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Review of John Shelton Reed’s Dixie Bohemia

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Southern History, Southern Literary Review, The South, Writing on October 31, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following review first appeared here in Southern Literary Review.

John Shelton Reed’s Dixie Bohemia is difficult to classify. It’s easier to say what it isn’t than to say what it is.

It isn’t biography.  It isn’t documentary.  It isn’t quite history, although it does organize and present information about a distinct class of past individuals interacting and sometimes living together in a unique, definable space.

It isn’t quite sociology either, although Reed is, by training and profession, a sociologist, and sociology does, every now and then, sneak its way into the pages.

Maybe it’s best to suggest that the book is a bit of all of these, but it’s also an annotated edition of Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles: A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans.

Written and compiled by William Spratling and William Faulkner, whom Reed affectionately dubs the “Two Bills,” Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, first published in 1926,was something of a joke: its oft-rambunctious subjects weren’t really creoles, but simply friends of the authors, and most weren’t, by most measurable standards, famous.

Reed’s stated goal, one of them at least, is to provide an “introduction to a Bohemian crowd of artists, writers, journalists, musicians, poseurs, and hangers-on found in the French Quarter in the mid-1920s.”  This eclectic and creative crowd comprises what Reed calls a social circle, or, in more academic parlance, a “loose network of relationships linked by friends in common,” “by association with the same institutions,” and “by common interests.”

Reed explains that social circles, by nature, “have no formal leaders, but they may have their notables,” and they have their cores, too.  The leader of the so-called “famous Creoles” is Sherwood Anderson, and the core, as you might have guessed, is the French Quarter.

Tulane University, with all of its energy, entertainers, and eccentrics, enabled and sustained the circle that produced the local arts, literature, and culture.  The area and its residents gained a national, indeed international, reputation.  As Meigs Frost, a reporter who made the cut as a famous creole, put it, “So many of us here are internationally famous locally.”

Reed’s subtly sociological introductory chapters place his subjects, which were also the two Bills’ subjects, into their historical context—and what a wild, exotic, and at times erotic context it is.  His comprehensive research is delivered with such wit and enthusiasm that one can forget this work is scholarship written by a former professor and published by a university press.

His occasional use of the first person and confessional, qualifying asides—“as far as I know,” “Some may find it easier than I do,” “to my mind artists should not be judged on what prejudiced observers see in their work,” “It is difficult to discuss this,” “I have mentioned,” “I know of someone,” “it’s fair to say,” “It’s hard to imagine”—will let you know, or let you guess at, where he stands on an issue or acknowledges an assumption on his part.  Such delicate humility—or is it just honest colloquialism?—is rare for a person who made his career in the university, and it would be a shame if readers neglected to notice it.

Peopled with absinthe-drinking, music-loving debauchers, 1920s New Orleans was a place where madams and brothels were as common as jambalaya and gumbo; where music poured into the streets, which smelled of spices, sex, and booze; where bootleggers (this was the Prohibition Era, remember) set up shop next to cops (who were customers of the brothels and the bootleggers); where the only limit on free love, it seemed, was the stultifying effect of alcohol; where parties—especially costume balls—were considered failures if nobody got naked; and where vivacious theater, daily newspapers, and edgy literary periodicals flourished.

If this milieu seemed excessive, radical, intemperate, even libertine, it was also in a way conservative: there was among its dwellers a ubiquitous impulse to preserve and maintain.  History, both that being made and that made already, was important to the artists and writers.  The districts, the streets, the homes, the buildings, the sidewalks—all of them required and received care and protection, and all of them underwent systematic revitalization.  The literati, as conservationists, were afraid that the world they had inherited, and to some extent made, was endangered.

Fans of Reed have come to expect certain things: the informal idioms and plain speech he uses while dissecting, with surgeon-like precision, complex people and institutions; the surprising clarity he brings to understudied topics; and the delightful, conversational prose with which he arrests your attention, transports you into another world, and then releases you back into your own world.

In this, his latest, he does not disappoint.  As always, he delivers—and in so doing provides telling insights into a minor renaissance in American literary history.  His discussions of race and sexuality will inspire (or provoke) future study, but more importantly he has addressed some of the least known phases of some of the most known American litterateurs.

Reed doesn’t need my endorsement.  But he’s got it.

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Book Note: Twentieth-Century English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Britain, British Literature, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Modernism, The Novel, Western Civilization, Writing on October 24, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following excerpt first appeared as part of the Routledge Annotated Bibliography of English Studies series.

