Archive for the ‘Novels’ Category
Steve Flowers Interviews Allen Mendenhall on “Alabama Politics”
In Arts & Letters, Books, Creative Writing, Humanities, Law, Literature, News and Current Events, Novels, Politics on December 1, 2023 at 8:00 amDonna Feazell Interviews Allen Mendenhall about “A Glooming Peace This Morning”
In Arts & Letters, Books, Creative Writing, Humanities, Novels on November 29, 2023 at 2:59 pmAllen Mendenhall Interviews Author Christy Alexander Hallberg
In Arts & Letters, Books, Creative Writing, Novels on October 7, 2021 at 7:00 amAllen Mendenhall Interviews Candace Cox Wheeler
In Humanities, Novels, Southern Literary Review on June 3, 2021 at 6:50 amWho Was John William Corrington?
In America, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, Essays, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Poetry, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literature, The South, Writing on October 10, 2018 at 6:45 am
Click here to purchase
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 28, 1932, John William Corrington—or Bill, as his friends and family called him—claimed on his academic CV that he was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Raised Catholic, he attended a Jesuit high school in Louisiana but was expelled for “having the wrong attitude.” The Jesuit influence would remain with him as he explored in his scholarly pursuits certain forms of Catholic mysticism as well as the teachings of the ancient Gnostics.
Bill loved the South and Southern literature and during his career authored or edited, or in some cases co-edited, twenty books of varying genres. He earned a B.A. from Centenary College and M.A. in Renaissance literature from Rice University, where he met his wife, Joyce, whom he married on February 6, 1960. In September of that year, he and Joyce moved to Baton Rouge, where he became an instructor in the Department of English at Louisiana State University (LSU). At that time, LSU’s English department was known above all for The Southern Review (TSR), the brainchild of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, but also for such literary luminaries as Robert Heilman, who would become Bill’s friend.
In the early 1960s, Bill pushed for TSR to feature fiction and poetry and not just literary criticism. He butted heads with then-editors Donald E. Stanford and Lewis P. Simpson. A year after joining the LSU faculty, he published his first book of poetry, Where We Are. With only 18 poems and 225 first edition printings, the book hardly established his reputation as a Southern man of letters. But it gave his name instant recognition and inspired his confidence to complete his first novel, And Wait for the Night (1964).
Click here to purchase
Click here to purchase
Of Bill and Miller Williams, Bill’s colleague at LSU, Jo LeCoeur, poet and literature professor, once stated, “Both men had run into a Northern bias against what was perceived as the culturally backward South. While at LSU they fought back against this snub, editing two anthologies of Southern writing and lecturing on ‘The Dominance of Southern Writers.’ Controversial as a refutation of the anti-intellectual Southern stereotype, their joint lecture was so popular [that] the two took it on the road to area colleges.”
In 1966, Bill and Joyce moved to New Orleans, where the English Department at Loyola University, housed in a grand Victorian mansion on St. Charles Avenue, offered him a chairmanship. Joyce earned her M.S. in chemistry from LSU that same year. By this time, Bill had written four additional books of poetry, the last of which, Lines to the South and Other Poems (1965), benefited from Charles Bukowski’s friendship and influence. Bill’s poetry earned a few favorable reviews but not as much attention as his novels—And Wait for the Night (1964), The Upper Hand (1967), and The Bombardier (1970). Writing in The Massachusetts Review, Beat poet and critic Josephine Miles approvingly noted two of Bill’s poems from Lines, “Lucifer Means Light” and “Algerien Reveur,” alongside poetry by James Dickey. Dickey himself admired Bill’s writing, saying, “A more forthright, bold, adventurous writer than John William Corrington would be very hard to find.”
Joyce earned her PhD in chemistry from Tulane in 1968. Her thesis, which she wrote under the direction of L. C. Cusachs, was titled, “Effects of Neighboring Atoms in Molecular Orbital Theory.” She began teaching chemistry at Xavier University; her knowledge of the hard sciences brought about engaging conservations, between her and Bill, about the New Physics. “Even though Bill only passed high school algebra,” Joyce would later say, “his grounding in Platonic idealism made him more capable of understanding the implications of quantum theory than many with more adequate educations.”
