoon.”

A handwritten note identifies this as “The Merchant of Venice as produced by the Colburn Players at Greene’s Opera House," a Cedar Rapids staple that was once one of the largest venues between Chicago and Denver. Soon, Greene's began working in collaboration with the Shakespeare Club and the produced Macbeth the next year.

Eventually, club members built a “Shakespeare Garden” in Marion’s Ellis park, complete with a bust of the bard. This still exists, by the way, as does the club. The original entrance, a rustic shelter with a thatched roof, was designed by Grant Wood, but unfortunately no longer remains. The theater, the park, the archive: they all hold a distinctly Iowan Shakespeare.

While contemplating this Shakespeare, what he meant, and what he means, I also called up a box of papers that belonged to the Yiddish writer, Bertha Korn Tucker. She's the young girl on the left rear of the photo, a daughter of Lithuanian immigrants (Sarah and Samuel Korn, center). She grew up in the Des Moines Ghetto, and from there she went to Drake University, where she penned a paper for one of her classes titled "Had I been Mrs. Shakespeare, or Had She been Me."

“Had I been Mrs. Shakespeare," Bertha begins, "Stratford-on-Avon couldn’t have held any part of me while exciting plays were being created and acted in the theatres of London...”

Bertha-as-Mrs. Shakespeare proceeds to explain to her truculent, dismissive husband the ways that she would rewrite Lear -- in large part by reconfiguring Shakespeare's female characters: “Your alabaster Cordelia was only fit to sojurn with angels – which is where you eventually felt you must send her. But not in my – we’ll come to that later...”

The monologue is incisive and often hilarious (My favorite transition in the paper: “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the Fool.") In the end of this version, Cordelia departs for France and Kent, in a gruesome bit of offstage business, stabs Lear and then himself, so that the old man will not be forced to live with his mental powers in decline.

So what lines can we trace between the ladies of the Marion Shakespeare Club and the young, female Jewish writer who decided to rewrite Shakespeare so that his works adhered more closely, as she explained, to nature as she understood it? Are there connections between the production of the Merchant of Venice at Greene's Opera House and the voice that Bertha Korn Tucker carved out of Shakespeare's works for herself? That will be one of the questions of my class and one that may give us a new perspective on our own work as a kind of "Iowa Shakespeare Club" (perhaps we'll need to make bylaws, too...)

Class Dismissed: Affirmative Action at Elite Universities

2012-11-28T09:10:00.002-08:00

As the Supreme Court considers whether to ditch race-based affirmative action, a growing chorus now calls for creating diversity principles around class rather than race. I've also pitched in my two cents, drawing on my own experiences, as someone who moved from a trailer house in Oklahoma to the University of Oxford, in a current review for The New Republic of Elizabeth Aries's book, Speaking of Race and Clas s: The Student Experience at an Elite College.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of Aries's book is the way it complicates the arguments for class-based affirmative action by showing that lower-income students suffer some pretty serious alienation on elite campuses. Unlike their minority peers, who often arrive on campus to an established support network, students who are poor but not minority can find themselves adrift "on another planet," as one of the students in the book relates. As with race-based affirmative action, this doesn't mean the idea should be scrapped -- but it does remind us that any effective diversity program will need to remember that "admissions" really only constitutes a small part of the college experience.

Ovid in England Syllabus

2012-11-17T16:18:00.002-08:00


From the University of Iowa's copy of Metamorphoseon, Antonio Tempesta, Amsterdam, 1606

I rarely get comments on the blog, but this week one reader asked if I'd mind posting my syllabus for my course, "Ovid in England." One reason I maintain the blog is to make public various documents that might help others in the field, including fellowship applications and book proposals (coming soon...).

So here's the syllabus, in all its ragged glory (evidently blogger won't actually let me attach files, so please excuse the formatting, which will be a little rough):
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008:122: 16^th and 17^th Century Poetry: Ovid in England

University of Iowa

Time and location: 9.30-10.45 AM T/Th, 207 EPB

Instructor: Dr. Blaine Greteman

blaine-greteman@uiowa.edu

Phone: 319-384-1860

Office Hours: 12.30-1.30 T/TH & 4.00-5.00 M, in 474 EPB, or by appointment

Ovid was the bad boy of classical poetry, and writers in Shakespeare’s England embraced his works with an unprecedented enthusiasm. This course will ask why these writers were so drawn to Ovid’s erotic elegies, his tales of transformation, and his poetics of exile. We’ll read Ovid’s poetry in both contemporary translations and in the ones that Shakespeare and his contemporaries knew and produced. We’ll also examine the way these writers used Ovid as the launching pad for their own imaginative efforts in works like Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Venus and Adonis, John Donne’s elegies, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. What did Ovid offer these writers and why did so many of them respond to his work at this historical moment? Just as importantly, how do these Ovidian poetics speak to us now, during the only historical period that has produced as many translations and adaptations of Ovid as the Renaissance?

