See Disclaimer Below.

Author Archive

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review of Lions of the West by Robert Morgan

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Historicism, History, Humanities, Nineteenth-Century America, Politics, Southern History, The South, Writing on January 31, 2012 at 6:46 am

Allen Mendenhall

This review originally appeared here at the Southern Literary Review.

Good histories don’t just tell stories; they make arguments.  Robert Morgan’s arguments in Lions of the West, subtle though they are, run as follows: historians and storytellers cannot help but view dramatic shifts of history as products of the actions of famous individuals; nevertheless, what happens in the course of history is attributable to numerous common folk acting independently and with disparate motivations.  Even the most comprehensive history cannot tell the stories of all these individuals, each of whom, in the narrative of the American West, could be numbered among the great “lions.” 

“While it is understandable,” Morgan explains, “that we see history mostly in terms of the deeds of a few, our grasp of what actually happened will be flawed and limited if we do not consider the story of the almost invisible many who made the notable deeds possible, even inevitable.”  Despite this claim, Morgan seems taken by the Great Man theory of history, and one of the epigrams to his book, which gets repeated in the Prologue, is Emerson’s remark that there is “properly no history; only biography.”

Morgan’s stated purpose is to “create a living sense of the westward expansion of the United States through brief biographies of some of the men involved.”  In realizing this goal, he offers a nod to other popular historians and storytellers such as Joseph J. Ellis, Gordon S. Wood, and David McCullough.  Each of these men writes histories free of the monotony and tendentious urgency of academic historians, yet each is also committed to facts and small details as indicia of greater narrative patterns. 

Morgan admits, as he must, that Lions of the West is, at best, “only a partial story.”  That’s not a shortcoming peculiar to Morgan’s narrative but a reality of human experience: all histories, like all memories, are partial.  Morgan himself submits that “written history is distortion through selection,” and that by its nature “narrative can represent only by implication, explicit about some parts, suggesting the many.”  No history could recount all the constituent parts that make up the whole; no history, in other words, could recreate the past.  For that reason, an author’s values and priorities are reflected in the subjects he or she chooses to undertake. 

Morgan’s values and priorities can be gleaned from his decision to profile ten individuals whose lives and toils characterize the American West in all its outlandishness and glory: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, John Chapman (“Johnny Appleseed”), David (“Davy”) Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams.  Of these, all but Chapman and Adams maintained significant ties to the South or would have considered themselves, or by others would have been considered, Southerners. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Book Review: Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox’s Literature and the Economics of Liberty

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Communism, Conservatism, Economics, Essays, Fiction, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Law-and-Literature, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Philosophy, Politics, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on January 23, 2012 at 4:53 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following book review originally appeared here in the Fall 2010 issue of The Independent Review.

Humans are not automated and predictable, but beautifully complex and spontaneous. History is not linear. Progress is not inevitable. Our world is strangely intertextual and multivocal. It is irreducible to trite summaries and easy answers, despite what our semiliterate politicians would have us believe. Thinking in terms of free-market economics allows us to appreciate the complicated dynamics of human behavior while making sense of the ambiguities leading to and following from that behavior. With these realities in mind, I applaud Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox for compiling the timely collection Literature and the Economics of Liberty, which places imaginative literature in conversation with Austrian economic theory.

Cantor and Cox celebrate the manifold intricacies of the market, which, contrary to popular opinion, is neither perfect nor evil, but a proven catalyst for social happiness and well-being. They do not recycle tired attacks on Marxist approaches to literature: they reject the “return to aesthetics” slogans of critics such as Allan Bloom, Harold Bloom, and John M. Ellis, and they adopt the principles, insights, and paradigms of the Austrian school of economics. Nor do Cantor and Cox merely invert the privilege of the terms Marxist and capitalist (please excuse my resort to Derridean vocabulary), although they do suggest that one might easily turn “the tables on Marxism” by applying “its technique of ideology critique to socialist authors, questioning whether they have dubious motives for attacking capitalism.” Cantor and Cox are surprisingly the first critics to look to Austrian economics for literary purposes, and their groundbreaking efforts are sure to ruffle a few feathers—but also to reach audiences who otherwise might not have heard of Austrian economics.