Click here to purchase
Bill became increasingly disenchanted with what he perceived to be radical campus politics, so he entered law school at Tulane University, graduating in 1975 and, with Joyce, coauthoring the screenplay for Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) while he was still a law student. By the time he graduated from law school, he had penned three novels, a short story collection, two editions (anthologies), and four books of poetry. But his writings earned him little money despite their sales figures.
Bill joined the law firm of Plotkin & Bradley, a small personal injury practice in New Orleans, and continued to publish in such journals as The Sewanee Review and The Southern Review, and in such conservative periodicals as The Intercollegiate Review and Modern Age. His stories took on a legal bent, peopled as they were with judges and attorneys. But neither law nor legal fiction brought him the fame or fortune he desired.
Click here to purchase
Click here to purchase
By the mid-70s, Bill, who preferred deep learning and philosophy to the popular writing that was earning him a comfortable living, had become fascinated by Eric Voegelin. A German historian, philosopher, and émigré who had fled the Third Reich, Voegelin taught in LSU’s history department and lectured for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he was a Salvatori Fellow. Voegelin’s philosophy inspired Bill and gave Bill a research focus and writing subject for the hours when he was not writing for film or television. In fact, Voegelin made such a lasting impression that, at the time of Bill’s death, Bill was working on an edition of Voegelin’s The Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings. (After Bill’s death, two men—Robert Anthony Pascal and James Lee Babin—finished what Bill had begun. The completed edition appeared in 1991.)
Bill constantly molded and remolded his image, embracing Southern signifiers while altering their various expressions. His early photos suggest a pensive, put-together gentleman wearing ties and sport coats and smoking pipes. Later photos depict a rugged man clad in western wear. Still later photos conjure up the likes of Roy Orbison, what with Bill’s greased hair, cigarettes, and dark sunglasses.
Click here to purchase
On Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1988, Bill suffered a heart attack and died. He was 56. His last words were, “it’s all right.” An introduction to his life’s work is both timely and necessary; this proposed manuscript will fill a gap in scholarship in addition to surveying the works of a man who was so important to the literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, this manuscript will make a scholarly contribution even as it serves as a basic introduction to Corrington’s writing and career.
This manuscript, moreover, will have the added benefit of being the first book-length exposition of Corrington’s oeuvre and will place his fiction and poetry into historical context. The manuscript will consist of approximately 58,000 to 60,000 words, including bibliography and front matter. It will include both primary and secondary bibliographies. More detailed information about the specific plan of the book may be found below. Here, in conclusion, is a list of Corrington’s most notable works:
Where We Are (Poetry), The Charioteer Press, Washington,
- C., 1962. Hardback and paperback.
The Anatomy of Love and Other Poems (Poetry), Roman Books,
Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 1964. Hardback and paperback.
Mr. Clean and Other Poems (Poetry), Amber House Press, San
Francisco, California, 1964.
Click here to purchase
- P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1964;
Anthony Blond, Ltd., London, 1964;
Pocket Books, Inc., New York, N. Y., 1965;
Panther Books, Ltd., London, 1967.
Lines to the South and Other Poems (Poetry), Louisiana State
University Press, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1965.
Click here to purchase
with Miller Williams, Louisiana State University Press,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1966. Hardback and paperback.
Click here to purchase
Southern Writing in the Sixties: Poetry (Anthology), ed.
with Miller Williams, Louisiana State University Press,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1967. Hardback and paperback.
Click here to purchase
The Upper Hand (Novel),
- P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1967;
Anthony Blond, Ltd., London, 1968;
Berkeley Books, New York, N. Y., 1968;
Panther Books, London, 1969.
Click here to purchase
- P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1968.
