Showing papers in "The Midwest quarterly in 2009"

Ideology as Core Curriculum? Textbooks and German Re-Education in May 1945

Abstract: The following case history of early postwar Germany addresses a vexed topic: how what purports to be "education" veils propaganda--and how school curricula promote ideology. Of course, it's no secret that education transmits culture--or that the so-called culture wars have long been raging in U.S. schools. Indeed American parents and school district administrators have wrestled for decades over what kinds of lessons those novels and plays assigned for classroom use should teach. In these battles we have banned many a classic--from Brave New World and 1984 to The Grapes of Wrath, Huckleberry Finn, and Catcher in the Rye--that failed to satisfy cultural vigilantes on the lookout for four-letter words, sex scenes, evolutionary theory, and Commies between the covers. In recent years the fiercest struggles among educators, parents, and religious authorities have centered on what textbooks to adopt. The textbook campaigns have introduced newfound rules and expectations into the age-old book wars. Traditionally, in the case of a novel or play, schools either use it or ban it, but they don't change it. That's not the case with textbooks, in which the content is insidiously malleable. As the twenty-first century unfolds, the textbook wars continue, with small watchdog groups disproportionately influencing textbook adoption policy. In my own state of Texas the state board of education--which purchases K-12 textbooks for the entire state--holds public hearings that witness no-holds-barred matches among family-planning, pro-life, gay-advocacy, fundamentalist Christian, and other lobbying groups on the merits of proposed textbooks. Those hearings often result in one or more textbooks being withdrawn from consideration for adoption (and even in the reconsideration of previously approved texts). It warrants mention that, among the thirty-six works of fiction currently banned in some Texas public school districts are Orwell's 1984 (for its sex scene) and the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling (for its "mystical content"). Until recently, the American Heritage Dictionary was also banned, because some parents objected that certain listed words were obscene. Creating "Textbook Reds"? Though textbooks undeniably fulfill important tasks in the school systems of all states and nations--capitalist as well as communist, democratic as well as authoritarian--perhaps nowhere were textbooks more consciously and completely turned to propagandist purposes than in the GDR (German Democratic Republic). Throughout the forty-four-year existence of the GDR (1945-89), the Ministry of Education controlled textbook content tightly, and the textbooks and teachers' guidebooks kept, in turn, a tight rein on GDR teachers. The task of writing textbooks was entrusted by the Ministry of Education to scholarly "collectives" (i.e., groups of academics, each headed by an elite Party member) who could be trusted to adhere to the communist line on all questions. The most important of these editorial collectives were at Verlag Volk und Wissen (People and Knowledge Publishers), the central state publishing house in East Berlin. (Volk und Wissen is still publishing textbooks today, in reunified Germany--though, of course, the GDR's system of socialist editorial collectives has been replaced by a conventional Western model of editorial staffing.) To guarantee that there would be no ideological deviations among members of the collective, recalls Helmut Roske, formerly an editor at Volk und Wissen who escaped the GDR in 1961 just before the Berlin Wall went up, his superior always took special precautions. Roske's department chief, Heinz Frankewicz, would regularly summon collective members to his office and remind them of the educators' ideological mission. In his memoir titled "'The Textbook Factory," published in the 1963 Atlantic Monthly, Roske recounts one such meeting, during which the political lessons that GDR textbooks sought to indoctrinate became painfully clear: The editors would listen in silence while he [Frankewicz] read out a perfectly correct sentence from the text[book] and then proceeded to smother it beneath a mountain of objections. …