Cantor and Cox submit that the Austrian school offers “the most humane form of economics we know, and the most philosophically informed.” They acknowledge that this school is heterodox and wide ranging, which, they say, are good things. By turning to economics in general, the various contributors to this book—five in all—suggest that literature is not created in a vacuum but rather informs and is informed by the so-called real world. By turning to Austrian economics in particular, the contributors seek to secure a place for freedom and liberty in the understanding of culture. The trouble with contemporary literary theory, for them, lies not with economic approaches, but with bad economic approaches. An economic methodology of literary theory is useful and incisive so long as it pivots on sound philosophies and not on obsolete or destructive ideologies. Austrian economics appreciates the complexity and nuance of human behavior. It avoids classifying individuals as cookiecutter caricatures. It champions a humane-economy counter to mechanistic massproduction, central planning, and collectivism. Marxism, in contrast, is collectivist, predictable, monolithic, impersonal, linear, reductive–in short, wholly inadequate as an instrument for good in an age in which, quite frankly, we know better than to reduce the variety of human experience to simplistic formulae. A person’s creative and intellectual energies are never completely products of culture or otherwise culturally underwritten. People are rational agents who choose between different courses of action based on their reason, knowledge, and experience. A person’s choices, for better or worse, affect lives, circumstances, and communities. (“Ideas have consequences,” as Richard Weaver famously remarked.) And communities themselves consist of multiplicities that defy simple labels. It is not insignificant, in light of these principles, that Michel Foucault late in his career instructed his students to read the collected works of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Allen Mendenhall Interviews J. Neil Schulman, Prometheus Award–Winning Author of Alongside Night

In Artist, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Creative Writing, Creativity, Economics, Fiction, Film, Humanities, Imagination, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, News and Current Events, Novels, Philosophy, Screenwriting, Television, Television Writing, Writing on January 17, 2012 at 9:00 am

J. Neil Schulman

J. Neil Schulman is a novelist, actor, filmmaker, journalist, composer, and publisher.  Among his many books are Alongside Night and The Rainbow Cadenza, both of which won the Prometheus Award.  Visit his website at http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/.

 

The following interview originally appeared here at Prometheus Unbound: A Libertarian Review of Fiction and Literature.

AM:  Right off the bat, it strikes me that I don’t know what to call you.  Will Neil work?

JNS:  Sure. It’s J. Neil Schulman in credits, and Neil in person.

AM:  Anyway, thank you for doing this interview, Neil.  You’ve had a fascinating and unique career.  You’ve written novels, short fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and other works.  Which of your works is your favorite and why?

JNS:  Every artist gets asked this question sooner or later. I asked it of Robert A. Heinlein when I interviewed him in 1973, and his answer was, “The latest one I’ve been working on.”

I’ve only completed one movie so far — Lady Magdalene’s — so it’s a Hobson’s Choice on that one. Ask me again when I’ve made two! But a lot of people also seem to like the script I wrote for The Twilight Zone, “Profile in Silver.”

I’ve written three novels. My first, Alongside Night [editor’s note: free in pdf], seems to be my most accessible and popular. I consider my second novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, to be my most layered, literary, and richest in explicit philosophy. My third novel, Escape from Heaven, is my favorite. It may not be as timely as my first novel or literary as my second novel, but it’s the one that’s closest to my heart…both the funniest thing I’ve ever written, and the one which is most deceptively simple. It appears to be a lightweight piece of comic fantasy, but it’s full of ideas that if examined more closely turn both traditional theology and rationalist philosophy on their heads.

Short stories? I’ll pick a few: “The Musician,” “Day of Atonement,” and “When Freemen Shall Stand” — all in my collection Nasty. Brutish, and Short Stories — and my latest short story, “The Laughskeller,” published on my blog, J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review.

AM:  Your worldview is, in a word, libertarian.  Why is that?  How does libertarianism come across in your writing?

JNS:  In my nonfiction essays it comes across explicitly. In fiction, drama, and comedy, I try to examine libertarian themes without preaching. I was probably most subtle doing this in The Rainbow Cadenza. The utilitarian politics advocated by the chief villain, Burke Filcher, is so self-consistent that a lot of readers have thought this character speaks for the author. In fact, I wrote the novel to attack utilitarianism as a nullification of the natural individual rights I believe in. The novel reduces utilitarianism to absurdity — it’s a formal satire of it.

Alongside Night is less subtle, though I’m probably more successful in the new movie script than the 1970s novel when it comes to letting the audience make up its own mind. I have learned some refinements of my craft in the last three decades.