This history of twentieth-century English literature addresses a wide variety of texts produced in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.  Made up of 44 critical essays, this book is divided into four parts: 1) Writing Modernity, 2) The Emerging Avant-Garde, 3) Modernism and its Aftermath, 1918-1945, and 4) Post-War Cultures, 1945-1970.  This division is meant to read like a history and not like a companion, anthology, or compilation of essays. 

The book attempts to avoid treating “Englishness” or “English literature” as fixed or essentialized categories and, instead, to use those loaded terms as illustrative of multiple and differing conceptions of place and identity.  As with any historical account of modernism, this book explores the tensions between continuity and change, but unlike many historical accounts of modernism, this book focuses largely upon transnationalism, diaspora, postcolonialism, and dispersal. 

In an effort to complicate simplistic characterizations of time and place, this book acknowledges overlapping chronologies even as it maps out a quasi-linear study of English literature in the twentieth-century.  As an example of the editors’ resistance against oversimplified periodization, the book begins not with a set date (say, 1900) but with a section of essays exploring the lives and works of authors both before and after the close of the nineteenth-century. 

This first section of the book (“Writing Modernism”) incorporates works about major themes in literature and the role those themes play in the gradual replacement and displacement of the literature of the so-called older generation.  The second section of the book also addresses the fledgling stages of modernism, considering as it does the divide between Edwardian and Georgian writers and literature.  This section closes with an account about how the Great War influenced literary production in Britain. 

Part three is, unlike the earlier sections, rooted in a particular time frame (1918-45), and it focuses on how authors such as Joyce, Woolf, Ford, Conrad, Lawrence, and Lewis experiment with forms while investigating their and their countries’ recent (and in some cases not-so-recent) past.  This section closes with World War Two and the literary productions emanating from that event. 

The fourth section, dealing chiefly with issues of continuity and change, also deals with issues of class, education, nationalism, and internationalism, and the fifth and final section, “Towards the Millennium,” examines literature and literary culture from the last 30 years.  This final section focuses on new opportunities for writing, publication, genre, performance, and experimentation.  It undertakes to explore the vexed “postmodern” signifier while refusing reductive conclusions about that term.   

In general, the book pays particular attention to genre and the construction and representation of literary culture during eras of new technology and shifting social circumstances.  When addressing more recent phenomena of literature and literary criticism, such as anxiety over the term “postmodern,” the book’s closing essays are careful not to “take sides,” so to speak, but to register the complexity of issues and insist that all claims about the contemporary or near-contemporary are provisional and not summative, speculative and not conclusive. 

This ambitious project leaves certain loose ends, as any project of this magnitude must, but it is nevertheless an impressive and meticulous contribution to ongoing and unsettled conversations about twentieth-century British literature.  The sheer number and variety of authors contributing to and represented by this text are so bold and interesting that definitive or comprehensive statements about them are difficult to make.  Suffice it to say that the complexity of this book, and of all of the authors and essays appearing in this book, is in keeping with the complexity of a subject as expansive as twentieth-century British literature.             

 

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American Literary History and Pragmatism

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Emerson, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Walt Whitman, Writing on August 29, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

American literary history, even before C.S. Peirce named “pragmatism” as a philosophy, validates much of what pragmatism has to offer.  Joan Richardson speaks of “frontier instances” whereby certain writers become aesthetic outposts from which we can trace continuities of thought and artistic representation.  She treats literature as a life form that must adapt to its environment; similarly, Richard Poirier looks to a tradition of linguistic skepticism in American literature to show the role that artistic influence and troping have had on American culture.  Long before Richardson and Poirier, George Santayana exercised his own literary flair in his celebratory, summative essays about American culture and experience.  If American literary history can undergo operations of tracing and mapping, it might be because—as Richardson, Poirier, and Santayana have suggested—the unfolding and development of an American literary canon have been processes of evolution.  Literary texts and movements have shown a tendency toward growth that is responsive to the natural and changing circumstances of the time.

Richardson begins A Natural History of Pragmatism with 17th century Puritan ministers and then quickly moves to Jonathan Edwards.  Edwards is representative of the Calvinist notion of limited disclosure, the idea, in other words, that God reveals his divinity to us through the shapes, forms, and outlines he provides to us in the phenomenal world.  From this idea (and others like it) began the uniquely American insistence on the value of nature and the physical universe to thought and the spiritual or psychological realm.  As Americans sought to make themselves culturally and intellectually independent from Europe, both in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they used the New World landscapes and vastly unexplored (by Europeans at least) terrains as objects of their fascination and as sources of inspiration.  Even figures like Jefferson insisted upon the scientific study of the natural world in order to authorize theories about law and politics, which he wished to distinguish from European ways.  Jefferson, like William Bartram, another naturalist, lionized Natives as being more in tune with nature and hence more “lawful” in the sense that their communal governments were in keeping with the laws of nature.  However problematic we may consider these romanticized depictions today, we should at least say of them that they inspired further attention to sustained observation of nature as a critical component of what was intended to be a new way of thinking divorced from the Old World of Europe.

