in this issue

“What Are You Reading?”/Interview with Gerry Canavan (’02)/Faculty Notes/”Respect the Book”/Alumni News/Schedule of Events

“What Are You Reading?”

Martha Woodmansee: The Great Escape

I’ve decided to tell you about my recreational, my purely escapist reading in 2014. It was precipitated by the virtual demise of the Plain Dealer. Deprived of the Sunday PD’s “TV-guide,” I wasn’t able to identify evening TV programs I might want to watch (on the five channels enabled by my very basic cable plan), so I had to abandon this escapist venue and return to books.

I’d recently purchased an iPad and discovered that all manner of books could be ordered and received on it within 5 minutes of purchase. What an impetus to “impulse reading”—so quick and so (relatively) cheap.

My adventure in escapist reading began with Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, all seven volumes of which I consumed in the $2.99 translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Sydney Schiff. This led me to two Proust biographies (recommended by my DMLL colleague Marie Lathers): the substantial one by William Carter and the short overview by Edmund White (which led me to White’s memoir, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris).

In the interest of time and space, I’ll skip over the next ten to twelve histories I subsequently consumed of French, especially Parisian, culture since early modern times—a special passion of mine that I’ve been pursuing for many years—in order to call attention to David McCullough’s 2011 Greater Journey, an engrossing history of the first generation of American men and women who crossed the Atlantic to study and work in Paris between 1830 and 1900.

I credit this terrific American social historian with reviving my interest in American history. I think I’ve now read every one of his books, and his Harry Truman and John Adams biographies inspired me to dip into our “founding fathers” generally and into a good number of our subsequent presidents: H.W. Brands’s Benjamin Franklin; Ron Chernow’s George Washington and his Alexander Hamilton; Jon Maceacham’s Thomas Jefferson; Fred Kaplan’s John Quincy Adams; Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism; Brands’s FDR: Traitor to His Class; Joseph Lash’s Eleanor and Franklin and his Eleanor: The Years Alone—and so it goes.

So, as things turned out, with the exception of Proust’s novel, almost all of my recreational reading in 2014 was nonfiction—history, and especially biography. Why? Better, why would I recommend that you consider doing same in your down time? All of the nonfiction I consumed, the biographies especially, read like novels—they’re (more and less) masterful deployments of the panoply of narrative devices we associate with the great 19th-century realist tradition, so they’re not demanding. They reward “passive” consumption. Of course, one knows the conclusion in advance—biographies tend to begin with birth and end in death—but they mobilize much the same suspense as the great realist novels along the way. So they’re deliciously absorbing. And what one effortlessly absorbs is some of the larger history of the eras in which one is working or anticipates working. This is no small advantage for those specializing in the analysis of individual literary works. It helps remediate (embarrassing) educational deficiencies and offset the pressures toward silo thinking that accompany the disciplinary specialization required of us.

Judged in terms of the pleasure I got out of this excursion into history and biography I rank 2014 right up there with those lazy elementary-school summers before I knew about disciplinarity, underlining, and taking notes. It couldn’t have happened without my iPad, which resisted this entrenched scholarly compulsion. I cherish—and commend—it for this especially even as I commend promiscuous recreational “reading around” outside our discipline.

Erika Olbricht: Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Colonial World.

Londa L. Schiebinger’s book theorizes the role of forgotten medical knowledge via “agnotology—the study of culturally-induced ignorances.” This inquiry allows Schiebinger to ask questions of how and why we do not know rather than more traditional epistemological questions. In particular, she writes about herbal abortifacients, noting that while plants were moved from country to country (the “colonial bioprospecting” part of the book’s subtitle), knowledge of their controversial medical uses did not travel with them. A long-18th-century historian, Schiebinger writes with clear and engaging prose about feminism and science, challenging the standard narratives about women’s participation in science and how science is gendered.