Alongside Night by J. Neil SchulmanAM:  I recently noticed that you commented on a post at the Austrian Economics and Literature blog edited by my good friend Troy Camplin.  Tell me about the influence that Austrian economics has had on you.

JNS:  I would say that Austrian economics — and more fundamentally, the analytical tools of praxeology and games theory — have been fundamental to my work for my entire professional career. They’re not the only tools in my kit, but they get shopworn as much as any of them. Austrian economics is most explicit in Alongside Night, projecting the social and political consequences of fiat money hyperinflation — but I used games theory in plotting “Profile in Silver” and applied praxeology to the afterlife in Escape from Heaven. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Law and Literature at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Conservatism, Economics, Humane Economy, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, News and Current Events, News Release, Philosophy, Politics, Western Philosophy on January 14, 2012 at 9:55 am

Allen Mendenhall

The Seventh Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society will take place in Bodrum, Turkey, at the Hotel Karia Princess, from Thursday, September 27, through Monday, October 1, 2012.  Readers of this site may be interested in some of the proposed talks for this event.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Stephan Kinsella will speak on Philosophy and Law.  Professor Hoppe’s paper is titled “The Nature of Man: Does Any Such Thing Exist?”  Mr. Kinsella’s paper is titled “The Market for Law.”

Sean Gabb and Benjamin Marks will speak on Literature and Literary Criticism.  Dr. Gabb’s paper is titled “On Literature and Liberty.”  Mr. Marks’s paper is titled “On H. L. Mencken as a Libertarian Model (and Some Romantic Libertarian Delusions).”

Other literati to speak include Jeffery Tucker, who interviewed me about literature and the economics of liberty and who now is the executive editor for Laissez Faire Books, and Theodore Dalrymple.

 

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How I Taught Sustainability

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Emerson, Fiction, Humanities, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, Writing on January 9, 2012 at 1:12 am

Allen Mendenhall

Last spring I learned that I had been assigned to teach a freshman writing course on sustainability.  I don’t know much about sustainability, at least not in the currently popular sense of that term, and for many other reasons I was not thrilled about having to teach this course.  So I decided to put a spin on the subject.  What follows is an abridged version of my syllabus.  I owe more than a little gratitude to John Hasnas for the sections called “The Classroom Experience,” “Present and Prepared Policy,” and “Ground Rules for Discussion.”  He created these policies, and, with a few exceptions, the language from these policies is taken from a syllabus he provided during a workshop at a July 2011 Institute for Humane Studies conference on teaching and pedagogy.

Sustainability and American Communities

What is sustainability?  You have registered for this course about sustainability, so presumably you have some notion of what sustainability means.  The Oxford English Dictionary treats “sustainability” as a derivative of “sustainable,” which is defined as

  1. Capable of being borne or endured; supportable, bearable.
  2. Capable of being upheld or defended; maintainable.
  3. Capable of being maintained at a certain rate or level.

Recently, though, sustainability has become associated with ecology and the environment.  The OED dates this development as beginning in 1980 and trending during the 1990s.  The OED also defines “sustainability” in the ecological context as follows: “Of, relating to, or designating forms of human economic activity and culture that do not lead to environmental degradation, esp. avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources.”  With this definition in mind, we will examine landmark American authors and texts and discuss their relationship to sustainability.  You will read William Bartram, Thomas Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Mark Twain, and others.  Our readings will address nature, community, place, stewardship, husbandry, and other concepts related to sustainability.  By the end of the course, you will have refined your understanding of sustainability through the study of literary texts. 

Course Objectives

I have designed this course to help you improve your reading, writing, and thinking skills.  In this course, you will learn to write prose for general, academic, and professional audiences.  ENGL 1120 is a writing course, not a lecture course.  Plan to work on your writing every night.  You will have writing assignments every week. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , ,

Joyce Corrington Publishes New E-Books

In Arts & Letters, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, John William Corrington, Law, Literature, News and Current Events, News Release, Novels, Writing on January 4, 2012 at 9:00 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Joyce Corrington, a long-term friend and supporter of this site whose interview with me appeared back in September, recently republished, in e-book format, the four New Orleans mysteries she wrote in a series with her late husband John William Corrington.  The books are available at the following links:

So Small a Carnival

A Project Named Desire

A Civil Death

The White Zone

Joyce’s latest novel, Fear of Dying, the fifth in the series, came out in 2011.