Required Texts:

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A.D. Melville (Oxford, 1986; reissued 2006).

Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Barbara A. Mowat (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993) (or equivalent edition).

+ coursepack at Zephyr Copies, 124 E. Washington St.

Grades:

Participation and attendance: 10%

Group Presentation: 10%

Paper 1: 15%

Paper 2: 25%

Midterm: 15%

Final: 25%

I will give “+” and “–“ grades.

A note on readings: readings marked “OM” refer to the Oxford edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis; all others are in the reader unless otherwise noted.

week of august 20: sex, power, and poetry, or why shakespeare and his contemporaries loved ovid

Tuesday: Course introduction; Midsummer Nights Dream, dir. Adrian Noble, 1996

Thursday: Midsummer Night’s Dream contd. Read Midsummer Night’s Dream (Mowatt) I-III.

Ovid, Pyramus and Thisbe (OM p. 76-79)

week of august 27: hierarchy and the politics of translation

Tuesday: Course [re]introduction. Midsummer Night’s Dream (IV-V).

Louise Adrian Montrose, “Shaping fantasies” (ICON)

Thursday: Golding’s “Preface to the Reader” (in reader).

Creation and Four ages of Man (OM pg 1-14)

(Compare Ted Hughes and Golding on handout)

Raphael Lyne, “Ovid in English Translation” (ICON)

week of september 3: the anti-epic mode and imperial tensions

Tuesday: Apollo & Daphne; Phaeton (OM pg 14-36)

Heather James, “Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early Modern England” (in reader)

Metamorphosis Due (ungraded but required)

Thursday: Arachne (OM 126-125); Spenser Muiopotmos, lines 232-440;

Jupiter and Europa, Cadmus (OM 49-54); Hobbes, De Cive (in reader)

Topics for Paper 1 Assigned

week of september 10: sexual politics – unlicensed desire

Tuesday: Ovid, Heroides XVIII-XIX, Hero and Leander, trans. Daryl Hine (in reader)

Thursday: Marlowe, Hero and Leander

Group 1: Sexual Deviance in Early Modern England

week of september 17: moral meaning and resistance

Thursday: Marlowe, Hero and Leander

Tuesday: Chapman’s continuation of Hero and Leander (in reader)

Paper 1 Thesis Statements Due

week of september 24 : speaking through ovid

Tuesday: Henry Petowe’s Second Part of Hero and Leander

Thursday:

week of october 1: protestant poetics

Tuesday: Ovid, Heroides XV (Sappho to Phaon); John Donne, Sappho to Philaenis

Group 2: Women Writers

Thursday: Goodnight Moon (read in class)

Ovid, Metamorphosis bk. 10 (OM pg.225-51)

Paper 1 Due

week of october 8: gardens of good and evil

Tuesday: Spenser, Faerie Queene II.XII (Guyon, Knight of Temperance)

Thursday: Spenser, Faerie Queene, III.vi (Birth of Belphoebe, Garden of Adonis)

week of october 15: venus and adonis

Tuesday: Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

Group 3: The Plague

Thursday: Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

week of october 22: politics of anti-petrarchan poetry

Tuesday: Midterm

Thursday: Marlowe, All Ovid’s Elegies, Bk I

Group 4: Petrarchan Poetry and Elizabeth’s Court

week of october 29: angry young ovidians

Tuesday: Donne, Elegy I (Jealosie) [Compare to Amores 1.4, trans. Peter Greene]

Donne’s Elegy 3 “Change,”; Elegy XIX “To His Mistress Going to Bed” / [Compare to Marlowe’s translation of Amores I.5]; “The Indifferent” [Compare to Marlowe’s translation of Amores 2.4]

Group 5: Inns of Court Culture

Thursday: Robert Herrick, “No Loathsomeness in Love”, “the Vine,” “The Night Piece, to Julia”; Thomas Carew, “A Rapture”

week of november 5: deluding and dangerous art

Tuesday: Ovid, Pygmalion (OM 232-34); John Marston, The Metamorphoses of Pigmalion’s Image

Thursday: George Sandys, “Philomela” and commentary, from Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished

Paper two topics due

week of november 12: uneasy ovidianism

Tuesday: Milton’s Lycidas; Invocation to Bk. III of Paradise Lost lines 1-55)

For refresher, see Ovid’s “Orpheus and Eurydice” (224-28) and the conclusion to the Orpheus story248-52)

Group 6: Puritans and Poetry

Thursday: Ovid, Echo and Narcissus (OM 61-66); Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV.410-504 (Eve recounts her creation and first moments in Paradise)

week of november 19: break

Tuesday: Thanksgiving holiday.