Santayana says that when orthodoxy recedes, speculation flourishes, and accordingly it is no surprise that as Puritanism solidified into an orthodoxy of the kind against which it once defined itself, there was a resistance among artists and writers and thinkers.  Emerson, for one, adapted the thinking of the Calvinists while maintaining their commitment to the natural world as a means for realizing higher truths.  Instead of God revealing himself to man through the forms of the natural world, God, according to Emerson, was realized within the person with a poetical sense, who was inspired by the natural world to discover the divinity within himself.  To become one and to see all—that is, to become a “transparent eyeball”—was something of a religious experience for Emerson.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Abolish the Bar Exam

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, History, Humanities, Law, Libertarianism, Nineteenth-Century America on July 20, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following piece first appeared here at LewRockwell.com.

Every year in July, thousands of anxious men and women, in different states across America, take a bar exam in hopes that they will become licensed attorneys. Having memorized hundreds if not thousands of rules and counter-rules – also known as black letter law – these men and women come to the exam equipped with their pens, laptops, and government-issued forms of identification. Nothing is more remote from their minds than that the ideological currents that brought about this horrifying ritual were fundamentally statist and unquestionably bad for the American economy.

The bar exam is a barrier to entry, as are all forms of professional licensure. Today the federal government regulates thousands of occupations and excludes millions of capable workers from the workforce by means of expensive tests and certifications; likewise various state governments restrict upward mobility and economic progress by mandating that workers obtain costly degrees and undergo routinized assessments that have little to do with the practical, everyday dealings of the professional world.

As a practicing attorney, I can say with confidence that many paralegals I know can do the job of an attorney better than some attorneys, and that is because the practice of law is perfected not by abstract education but lived experience.

So why does our society require bar exams that bear little relation to the ability of a person to understand legal technicalities, manage case loads, and satisfy clients? The answer harkens back to the Progressive Era when elites used government strings and influence to prevent hardworking and entrepreneurial individuals from climbing the social ladder.

Lawyers were part of two important groups that Murray Rothbard blamed for spreading statism during the Progressive Era: the first was “a growing legion of educated (and often overeducated) intellectuals, technocrats, and the ‘helping professions’ who sought power, prestige, subsidies, contracts, cushy jobs from the welfare state, and restrictions of entry into their field via forms of licensing,” and the second was “groups of businessmen who, after failing to achieve monopoly power on the free market, turned to government – local, state, and federal – to gain it for them.”

The bar exam was merely one aspect of the growth of the legal system and its concomitant centralization in the early twentieth century. Bar associations began cropping up in the 1870s, but they were, at first, more like professional societies than state-sponsored machines. By 1900, all of that changed, and bar associations became a fraternity of elites opposed to any economic development that might threaten their social status.

The elites who formed the American Bar Association (ABA), concerned that smart and savvy yet poor and entrepreneurial men might gain control of the legal system, sought to establish a monopoly on the field by forbidding advertising, regulating the “unauthorized” practice of law, restricting legal fees to a designated minimum or maximum, and scaling back contingency fees. The elitist progressives pushing these reforms also forbade qualified women from joining their ranks.

The American Bar Association was far from the only body of elites generating this trend. State bars began to rise and spread, but only small percentages of lawyers in any given state were members. The elites were reaching to squeeze some justification out of their blatant discrimination and to strike a delicate balance between exclusivity on the one hand, and an appearance of propriety on the other. They made short shrift of the American Dream and began to require expensive degrees and education as a prerequisite for bar admission. It was at this time that American law schools proliferated and the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) was created to evaluate the quality of new law schools as well as to hold them to uniform standards.

At one time lawyers learned on the job; now law schools were tasked with training new lawyers, but the result was that lawyers’ real training was merely delayed until the date they could practice, and aspiring attorneys had to be wealthy enough to afford this delay if they wanted to practice at all.