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Additional Thoughts on Gary W. Gallagher’s The Union War

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Historicism, History, Nineteenth-Century America, Slavery, Southern History, The South, Western Civilization on December 23, 2011 at 10:50 am

Allen Mendenhall

Recently I reviewed Gary W. Gallagher’s The Union War (Harvard University Press, 2011) for The University Bookman.  The review (“Why the Union Soldiers Fought”) is available here.  I have not said all I mean to say about Gallagher’s book, so this post records some additional thoughts.

I began my review with the tale of the “Lost Women and Children of Roswell.”  It was difficult as a child, knowing this story and others like it, to view the Union Army as completely righteous and pure, or to justify the eradication of certain evils like slavery with other widespread and destructive evils like war.  Despite being a Southerner with ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, I’m ambivalent about the War because of the various and totalizing perspectives that were thrust upon me when I was young, and because of my general opposition to war and nationalism, to say nothing of the complex figuring of race that played a defining role in bringing about the conflict.

As I went from middle school to high school, and then college to graduate school, the less likely I was to reduce the causes of the War to one or two factors, and the more likely I was to believe that anyone’s view of the War is already tainted by biases and assumptions.  Over time, I learned never to rule out alternate ways of viewing the War or the Confederacy.  I decided that no one would ever discover the intellectual trump card that would prevail over other viewpoints about the War that killed more men than all other wars in American history, combined.

There’s always more than one way of looking at a conflict, be it this War or some other one.  And our imperfect understanding of conflicts—of anything, really—always consists of generalizations based on the confines of personal experience.  We can read about the events encompassing the War, and we can guess at the logic and beliefs that explain those events.  But we can never relive the War or experience it in real time; and if we are honest, we must say that we can never read all there is to read about the period, never fully know the way a nineteenth-century mind thought, never entirely understand the quotidian realities of the men and women of all races at those times and in those places.  Being human, moreover, we make mistakes and assumptions.  Most of us revise our errors when we notice them.  But some don’t.  Some try to rationalize the logic of the unrealities to which they cling.  Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Allen Mendenhall Interviews Ace Atkins

In Artist, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, News and Current Events, Novels, Southern Literary Review, Writing on December 12, 2011 at 8:46 am

Ace Atkins is the author of nine novels, most recently The Ranger and Infamous.  A former journalist at The Tampa Tribune, Atkins has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his investigation into a 1950s murder.  He lives on a farm outside Oxford, Mississippi.

The following interview first appeared here at Southern Literary Review.

AM: What I suspect everyone wants to know is, how do you stay so prolific?  How do you write so much, so quickly?

AA: I’m very fortunate to be a full-time novelist. I’ve been writing full time since 2001 and that gives me the freedom to concentrate completely on my stories. Many terrific writers I know have to carve out time from from their jobs to work on a book. I am able to go to my office every day and work on that new novel. I feel pretty damn lucky and that in turn means I get to work on more projects.

AM: You seem to have located The Ranger in regions of the South that you know well.  Would you call this book “Southern literature”? 

AA: Absolutely. I don’t get into working in a certain genre—that’s up to readers and critics—and can hurt the writer and reader. My new series of novels could not be set anywhere else but the South and certainly centers on many Southern themes. I gain a lot of inspiration from the gritty world of Faulkner’s crime stories and turn my attention to the descendants of those people. 

AM:    I noticed that country music and country musicians appear throughout The Ranger.  Can you tell us about the significance of this to the novel?

AA: My first four novels were stylistically and thematically about blues. I always wanted to work on a novel that felt like an old Johnny Cash ballad—a solider returning home to town, unrequited love, guns and violence. I listened to a lot of Johnny Cash and also tons of Outlaw Country—Waylon, Merle, etc.—when coming up with the background of Quinn Colson.

AM: Who is Colonel George Reynolds?  I noticed his name in the Acknowledgments. 

George is the guy who saved my ass. I had contracted to write a novel about a U.S. Army soldier without knowing enough about the modern war in Afghanistan. Colonel Reynolds contacted me from Camp Phoenix in Afghanistan about signing a copy of my novel, Devil’s Garden. He offered help if I ever needed. It turned out, I needed help immediately. He offered terrific insight direct from the battle front and introduced me to the real Ranger who provided the background for Quinn Colson. 