Taking on Being: Getting beyond Postmodern Criticism

Abstract: "This is the terrible product of a materialistic age: scholars write commentaries on art. But these academic explanations, Faust commentaries, Hamlet commentaries, learned descriptions of the art of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, are coffins in which genuine artistic feeling, living art, lie buried. If one picks up a Faust or Hamlet commentary, it is like touching a corpse."--Rudolf Steiner, The Arts and Their Mission (1923), 85. "... as soon as 'the method' tunas criticism into a species of decoding, the man whose attachment to art is warm and direct must decline the game. He knows that the grand rule of life, Probability, also underlies art, and that such a rule can be applied only by intelligence, not a system.'"--Jacques Barzun, The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors, Classic and Modern (1956), 14. "We are all sick of interpretation."--trans, of Jean Wahl, qtd. in The Structuralist Controversy (1966), 97. Though I sometimes assume the role of literary critic, I must admit that there is something intrinsically unsettling about the very concept of literary criticism. I am not sure what the problem is. My immediate inclination is to blame criticism's parasitic nature: that it lives at the expense of another, or, more properly, "the other." But at best this is only a partial truth. My apprehension is probably what inclines me toward an appreciation for George Steiner's observation that a subsequent literary work is the best type of criticism. The Aeneid and Ulysses, according to his manner of reckoning, are commentaries on The Odyssey as well as creative works in their own fight. Anna Karenina performs the same service for Madame Bovary. "All serious art, music and literature," he writes, "is a critical act" (11). Steiner's insight reaches beyond notions of intertextuality or allusion and points to relationships--between separate works and their authors; between authors, works, and audience--that literally divine meaning. He terms these relationships experiences of "real presences." The literary criticism George Steiner wrote of in 1989 and that we are accustomed to now, however, is very much different from that Rudolf Steiner (quoted above) encountered in 1923. Early twentieth-century criticism was of a more historical bent, focusing more on dates, sources, influences, and rhetoric than do late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century criticism. While more traditional modes of criticism are still to be found, by far the most prevalent approach to criticism is marked by the wide variety of self-reflective, idiosyncratic, subjective (though often, bewilderingly, professing to be objective) crystallizations of theory that can be categorized under the heading "postmodern." Criticism is much changed since 1923. The difficult thing, of course, is finding a definition for postmodernism. We are in no danger of running out of definitions for this word. Indeed, when I asked a colleague--a scholar who teaches courses on postmodernism--how she would define it, she declined, saying, "It is impossible to define." My own definition is a general one, and one which many might find too wide. They are welcome to come up with their own definitions. Postmodernism is not a system of thought, not a philosophy, not a world view, but an attitude. As Socrates through Plato (or is it Plato through Socrates?) asserted that the rhetoric of the Sophist Gorgias was not the wisdom the latter professed it to be but "a knack;" so postmodernism is not a theory or set of theories but a knack, a habit, a proclivity particular to scholars of our day and age. The postmodernism habit is characteristic of approaches to literary criticism and studies in the humanities that have proliferated since the 1960s. These approaches are marked by fragmentation, uncertainty, irony, as well as by intellectual and spiritual ambivalence or even, at times, hostility. The postmodern gesture is one of malaise when confronting the world, of insecurity when confronting the self. …

The Politics of the Handmaid's Tale

Abstract: In Canada, they said, 'Could it happen here?' In England, they said, 'jolly good yam.' In the United States, they said, 'How long have we got?'" Such were the reactions, according to an interview that Margaret Atwood gave to The New York Times, to her futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale. The British response is the calmest, viewing the work, that is, purely as fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland or Lord of the Rings. Canadians feel, apparently, some modest degree of apprehension. But it is in America, where the tale is set, that reaction has been most intense, most alarmed. By now a canonical text (the self-important term that academics use for books that get taught a lot) in university courses, the source of a film and an opera, a work particularly revered by pessi-feminists, The Handmaid's Tale has been widely viewed as a serious commentary on the socio-political conditions of the day. I want to cast a critical eye on the putatively American way of responding to Atwood's tale. Read "seriously" (in contrast to pure fantasy), the book belongs to the genre called the dystopia, a genre that projects an imaginary society that differs from the author's own, first, by being significantly worse in important respects and, second, by being worse because it attempts to reify some utopian ideal. Science fiction works like Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, while offering decidedly negative images of the future, are not truly dystopian because they lack an anti-utopian animus; Zamyatin's We and Huxley's Brave New World, by contrast, serve as paradigms of the genre precisely because their negative futures stem specifically from the implementation of a rational design for reorganizing society, a utopia. Since most, if not all, such designs for a dirigiste world belong to the political left--most, of course, are communal, collectivistic--their anti-type, the dystopia, usually is, or at least appears to be, conservative, counseling rather the bearing of those ills we have than flying to others that we know not of. Another tradition of utopias, however, depends on revelation rather than on reason, on some divine injunction or leading from above, in which case they are usually theocracies, regimes ruled by a priestly class whose authority rests in the will and word of God. Giliad--the futuristic society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale--is Atwood's dystopic projection of such a theocracy, a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Aldous Huxley has argued that "whatever its artistic or philosophic qualities, a book about the future can interest us only if its prophecies look as though they might conceivably come true." That is to say, the conviction or force that such projections convey depends on real-world conditions or, at least, on the perception of these conditions; consequently, as these conditions or perceptions change, so will the vatic force of the fictive projections. Powerful as Nineteen Eighty-Four remains in many ways, its potency as a possible and fearful future significantly declined with the decline of the old-fashioned jackboot-and-truncheon totalitarianism. With the collapse of the Evil Empires of Orwell's day, the specter of Ingsoc no longer haunts Europe or the world. As long ago as 1958, in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley noted that "recent developments in Russia . . . have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude" and argued, correctly, that "the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than something like 1984" looming in our future. We have, in other words, little cause to fear a future that does not seem a plausible extrapolation of current conditions. An America, for example, whose super rich convert to Christianity, sell all they have to give to the poor, and thus create a crisis in capital accumulation and economic catastrophe is not a scenario that arouses much anxiety. The question, then, that I want to consider is the plausibility, in light of current conditions, of the future depicted in The Handmaid's Tale. …

