This list shall feature “highlights” rather than an attempt to be comprehensive.
George Scialabba’s Divided Mind, a powerful and gracefully readable meditation on the social use of intellectuals, the political despair that accompanies a perceived divide between the examined life and the masses, the antidemocratic impulse in critiques of popular sovereignty, harrowing depression, and tax rates. Along the way, Scialabba is engaged with a daunting array of deep and less deep thinkers and poets, Nietzsche, Rorty, Ortega y Gasset, Whitman, Arnold, Wilde, Orwell, Bloom, to name a few. The doyens at Harvard might well be more enlightened had they stopped to chat with the assistant building superintendent who authored these pieces. I hope that a little of his learning will rub off on me. The collection is available for PDF download on George Scialabba’s web site.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power
Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, forced upon me–pleasant duty–by Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations, which now that I’ve read Benito Cereno I realize cannot properly be said to have been “read” without being “re-read.” So maybe I’m still reading it.
C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, which in the revised reprint edition I’m reading has James’s comments on his earlier prescient and controversial statements. One reads with the sense of deja lu. The emerging theme of what I’m reading appears to be re-reading.
Cervantez’s Don Quixote in Spanish with translation, as a crutch for early modern Spanish, which is still difficult though I’m a relatively proficient reader of contemporary Spanish. I expect this to be a permanent entry on this list, as I’ve been reading Cervantez’s novel off and on for the past three years. I read it in Spanish with monkish discipline. So I read slowly, because monkish discipline is in short supply.
Theresa A. Antes’s Analyse linguistique de la langue française, a wonderful little book for maintaining and improving French proficiency.
For American Literature class, much of volumes C and D of Norton Anthology of American Literature, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, and Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs.
For Honors Seminar, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Malcolm X’s Autobiography (as told to Alex Haley), Nella Larsen’s Passing, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead and Twin, and Charles W. Chesnutt’s House Behind the Cedars.
Claire Parfait’s Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852-2002 Since the publication history of Stowe’s work begins in 1851, why does the title of this book have 1852? Because it’s “book” history, and I suppose the non-book publication does not count. Despite the unfortunate title, Parfait does some nice work on the Era publication and some really nice research in the archives (Stowe’s letters and publisher records) on late 19th C. editions.
Miscellaneous grab-bag: O’Reilly tutorials and guides on PERL and Regular Expressions. Conrad’s Secret Agent. Lawrence’s American Literature. Short stories and poems from Norton Anthology of American Literature: Malamud, Cather, Jewett, Cheever. Selections from Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory.
O M Brack, Jr. “Mark Twain in Knee Pants: The Expurgation of Tom Sawyer Abroad” Proof 2 (1972): 145-53. I had read this article some years previously to writing my article on “Eli’s Education.” But on reading Brack again, with some distance from my own attempt to construct Mary Mapes Dodge as an editor sympathetic to Alcott’s work, I’m pleased that I chose the route that I did. Brack, however, writes an article that I think would entertain more readers, because he is more sympathetic to Twain. The female blue-stocking editor and heroic male author still fits certain preconceptions about 19th-C. literature that I believe historical scholarship can dispel. I hope to construct literary history that dispels such preconceptions–when evidence justifies dispelling them, as I think it does–but can one do that and still entertain readers with a wry appeal to readers’ identification with the author?
Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada, a riotously funny book for readers familiar with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stereotypically loyal slave Uncle Robin outsmarts Massa Swille and his heirs. Quickskill and Quawquaw escape to Canada. Harriet Beecher has a cameo.
Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children has five grimly horrifying accounts of racial terrorism in the early 20th-century south. I read this in the Library of America edition prepared with useful textual notes by Arnold Rampersad. “Big Boy Leaves Home” had been previously published in The New Caravan (1936) while “Fire and Could” had appeared previously in Story Magazine (1938). First book edition was issued in 1938 by Harper and Brothers. The story “Bright and Morning Star,” which Wright hoped in include in 1938 edition, was rejected by Harpers and first published in New Masses (1938) and O’Brien’s Best Stories of 1939. Second edition of Uncle Tom’s Children (1940) included “Bright and Morning Star” and “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” which had been previously published in American Stuff: WPA Writers’ Anthology (1937).
Richard Wright’s Native Son in the typescript version that was maimed for a Book Club edition. I usually hesitate to accept Hershel Parker’s “maimed” and prefer instead collaboration. But this book was maimed. The insipid communist chit-chat that replaces the previous scene of masturbation in the theater is a maiming of Wright’s work, and that maiming reverberates throughout as Wright deals with the effects of that maiming. The tension between the threat either of sexual violence or of communism (the latter more acceptable for the book club) is a compelling example of a fluid text. To edit this book in a scholarly edition would be a real challenge, which would probably make it worth doing.