Entrepreneurial forces attempted to fight back by establishing night schools to ensure a more competitive market, but the various bar associations, backed by the power of the government, simply dictated that law school was not enough: one had to first earn a college degree before entering law school if one were to be admitted to practice. Then two degrees were not enough: one had to pass a restructured, formalized bar exam as well. Read the rest of this entry »

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Law in Melville and Hawthorne

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Historicism, History, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Writing on July 11, 2012 at 8:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

Law was a common trope in the writing of nineteenth century American authors.  The jurist Roscoe Pound referred to nineteenth century America as a “frontier society” that was struggling to define what law was.  Justice John Marshall was carving out the jurisdiction of the nation’s high court, even as Andrew Jackson challenged Marshall’s authority to do so.  (Jackson supposedly said, in regard to Worcester v. Georgia, that Marshall had made his decision, “now let him enforce it.”)  American jurisprudents were seeking to reconcile the contradictions between liberty and equality on the one hand—the ideals of the revolutionary generation—with the peculiar institution of slavery on the other.  The ethos of republicanism and the ideal of open discourse clashed with the legislative attempts among the Southern states to resurrect Roman code to validate slave laws, even as the judiciary, on all levels and in all states, attempted to incorporate British common law into a new setting with unique problems.  In short, law was in flux during the nineteenth century in America, and writers like Melville and Hawthorne picked up on this problem and gave it unique and sometimes troubling articulation in their literature.

The “facts” in Benito Cereno are strikingly similar to the facts in one of America’s most memorable cases: U.S. v. The Amistad, in which John Quincy Adams, among others, served as an attorney.  In both “cases,” slaves took over a slave ship, killed some of their white captives, and demanded that the remaining white shipmen return the boat to Africa.  Rather than doing that, however, the white shipmen steered a path toward America, where the unsuspecting crew of another ship, sensing something wrong, came to assist.  These fact patterns raise sensitive and disturbing questions about the law.  What is justice?  How should it be determined?  Which party is right, and what does it mean to be right or to have rights?  For that matter, what is the law to begin with?

In Benito Cereno, Cereno is the captain of the ship bearing slaves, and it is from Delano’s perspective that we learn, gradually, that a slave revolt has occurred and that Cereno is being held captive by Africans.  Delano is the captain of a different ship who has come aboard Cereno’s ship to assist Cereno’s apparently distressed crew.  The leader of the slave revolt, Babo, himself a slave, is always by Cereno’s side, thereby giving Delano the impression that Cereno has a loyal servant.  What Delano eventually discovers is that the slaves have spared the lives of only Cereno and a few other whites in order that these whites return the ship to Africa.

In Amistad as in Benito Cereno, the African slaves had been removed from their homeland, without their consent, and taken to a foreign land among alien peoples for the sole purpose of perpetual enslavement.  On the other hand, the white shipmen had, it could be argued, complied with the law of the sea in conducting these actions, and they were murdered by mutinying slaves.  The problem here is that neither side seems to represent an unquestionably moral or obviously right position.  Slavery is evil, but so is murder.  Melville, perhaps realizing the literary possibilities created by this tension, subjects this challenging set of circumstances to rigorous interrogation by way of a captivating narrative. Read the rest of this entry »

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Review of Coleman Hutchinson’s Apples and Ashes

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Fiction, Historicism, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Southern History, Southern Literary Review on June 20, 2012 at 8:00 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following review first appeared here at the Southern Literary Review.

Confederate literature and literary culture have not received the critical consideration that they warrant.  Not only that, but they have been dismissed as scant and mediocre.  Scholars of the South and of the Civil War—even those whose work has reached wide audiences—have paid more attention to other humanistic fields than to literature, particularly to Confederate literature and particularly during the so-called “fighting” years of 1861-1865.  This neglect, argues Coleman Hutchison in Apples and Ashes, is regrettable because “the Confederacy gave rise to a robust literary culture.”

Several factors account for the dearth of scholarship on Confederate literature, not least of which is the fact that the Confederacy existed for only a short time, during which Confederate writers had to overcome, among other things, ink and paper shortages; many of these men and women struggled to see their work reach print in cities occupied by Union troops.  Accordingly, much of what might have become Confederate literature was lost or unpublished, yet the relative shortage of Confederate literature was not due to lack of talent, but to printing paralysis.