Thursday: Thanksgiving holiday

week of november 26: eterne in mutability

Tuesday: Ovid, Book XV (OM 352-79) Doctrines of Pythagoras

Paper 2 Due

Thursday: Spenser, Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

week of december 3: change and apocalypse

Tuesday: Spenser, Two Cantos of Mutabilitie

Thursday: Spenser continued, Final exam review

FINAL EXAM: TUESDAY 8:00-10:00 PM (yes, PM!) in 207 EPB

The Beginning of Now: Contemporaneity in Early Modern Writing

2012-11-09T13:40:00.001-08:00

The 2012 MLA saw the advent of special areas set aside for blogging and tweeting, recognizing a basic fact of twenty-first century life in the developed world: we are obsessed with the present and increasingly aware of the way social networks inflect our understanding of it. When did this happen? We may find a clue in Harry Berger Jr.’s insight that during the early modern period “changing conceptions of self and experience at some time penetrated the practice of lyric poetry so that the poem was conceived not merely as a report of prior experience but as the unfolding of experience itself” (Revisionary Play, 135).

I've organized a special session for this year's Modern Languages Association (MLA) conference in Boston, with papers that address the social networks, epistolary practices, and lyric structures that drive this development, which they identify across various genres of seventeenth century writing.

The panel, on "The Beginning of Now: Contemporaneity in Early Modern Writing," will take place 8.30-9.45 am, Sunday Jan. 6, in Back Bay D, at the Sheraton Hotel. I'm looking forward to fantastic papers by Barbara K. Lewalski (Harvard), Daniel Shore (Georgetown), Christopher Warren (Carnegie Mellon), and Rachael Scarborough-King (NYU).

These three papers expand our concepts of contemporaneity and the ways it was formed and represented in early modern writing. Together, they both address this issue in a very specific and focused moment, from 1640-1674, and open up larger questions about the way we define literature, influence, and context.

I've posted the abstracts below:

Barbara K. Lewalski, Current Political Events as Literary Subject: Sidney to Milton

After a brief account of the intense interest in, and some vehicles for, conveying news in Early Modern England, I pose the question, could current news be used as a literary subject? Noting theoretical statements by Sidney and Tasso discouraging such use. I then consider briefly some literary genres that traditionally deal with contemporary matter if not precisely with news--encomiastic odes, poems celebrating royal events, satire—and some literary kinds (pastoral, allegory, roman a clef) that wererecognized as means to treat contemporary matters seen as liable to censorship or punishment. Some examples include:Sidney’s Old Arcadia, Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale, and the May and July Eclogues in his Shepheard’s Calender, Wroth’s Urania. Allegory in Spenser’s epic-romance, the Faerie Queene, allowed him to present Queen Elizabeth under several personae and to include real as well as fictional personages and events of her reign and times.

But my principal focus is on eight of Milton’s 23 sonnets, those written during the Civil War and Interregnum (1642-1660) that take contemporary events as subject without the cover of pastoral or allegory. This is new in itself, as well as marking a new and radical transformation of the small sonnet genre, normally concerned to analyze private love or religious devotion. These eight poems bear titles in Milton’s Trinity Manuscript that point to their specific occasions: Sonnet VIII deals with the threatened royalist assault on London, Sonnets XI and XII satirize those who attacked Milton’s Divorce tracts, a sonetto caudato denounces the persecuting Presbyterians, the Sonnets to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane urge their attention to securing religious liberty, and the magnificent sonnet on the Waldensian Massacre conjoins imagery from contemporary news accounts with biblical prophecy. I suggest that Milton’s strategy for turning the usually intimate sonnet genre to these new public purposes was to dramatize his speaker’s very personal response to the particular event or crisis, often making that event a lens through which to read public danger. Yet Milton evidently decided not to tie these sonnets permanently to the current events that evoked them In his published volumes of poetry (1645 abd 1673) he titled them (except for the Waldensian sonnet) by numbers only, thereby allowing them to speak to new circumstances. Poetry, he seems to signal by this gesture, can give the “news” much wider application.