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, an original copy of the first edition (1856) in Archives. What a treat. This in keeping with a promise that I made to myself after reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era. The enjoyment of reading a rare copy of a great work in its original published form should never be underestimated. I’ve promised myself to read Hamlet or Coriolanus in the folio, and I’ll get to it soon.
Burnard, O’Keeffe, and Unsworth’s Electronic Textual Editing, though I suppose I should say that I’m re-reading, which I am. I’m also silently present in that book. I re-designed the documentation for the Blake Archive Object View pages. See Eaves 212. It was a truly collaborative exercise. The original designer of these hot-spot images was (I believe) either Matt Kirschenbaum or Andrea Laue. I re-did them for the re-designed OVP control panel. So it was a typical collaborative exercise.
I read Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs. I also collated the first edition against the Atlantic Monthly appearance and against the 1910 revised edition. The edition prepared by Willa Cather (1925) is not available in electronic form. But my friend in Cather studies informed me that it was prepared based on the sheets from an earlier edition (according to a Cather letter).
I read Jean Toomer’s Cane, and I found that editor Darwin T. Turner annotated numerous (probably most, perhaps all) of the passages drawn from periodicals. I think that going back to read the periodical versions of sources could be a fascinating study.
I read about half of Lucien Febvre’s L’apparition Du Livre and El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales, and I’ve put aside Blackwell’s Companion to the Digital Humanities after reading almost all of the articles in which I was immediately interested. I’ve also put aside temporarily De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. Months after I wrote this I finished Miss Ravenel’s Conversion.
Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! I’m inclined to compare to Death Comes for the Archbishop, which I read in high school and again for my orals reading list. In both I’m impressed with the austerity of Cather’s prose, though with O Pioneers! I’m especially fascinated by her decision later in life (1937 edition) to remove all of the purple passages. See the textual notes in the Nebraska edition.
I polished off Meredith C. McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853.. I finished Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Specimen Days.
Henry Louis Gates’s Signifying Monkey, which I’ve not read previously, has an astonishingly rich reading of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, though that chapter seems almost to stand on its own independently of the book.
Lisa Gitelman’s Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Instruments is a thoroughly enjoyable scholarly history of genuine importance. Gitelman puts the invention of Edison’s phonograph in the context of various writing technologies. Edison intended the phonograph as an office dictation machine, and thus its invention must be understood in the context of other writing technologies such as the typewriter. The conclusion should be required reading for anyone who is tempted to jump from Gutenberg and the invention of print to the Internet. By the way, many technology theorists have made what Gitelman’s work suggests is an ill-advised leap.
Donald Hall’s Without, a profound and movingly human meditation on his wife (and poet) Jane Kenyon’s cancer, death, and the aftermath.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, a sequel (of sorts) to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is a more thoughtful and meditative work than its more famous antecedent.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Minister’s Wooing, impossibly good Romantic heroine Mary Scudder (plot spoiler) almost marries theologian Dr. Hopkins, but Providence and the good offices of the local seamstress intervene. Stowe at this time is a mature writer, a master of the character portrait. She manages the serial form with aplomb. The story provides an engaging portrait of many-faceted feminine support networks. Herein the difference between tragedy and comedy. In comedy, social networks prevent tragedy by intervening to prevent it. Pair it with Scarlet Letter?
Alice Cary’s Clovernook, an early collection of regional sketches. Fetterley and Pryse have suggested that a coherent tradition of women’s local color fiction begins with this work. Perhaps because formative of a tradition rather than its fully mature outpouring, the collection is uneven. “My Grandfather,” “Uncle Christopher,” and “The Sisters” are fine sketches. In the first, the grandfather, on his death bed, has a wonderful line. His final words to his young grand-daughter are these: “Child, you trouble me.”
Charles W. Chesnutt’s House behind the Cedars, a remake of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (and thus Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans) a work that I imagine could be interestingly paired with Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (which at least one scholar has argued is a remake of Dred). House behind the Cedars is a reserved exploration of the social consequences for a mixed-race person who chooses to pass as white, or black. Chesnutt explores the contradiction of choosing to pass based on appearance and the pull of socialized racial identity. Warwick, who becomes a lawyer and is able to pass as white in post-war South Carolina, removes his sister Rena (yes, Rowena from Ivanhoe) from her mother’s house, where she has lived as a black person. Able to pass as white in South Carolina, she falls in love. Complications ensure, and both Rena and Warwick have to make their choices.