Is This the Best American Poetry

Abstract: The poetry avant-garde continues insisting that it doesn't get enough respect from the mainstream scholarly apparatus, when in fact it has been seamlessly absorbed into the academic machine. In the case of Language poetry, one reason for its proliferation is that this is the ideal correlate to the poststructuralist theory fashionable in the academy since the early seventies. Poetry which takes language itself as the arena of political action, without any ideological content in the old sense, is perfect fodder for critics claiming to take the bourgeois world by storm. There has been no shortage of critics defending the vacuities of experimental poetry as the cutting edge of human creativity. Marjorie Perloff, in Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media and other texts, has become a key defender of avant-garde poetry. Her argument is that artifice, in the sense of poetry that is clearly derived from playful language games, in the supposed Wittgensteinian sense, is the only acceptable form of poetic expression in the modern age of media. Our selves are fabricated by the tissue of language games the media daily enact, and to engage with our selves means to play with these languages. Does this "procedural" poetry not become the ultimate legitimation of media manipulation of the consuming body, however? Why can't there be an authentic oppositional self not deriving meaning from forms of discourse and meaning aside from media languages? Perloff's answer is that disruption of the language routines is itself the most revolutionary act. She is rather vague on how the reader's discomfort after defamiliarization leads to any sort of political change. The Best American Poetry 2004 anthology reveals how badly things stand. This volume has been edited by Lyn Hejinian, one of the prominent practitioners of language poetry for the last thirty years, and an assiduous manifesto-producer, as is true of other leading exponents of this variety of the avant-garde. A key characteristic of language poetry manifestos is to insist on this school's marginalization from the mainstream. In fact, legions of journals and small presses exist only to promote this and other forms of avant-garde poetry, and their editors look down on poetry that accepts a stable subjectivity as fascistic trash. Yet like any ingrained establishment movement, the avant-gardists can function only by opposing themselves in Manichean terms against the traditionalists who won't admit their existence. Hejinian has argued, in well-known essays like "The Rejection of Closure," that the open form, "paratactical poetry," or what Ron Silliman has called "the new sentence," puts the reader at the forefront of producing meaning, rather than the old-fashioned authoritative poet himself. Bob Perelman has explicated the critical postures of Robert Grenier, Bruce Andrews, and Ron Silliman, each enacting various forms of openness. Yet after what point does production of meaning become purely arbitrary? If sentences follow each other in random order, making any sort of meaning out of them becomes as easy as the writing of such poetry itself. David Lehman, of the New School and the New York University writing programs, founded The Best American Poetry anthology in 1988, and has been series editor since its inception. His apologetics reflect the same self-positioning as Hejinian in her role as a leading spokesperson of the mainly West Coast language school articulates: the New York School is also marginalized, ostracized, not supported by the establishment, and in constant danger of annihilation through cooptation and compromise by watered-down schools. The Best American Poetry series is one of the key legitimating tools of the poetry establishment; once an emerging writer lands on its pages, the path to critical acceptance is much clearer--not to mention the lucrative rewards of security in the teaching world. The series is an accurate barometer of the poetry being published in the majority of the nation's many little magazines, particularly the MFA-affiliated ones, and by extension of the state of poetry itself. …