I could not have written the book without him and he still provides me with a ton of answers to picky questions. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , ,

Review of Forensic Fictions by Jay Watson

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Fiction, Georgia, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Southern History, Southern Literary Review, The South, Writing on December 5, 2011 at 10:56 pm

Allen Mendenhall

The following review originally appeared here at the Southern Literary Review.  If you enjoy this review, please consider subscribing to the Southern Literary Review.  I became the managing editor of the Southern Literary Review in November.

 

Kudos to the University of Georgia Press for this recent reprint of Jay Watson’s Forensic Fictions, which has become something of a classic among law-and-literature scholars.  A pioneering project, Forensic Fictions stands as the first critical work to interrogate the lawyer figure in Faulkner’s oeuvre.

Watson submits that law is vast and multidimensional, “at once a deeply normative cultural system, a vehicle of ideology (in its constructive and destructive manifestations), a force of social stability and control, an entrenched and often blindly self-interested institution, and not least of all a human vocation, a form of practice that in some instances achieves the status of a calling.” 

In Faulkner’s fiction, law helps to highlight the complexity, sometimes liberating and sometimes disorienting, of the “everyday” aspects of Southern culture, institutions, and traditions.  Law is more than bills, statutes, judge-made opinions, codes, and the like.  Law isn’t a monolithic animal but a multiplicity of people and institutions; a product of self-serving performances by lawyers, judges, and politicians; and an accumulation of arguments couched in topoi of guilt and innocence, right and wrong, justice and equality.  Law is, simply put, a network of human relations and a collection of stories. 

Watson’s book examines how lawyers and laws constitute and presuppose authority in the microcosm of Yoknapatawpha.  “Lawyers of course advocate by narrating,” Watson explains, “by telling their clients’ stories in the language of the law.”  Lawyers, then, are raconteurs, and laws are products of language, even as they institute language.

Watson suggests that Faulkner internalized the “conspicuous and complicated presence” of real-life lawyers—Dean R.J. Farley, Governor Lee M. Russell, General James Stone, Ben Wasson, Jim Kyle Hudson, and Lucy Somerville Howorth, to name just a few—and then expressed mixed feelings about lawyers and the legal community in his writings.  Although not a lawyer himself, Faulkner could boast of a legal pedigree, having been born into a family and a society overflowing with attorneys.  Faulkner’s multifaceted and often contradictory ideas about law reflect these cultural associations.

Watson uses the term “forensic fictions” to refer to Faulkner’s depictions “of the legal vocation and the practice of law, a practice that extends from the official space of the courtroom and the professional space of the law office to the farthest reaches of the community.”  Thus conceived, law is not only a communicative vehicle but also a way of life, as mundane as it is exciting. 

Watson works out of the paradigms of forensic discourse.  He treats law as a theater of differences and disparate perspectives and as a vast system of interrelated parts.  An “important subtext” for Faulkner’s forensic fictions, according to Watson, “is the conviction that the values and concerns of the storyteller can and must carry over from a limited, private, aesthetic realm into a public world outside, where verbal creations can reinforce, challenge, or otherwise inform social norms.”

Three novels—Intruder in the Dust, Knight’s Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun—make up what Watson dubs Faulkner’s “forensic trilogy.”  These novels portray the lawyer as citizen-spokesperson, able to appropriate the public sphere as a space for social celebration or critique. Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ciceronian Society Annual Conference, March 29-31, 2012: Call for Papers

In Arts & Letters, Conservatism, Humanities, News and Current Events, News Release, Western Civilization on November 30, 2011 at 8:27 am

 

Allen Mendenhall

The Ciceronian Society will be holding its annual meeting at the University of Virginia, March 29-31, 2012. This will be an academic conference in which panelists can present on a variety of topics related to the themes of Tradition, Place, and ‘Things Divine.’ A more elaborate description of these core-themes and their relation to the humanities is provided on the Ciceronian Society website. 

Possible panel themes include the following: 

 

  1.  The Relationship of Modern Thought to Tradition and the Divine. 
  2.  Greek and Roman Thought. 
  3.  Place, ‘Things Divine,’ and Tradition in Medieval Thought
  4.  Human Scale, Decentralism, and Federalism
  5.  American Thought/Experience and Tradition and Place
  6.  Literature, Localism, History, and the Divine. 
  7.  Agrarianism, Localism, and Economics 
  8.  Social-Political Theology