Another reason Confederate literature has failed to become a common subject of study is the presumption that this topic is not worthwhile, largely because Confederate cultural values have been discredited.  There is, today, the tendency to demonize or denounce any person who would take seriously the claims and writings of Confederate partisans, politicians, and highbrows.  Yet to take something seriously is not to endorse it, and to proclaim certain intellectual matters off-limits—even if those matters are highly complex and, when studied carefully, telling about contingencies and urgencies of our own day—is dangerous and foolish indeed.  Hutchison is just as aware of the importance of Confederate literature as he is of the importance of disclaiming it.  “To write about the Confederate nation,” he says, “is to risk being seen as endorsing its right to exist.”  He adds, emphatically, that his book “is by no means an apology for the Confederacy or Confederate nationalism,” and that he “finds almost nothing that is admirable in the politics and culture of the Civil War South.”  That Hutchison feels compelled to disassociate himself from Confederate ideology at all suggests how strangely anxious the impulsive, opportunistic, or lazy readers will be to either condemn or celebrate (depending on their perspective) this book as pro-Confederate.

Mostly uninterested in matters of taste and judgment regarding the literary quality of his subjects, Hutchison submits that Confederate literature teaches literary scholars not only about the nuances and cultures of nationalism, but also about nineteenth century American (read: non-Confederate) letters generally, since Confederate literature was in conversation with—and in contradistinction to—American literary nationalism.  Among the distinguishing features of Confederate literature were its aspirational impulses and its focus upon an imagined and impossible future.  In some respects, the South’s belles lettres recognized the poignancy of a lost cause narrative before the cause was actually lost. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sidney Morgenbesser on the American Pragmatists

In America, American History, Arts & Letters, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Nineteenth-Century America, Philosophy, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on June 13, 2012 at 8:00 am

Sidney Morgenbesser was a philosophy professor at Columbia University.  Among his students were Jerry Fodor, Raymond Geuss, Robert Nozick, and Derek Parfit.  In the following videos, Professor Morgenbesser speaks to Bryan Magee about the American Pragmatists.

Section One

Section Two

Section Three

Section Four

Section Five

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Lack of Intellectual Preparation?

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Historicism, History, Humanities, Law on May 25, 2012 at 9:03 am

Allen Mendenhall

Last week I was reading several old reviews of Lawrence Friedman’s landmark work, A History of American Law.  I came across a 1974 review by David J. Rothman in Reviews in American History.  Rothman made the following point, which, despite being made 34 years ago, is bound to offend some readers of this site, especially those who are lawyers or law professors:

I have attended conferences of law professors doggedly determined to be interdisciplinary, and I have been appalled at the lack of intellectual preparation that many of them had for such work. They would talk blithely about bringing the insights of, say, game theory to the law-with only the vaguest idea of what game theory was all about. (Indeed, how could they have had more than a vague idea? After a general undergraduate training, they went to the law schools, then to the courts as clerks, then back to the law schools.) So one must, perforce, have a lurking fear that some of the new interdisciplinary efforts will be so inadequate as to prompt law professors to decide to do well what they can do, rather than to do badly what they should do. And law schools may well continue to perpetuate half-knowledge. They remain torn between serving as trade schools to the profession and graduate schools to the scholars. This compromise may turn out to be less and less tenable over the next years.
 
Does Rothman’s claim remain true when the “new interdisciplinary efforts” aren’t so new anymore?  Today many law professors hold Ph.D.s in various disciplines, and these professors use their unique, specialized training to enhance legal scholarship in their respective sub-disciplines.  But does “extra” graduate work or a specialized degree necessarily signal a superior skill set, or is Rothman’s view elitist?   These questions will be the subject of a future post on this site, and potentially of a future article, so I would like to hear back from readers.  Please email your responses to me or, if you’d prefer, post them in the comment box below.    

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Liberty and Shakespeare, Part Two

In Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Economics, History, Humanities, Law, Law-and-Literature, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Shakespeare, Western Civilization on May 22, 2012 at 8:08 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following essay orginally appeared here at Mises Daily.

The Later Works (1973 to present)

It is well settled that James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination (1973)[29] catalyzed the law-and-literature movement as we know it today. A professor in the Department of English, Department of Classics, and College of Law at the University of Michigan, White brings a unique interdisciplinary perspective to bear on this field that he more or less founded. He remains prolific even in his old age, having published a string of books on a wide variety of topics having to do with legal rhetoric and legal or literary hermeneutics. Since White’s landmark tour de force in 1973, several legal scholars have followed in his footsteps, venturing into literature (broadly defined to include novels, plays, poems, short stories, essays, and so on) to make sense of legal culture and legal texts. Some of the resulting scholarship has been quite good — some, however, more than slightly wanting.