Toni Morrison's Sermon on Manhood: God in the Hands of Nine Angry Sinners

Abstract: In discussing her own works of fiction, Toni Morrison explains that two of the major goals in her writing are to evoke the spoken word and to prompt readers to "feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon" ("Rootedness," 341). Considering Morrison's goals of privileging the oral and evoking reader response, it is not surprising that her prevailing mode of written discourse is the call-and-response model of the African American sermonic tradition. However, while Morrison writes from within the tradition of the black call-and-response sermon, the anger of her Christian patriarchs in Paradise also calls to mind the extreme anger of Jonathan Edwards's God in Edwards's famous sermon of July 8, 1741, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Like Edwards's God, who "holds" the unredeemed "over the pit of hell ... and is dreadfully provoked" (590), Morrison's nine angry patriarchs in Paradise are enraged by a group of women they have damned as "unredeemed by Mary" (Paradise, 18). However, unlike Jonathan Edwards's God, who offers salvation in spite of his rage, Morrison's males offer no hope for the wayward. In a display of wrathful masculine aggression and with "God at their side, the men take aim" at the women of Morrison's fictional Convent (Paradise, 18). However, while Morrison's Christian patriarchs refuse to entertain the possibility that these "unredeemed" women deserve compassion and the chance for redemption, Morrison extends both compassion and redemption to her murderous male characters at the novel's conclusion. Morrison's obvious sermonic purpose in Paradise is to convey the atrocities that can occur when black patriarchs imitate the racist, oppressive, and exclusionary ideologies of white society. Equally important, however, is this novel's confirmation of Morrison's strong belief that "protecting the male" is paramount. In an interview with Charles Ruas, Morrison addresses the need for African American women to "protect the male ... by giving him little places in which he can perform his male ritual, his male rites, whether it's drunkenness, arrogance, violence, or running away" (113-14). When asked by Ruas if she thinks that "within black culture, ... women bear the burden of living in a society where the men are more severely discriminated against," Morrison responds as follows: There's some problem with defining what men go through in the culture of black people, or any group of people who have really to work. Men identify with their ability to work and take care of the people they are responsible for.... Now the work has been drained off, and that's the economy in which we live.... That is devastating for the maleness of a man. So women have the domestic burden of trying to keep things going, on the one hand, and also protecting the male from that knowledge by giving him little places in which he can perform his male ritual, his male rites, whether it's drunkenness, arrogance, violence, or running away. It is a certain kind of fraudulent freedom, and destructive perhaps. The man is not free to choose his responsibilities. He is only responsible for what somebody has handed him. It's the women who keep it going, keep the children someplace sate. (113-14; emphasis added) Morrison's protective stance toward African American males is evident in Paradise. Her fictional and "destructive" patriarchs are released from any accountability for their actions of extreme aggression even though, unlike the males Morrison refers to in her above statement, these male characters are "free to choose [their] responsibilities" as rulers of an all-black town. Moreover, if responsibility does not include accountability, what lesson is being forwarded? In Morrison's benevolent view, these male characters, who embody constructions of violent manhood, deserve compassion and protection not condemnation. …

Going beyond Binary Disposition of 0/1: Rethinking the Question of Technology

Abstract: Technology has been a major driving force in human history in the modern era and will continue to be the most important factor in shaping its future. Artificial tools have helped people survive in unfavorable environments. The evolutionary development of modern technology has enabled humans to control and transform the natural environment to meet their needs and realize their will as well as to adapt and accommodate themselves to it. Therefore, technology, as the power to shape the given environment to our desire and will, can be understood as a powerful means of materializing the ideal world. While technology has been beneficial to human progress, it has also been seen to possess an intrinsic evil power. Implied in the advance of technology, then, is the potential for disastrous outcome. This pessimistic, negative view has played a great part in creating the dark image of technology in most literary works since the Industrial Revolution. In many such texts, technology is described as having "an irresistible power to determine the course of events" (Marx, xii). The objective reality of the powerful development of technology has been one-sidedly criticized instead of being accepted for what it is. The result is that technology has often been depicted as "an embodiment of evil." Is technology destined to bring about nothing but evil? Or, on the contrary, is it a sure key to the gate of our dreams? Technology can be understood as both an appropriate way to maximize human potential power and a perilous risk to confine and reduce the limitless human potentiality into a restricted narrow scope. The supposition that technology can be viewed from these opposing perspectives at the same time is the starting point of this essay. Obviously, what is important here is not a simple binary opposition of two extremes but a complex reality of technology neither to be given up nor to be heavily depended upon. In this respect, Thomas Pynchon is worth special attention because his works are solidly organized upon scientific and technological ideas and rules and provide an insider's perspectives on the intertwined complexity of technology in human life. In his works technology is neither harshly criticized nor excessively admired; technology is not one-sidedly viewed from a distance but directly dealt with. His works focus on technology to the extent that they cannot be fully appreciated without modern scientific and technological understanding. Pychon is not alone in observing the ambivalent status of technology. This essay discusses Pynchon's works, in particular The Crying of Lot 4, as well as science-fiction narratives like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Terminator 2, to explore the question of technology. Relationships between man and machine in science-fiction narratives are both dynamic and complex. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? humans become inhuman and androids become "more human than humans," and the boundaries between man and machine begin to dissolve. This complex relationship between man and machine is also evident in the successful Hollywood science-fiction movie, Terminator 2. Pynchon's technological themes seem to have made a particularly significant influence on this movie. In fact, Cyberdyne, the center of the action in the plot of Terminator 2, may be regarded as the technologically advanced version of Yoyodyne, which is one of significant settings in three of Pynchon's major works, V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. It will be observed, however, that the tense relationship between man and machine is finally dissolved into the self-insistence of humans in the last stage of Terminator 2. In relation to the anthropocentric perspectives in the science-fiction narrative like Terminator 2, Donna Harraway's cyborg discourses are significant as her argument suggests the possibility of the cyborg as a new subject or new social reality and not just as an instrumental object. …