Eric Earnhardt: Experience and Experimental Writing 

Paul Grimstad’s Experience and Experimental Writing treats works by Emerson, Poe, Melville, and Henry James as compositional experiments, responses to and constitutive of the ongoing “loop of perception, action, [and] consequences” that William James and John Dewey defined as “experience” against the “correspondence model” of squaring subjective inner images with objective outer things. Grimstad employs historical, biographical, and philosophical/aesthetic criticism to account for experiences of writers that bred experiments that created linguistic conditions for particular literary experiences: “the wording of the world into something shareable and meaningful.” The slipperiness of experience, the abrupt abstraction of concluding terms from each chapter, and the imprecise (sometimes anachronistic) relation of pragmatism to the chosen authors (especially Melville), suggests that this first book could have better refined its own bravely experimental method. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy for its discussion of Poe’s “The Raven” and for its effort to extend the worthwhile project of Richard Poirier and others of developing rigorous, pragmatic approaches to literary texts.

 Michelle Lyons-McFarland: Captain Alatriste

Published in translation in 2005 in the US and UK, Captain Alatriste is a historical swashbuckling novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte in the tradition of Alexandre Dumas, pere. While the work is a quick, entertaining read, Perez-Reverte does not treat his subject lightly. The novel continually shows how life is measured as a commercial transaction, both Alatriste’s own and the lives he is paid to end. Perez-Reverte lays questions of the value of life, honor, and service to the state in front of us, but as with any great writer, he refuses to give us easy answers to the problems Alatriste and the reader observe, even as he concludes the plot in a whirlwind of flashing steel.

Brian McLaughlin: No Longer Human

I read No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai (more accurately translated as Disqualified From Being Human). The Japanese novel begins and ends with a narrator’s comments surrounding excerpts of a journal he has found and some photographs that were with it, but the bulk of the novel consists of the diary entries of some unknown man, who we come to find out firmly self-identifies as an outcast but does not actually assert any sense of a true identity. Throughout the depressing course of the narration, the mysterious writer of the diary spends his time drinking, doing drugs, sleeping with women, and contemplating suicide. As self-loathing and dramatic as it sounds, nothing dramatic actually happens to him, and the diary abruptly ends. The person responsible for finding the diary (the “author”) reports at the end that he has heard that the owner of the diary is still alive somewhere in Japan; so all we have is a small cross-section of his time, but which we assume can probably stand in for the rest of his anticlimactic life. The novel is not just “sad” or “arbitrary” or “good/bad,” I think the novel itself is “Depressed.”

Sydney Pierce: “The Gernsback Continuum”

I chose this short story by William Gibson because it explored a lot of concepts within science fiction, specifically related to time and dystopia. The protagonist is a photographer commissioned to take pictures of art and architecture produced by people in the past, who speculated about what the future might have been. He becomes increasingly distressed by the ideas of “futures that never were,” imagined by individuals in the past through kitschy American architecture. These alternate futures that “never were” manifest themselves through art, playing into the idea of alternate realities and the disconcerting thought that we may potentially be living in a dystopia, as our present is nothing like what was envisioned in the ‘30s. It is interesting to think about what may have been, but never was, and if anyone’s ideas of the future can ever be correct.

Interview with Gerry Canavan (’02)

CWRU: How did this collection of essays examining the connection/
interrelationship of ecology and science fiction and your co-editorship with Kim Stanley Robinson come about?

Canavan: I was lucky enough to meet Stan when he came to an event on the intersection between science, science fiction, and religion while I was a graduate student at Duke. One of my dissertation advisors was the host of the event, and the other had been Stan’s own dissertation advisor way back when, so I was able to introduce myself and spend a bit of time getting to know him. I’m a big fan of his novels, especially the Mars trilogy, so that was a real pleasure. Around that same time, my friend Mark Bould and the British science fiction writer China Miéville put out their edited collection, Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. I was working a lot in the ecological humanities then, as I still do, and it occurred to me that you could easily do a similar collection about science fiction and the environment and call it Green Planets. So I pitched the idea to Stan as a project we could co-edit together, and to Wesleyan University Press as a kind of unofficial sequel to Red Planets, and they both went for it. Since then someone’s come out with Black and Brown Planets, about science fiction and race, and the same person is doing a Yellow Planets as well (if the publisher will let him call it that) on science fiction and Orientalism. And there’s still a lot of colors left! I’d really like someone to do Pink Planets on feminist SF at some point.

Continue reading interview here.

Faculty NOTES