Rachael Scarborough King ‘I take up my pen to write’: Writing to the Moment in Early Modern Letters

This paper explores the development of the epistolary technique of “writing to the moment” as a model for a discourse of contemporaneity in seventeenth-century news periodicals. The new genres of printed news that developed in the seventeenth century were fundamentally epistolary in nature; they used letters and the postal system to obtain news for publication, format texts, and circulate documents to readers. Readers expected to see real and fictional letters constantly appearing in newsbooks and pamphlets, especially during periods of political upheaval. At the same time, “familiar” letter-writing was becoming a widespread social practice. Individual authors and pedagogical texts adopted a less formal style that stressed letters’ “conversational” nature. Dorothy Osborne’s letters to Sir William Temple, dating from 1652-54, offer an early example of the convention of writing to the moment, a move in which the writer figures letter-writing as an ongoing part of everyday life. “Just now I was interrupted”; “I have been called away twenty times since I sat down to write”; “my eyes are so heavy that I hardly see what I write”: in these and many other examples, Osborne creates a metadiscourse on her own writing that fuses communication with timeliness. Each letter is precisely located in time and unfolds over time, allowing Osborne to depict her correspondent as a constant presence. In this paper, I will read Osborne’s letters alongside contemporary newsbooks and pamphlets to argue that the conventions of letter-writing—particularly that of writing to the moment—developing in manuscript and print offered ways to depict the contemporaneous unfolding of news events. Writing to the moment allowed printers to figure their news as constituting the “freshest advices”; simultaneously, the epistolary status of printed news affected the style and content of personal, handwritten letters and the ways people represented their everyday activities in writing.

Christopher Warren and Daniel Shore, Locality and Contemporaneity in the Early Modern Social Network

Our paper will argue that mapping out the associations that composed the early modern social network forces us to rethink many of our basic assumptions. More specifically, it will revise the concepts of “the local” and “the contemporary.” In the early 1980s, New Historicism established the primacy of these concepts as the measures of contextual relevance. We may think here of Clifford Geertz’s “local knowledge,” or Steven Greenblatt’s “particular and local pressures.” The New Historicism did not merely assert the local as the most relevant context of understanding but implicitly defined context as the local and the contemporaneous, such that “to historicize,” or “to contextualize” means to reinsert a work into its most proximate time and place. When more distant contexts become relevant, they do so only through the mediation of local ones. Historicists of all stripes have generally deployed an unreflective notion of “the local” and “the contemporaneous,” such that relevance can be thought of as a rough product of proximity: as a set of progressively larger circles centered on a spatiotemporal point. We contend, by contrast, that the local and contemporaneous are not merely given by mapped space or clock time, but are instead produced by social networks. Information, objects, and persons travel along a network’s edges, generating the local and the contemporary in the process. While this reversal is especially manifest with digital networks like Facebook, it has been true for as long as it has been possible to communicate through signs at a distance. Reconstructing the early modern social network can thus allow us to revisit and revise our understanding of a work’s context. Networks that stretch across epochs, nations, and continents show how relevant context breaks free of an unreflective notion of the local or the contemporary, redefining the terms so as to include, respectively, the trans-epochal and the trans-national.

For the purposes of this paper, our examples will primarily be concerned with John Milton and his associates, and our theory of networks will be primarily drawn from the work of Bruno Latour.

Ovid in England, Ovid in Iowa

2012-09-21T20:32:00.002-07:00

I'm currently teaching a class on "Ovid in England" at the University of Iowa, and after the students got a bit of Ovid under their belts I asked them to do their own, creative, metamorphosis. I got the idea from my esteemed colleague David Hamilton, who has recently retired from the department and from his role editing the Iowa Review, but who still gets far more mail than me (his box is just above mine, and he still ambles in, from time to time, to empty it and pass along his words of wisdom).

by Leonie Sparling, 2012

In recent years, I've been incorporating creative projects into nearly every course I teach, asking students to produce a creative work in any media and to give me a brief analysis that relates it to the subject matter in the course. The approach has major trade offs: the students, especially the better ones, get passionate about it, and I often get some of their most thoughtful and provocative work. On the other hand, I also have to wade through a lot of pretty bad poetry...but I've written a bit of that myself, and I am a firm believer that even bad poetry, when written with a good heart, can serve a useful purpose.

This year, I gave a prize to the best project: my copy of Dave Tomar's The Shadow Scholar, which I recently reviewed in The New Republic. (If you read the review, you'll know this was kind of a booby prize: but I thought perhaps the winner could trade it for something better). Anyway, my winning entry shows why I love these sorts of assignments.

This is a pencil drawing by Leonie Sparling, and it is about 5 feet tall and quite impressive in person. Better yet, she has a wonderful narrative that describes its genesis: it is the aition of a tropical flower that blossoms only when it enters a symbiotic relationship with the taller trees around it, climbing them, from the forest floor, to bloom at the top of the canopy. For Leonie, this is a story of jealosy and pride -- a realization that one must rely on others. What I like about it is that it is difficult to tell if that realization is painful or ecstatic, which is exactly the sort of ambiguity we've been exploring in Ovid and those who adapt him. And (this will make sense in light of The Shadow Scholar): I'm pretty sure you can't order such a work from a custom cheating service....