Redefining the Epic Hero in Joyce's "Eumaeus"

Abstract: The mark of a truly great piece of literature lies in its ability to grow with humanity, to evolve. Even though the printed words will never change, the meanings and interpretations will. Thus, over the years since the first publication of James Joyce's Ulysses, countless articles and criticisms have been written to convey different notions and ideas concerning the themes and motives behind just about every single word printed in the text. However, for all its analysis, there is one chapter which to this day is left virtually untouched by critics when considering the amount of criticism that has been written for the other eighteen chapters. The chapter I am speaking of is number sixteen, "Eumaeus." In his article, Brook Thomas, author of multiple articles that discuss the complex writing styles employed by Joyce, notes that "Eumaeus," "has the privileged status of being the most maligned chapter of the book" (15). James H. Maddox, in his book-length study of Ulysses, refers to it as "a dead spot in which nothing happens at great length" (156). The problems that surround this chapter seem to stem from its style, or lack thereof. All of the other chapters have very conspicuous styles, almost to the point that it can overshadow the events of the chapter. The writing in "Eumaeus" is, for the most part, simple. It is not as romantically written as the "Nausicaa" chapter, nor is it as musical as the "Sirens" chapter. It is simply a chapter filled with dialogue, long discussions that appear to go nowhere, and it is for this reason that many critics seem to lose interest when it comes to this chapter. What many critics fail to recognize, however, is the importance of "Eumaeus" to the culmination of not only the story, but of the synthesis between Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's own tale of the wandering Leopold Bloom. It is imperative that we remember that the Odyssey is not simply a story about Odysseus's journey home. It is also about the triumphant reuniting of a father and son, and Joyce reminds us of this part of the story in "Eumaeus." The critical interpretations of this chapter are often inconclusive and leave one with a sense of irreconcilability between critical views and the text itself. Joyce's themes are often hidden implicitly within convoluted sentence structure and rhetoric that seems to go absolutely nowhere; yet, there is often a method to his madness, and in "Eumaeus," it is no different. To fully understand the context and importance of the chapter, one need not look any farther than the text on which it is based, The Odyssey. Through careful analysis of Joyce's use of epic tradition, language, and characterization, one can see that "Eumaeus" is Joyce's commentary on the differences between the classical epic, based on actions and brought about through exaggerated tales of oral tradition, and his own modern-day epic, based on discourse and brought about through mundane yet realistic events. In doing so, Joyce reconstructs the epic hero from the man of action to the man of discourse. Though it would seem that Joyce must have admired Homer's epic tradition, considering it is the frame from which his greatest masterpiece was formed, Ulysses does not seem rooted so much in the format of The Odyssey, as much as it is rooted simply in the story itself. According to Richard Ellmann, at the age of twenty, "Joyce had no interest in Homer." Furthermore, he described Homer's works as being "outside of the tradition of European culture" (103). Thus, for Joyce, The Odyssey did not appear to be an overwhelmingly influential piece of literature. Yet it would seem that the Irish-born author had a change of heart when he decided to pen the tale of his often-brooding character Stephen Dedalus and his not quite epic hero Leopold Bloom. Though Joyce had his reservations about Homer's epic tale, there was one aspect of The Odyssey that Joyce had great respect for: the theme. Joyce described The Odyssey as "the most beautiful, all-embracing theme" of humanity. …