Shortly after White’s “overture,” the work of literary PhDs like Robert Weisberg (PhD, English, 1971, Harvard University; JD, 1979, Stanford University), Richard H. Weisberg (PhD, French and comparative literature, 1970, Cornell University; JD, 1974, Columbia University), and, among others, Stanley Fish (PhD, English, 1962, Yale University) lent credibility to a field seen as dubious by law-school deans and territorial literature professors.[30] Today the movement seems to be picking up, not losing, momentum, in part due to the interdisciplinary nature of the project and in part due to the literati heavyweights who have used the movement as an opportunity to enlarge their celebrity status (to say nothing of their salaries).

The vast array of Shakespeare-focused works that flew under the banner of law and literature during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s actually undermined the entire field. Titles like Michael Richmond’s “Can Shakespeare Make You a Partner?” (1989)[31] signaled a practical but nonscholastic rationale for lawyers to turn to Shakespeare’s texts. Works most commonly addressed during this period include The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Hamlet, and Measure for Measure.[32] In the rush to canonize Shakespeare in this budding genre that sought to include humanities texts in professional schools, even the conspiracy theories of a Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens, became authoritative readings.[33] Stevens is not the only Supreme Court justice with an opinion on the Shakespeare authorship debate, as the following chart by the Wall Street Journal[34] makes clear:

Shakespeare’s Court
The Supreme Court on the likely author of Shakespeare’s plays:
Active Justices
Roberts, Chief Justice No comment.
Stevens Oxford
Scalia Oxford
Kennedy Stratford
Souter “No idea.”
Thomas No comment.
Ginsburg “No informed views.”*
Breyer Stratford
Alito No comment.

*Justice Ginsburg suggests research into alternate candidate, Florio.
Retired Justices
O’Connor Not Stratford
Blackmun* Oxford
Brennan* Stratford

*Deceased

That Supreme Court justices have weighed in on Shakespeare’s authorship is more a study in itself and less a constructive contribution to Shakespeare scholarship. Not long after Stevens’s law-review article, at any rate, some creative attempts to render the Shakespeare as lawyer or other conspiracy theories surfaced. Law professor James Boyle, for instance, penned a novel, The Shakespeare Chronicles (2006),[35] dealing with the obsessive search for the “true” author of Shakespeare’s works. I suspect that Boyle would admit that The Shakespeare Chronicles, being fiction, does not represent scholarship, even if its production required rigorous scholarly research. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Gone,” Edited with Photography by Nell Dickerson

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, History, Humanities, Nineteenth-Century America, Southern History, Southern Literary Review, The South, Writing on May 9, 2012 at 7:45 am

Allen Mendenhall

The following review originally appeared here in the Southern Literary Review.

I’ve always maintained a spectator’s curiosity in the rituals and practices of photography.  I can’t take a good picture, no matter which side of the camera I’m on, but I appreciate the idea of reducing the world to a more manageable form, something I can look at and admire without getting overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and kinetics of it all.

I used to have a friend who was a photographer, and I would watch her take pictures.  She tried, once or twice, to teach me the nuances and particulars of photography, but I’m too proud to fail at new activities, so I strive never to undertake them.

Photographs are, folks say, moments stuck in time.  That makes them especially melancholy if their subjects, as it were, are decaying, rotting, or dying.  That’s what I realized when I leafed through the pages of Gone, a brilliant, conversation-starting, coffee-table book bearing the subtitle “A Heartbreaking Story of the Civil War,” and the sub-sub-title “A Photographic Plea for Preservation.”

Gone makes history even as it documents history.  Its images of antebellum Southern churches, plantations, and homes—some dilapidated, some just barely restored—ought to remind Southerners of the need for preserving the finest monuments of, and to, our complicated history.

That the photographer is Nell Dickerson, cousin to the late, great historian and novelist Shelby Foote, who needs no introduction to readers of this publication—although we editors have given him one—only adds a sense of authenticity to this project.  It’s as if in image and word and authorial kin, the book is tied to a past that struggles, and fails, to remain present; and it’s in that failing that the book achieves its most meaningful and poignant expression.

We Southerners place a premium on the fixed, the immutable, the known, perhaps because we understand that the things we value—family, hearth, home, community, place, religion—are bound to change.  We mourn change as we mourn loss, because all change entails loss, and it’s our tendency to mourn that gives us a unique, constructive identity.

We define ourselves as a people who have lost, or have lost something.  It’s a position that doesn’t survive interrogation, but there it is, a tragic ethos (and, for that matter, pathos) that we hope will stay the same when all else is, if not different, then almost unfamiliar.  Almost. Read the rest of this entry »