Click here to purchase
The Bombardier (Novel),
- P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, N. Y., 1970;
Lancer Books, New York, N. Y., 1972.
The Actes and Monuments (Short Fiction), University of
Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1978. Hardback and paperback.
Click here to purchase
Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, 1981.
Shad Sentell (Novel),
Congdon & Weed, Inc., New York, N. Y., 1984;
Click here to purchase
(Shad) Macmillan, London, 1984;
(Shad) Grafton Books, London, 1986.
Click here to purchase
Click here to purchase
Viking/Penguin, New York, 1986;
Ballantine Books, New York, 1987;
(Karneval med doden) Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck
A/S, Kobenhavn, Denmark, 1988;
Hayakawa Publishing, Inc, Japan, 1988;
(New Orleans Carneval) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munchen,
Germany, 1988;
(Carnaval de Sangue) Editora Best Seller, Sao Paulo,
Brazil, 1988;
Mysterious Press, London, UK, 1989;
(Carnaval de Sangue) Editora Nova Cultural Ltda., Sao
Paulo, Brazil, 1990.
Click here to purchase
Click here to purchase
Viking/Penguin, New York, 1987;
(Das Desire-Projekt) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munchen,
Germany, 1987;
(Dannys sidste sang) Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck,
Kobenhavn, Denmark, 1988;
Hayakawa Publishing, Inc., Japan, 1988;
(Una Canzone Per Morire) Arnoldo Mondadori Editore
S.p.A., Milano, Italy;
(Um Projecto Chamado Desejo) Editora Nova Cultural
Ltda., Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1990;
(Um Projecto Chamado Desejo) Circulo do Livro, Sao
Paulo, Brazil, 1990;
(Um Projecto Chamado Desejo) Editora Best Seller, Sao
Paulo, Brazil, 1990.
Click here to purchase
Viking/Penguin, New York, 1987;
(Begrabnis Erster Klasse) Wilhelm Heyne Verlag,
Munchen, Germany, 1988;
Ballantine Books, New York, 1989;
Hayakawa Publishing, Inc., Japan, 1989;
(Finche Odio Ci Separi) Arnoldo Mondadori Editore
S.p.A., Milano, Italy, 1989.
Click here to purchase
Click here to purchase
Risi’s Wife”), University of Arkansas Press,
Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1987. Hardback and paperback.
Click here to purchase
Viking/Penguin, New York, 1990.
Click here to purchase
Joyce Corrington, University of Missouri Press,
Columbia, Missouri, 1990.
The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 27, The Nature
of the Law, and Related Legal Writings, ed. with Robert
Anthony Pascal, James Lee Babin, Louisiana State
University Press, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1991.
Daniel James Sundahl Reviews Sara Baker’s “The Timekeeper’s Son”
In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Novels on December 13, 2017 at 6:45 am
Daniel James Sundahl is Emeritus Professor in American Studies and English at Hillsdale College where he taught for over 32 years. Prior to retirement, he was Kirk Distinguished Professor in American Studies. He’s relocated from Michigan to South Carolina.
These days one can enroll in creative writing programs with coursework or workshops in narrative medicine, poetic medicine, expressive writing and even medical humanities.
It’s an interesting notion likely connected to “coming of age” stories, “family dynamics” stories, all to be told with within expansive and insightful narratives which apply to all fields of “work” and of course what it means to be human with an examined life. Storytellers, after all, are interpreters in professional and cultural environments.
What would be the point?
Narrative as healthcare can be the point especially since stories help build empathy, mindfulness, and are diagnostic tools. Imagine for a moment a healthcare professional addressing an illness. How quick and easy to venture into remote hypotheticals. How better to address the illness through narrative, the interior experience of deep inquiry, confronting the illness as a story.
I mention this since it seems the way to address a review of Sara Baker’s The Timekeeper’s Son, a novel which asks the reader to recognize, absorb, interpret, and bear witness to a young man’s “difference” and his family’s dysfunction.
Why?
It can be used to explain motivation, even what organizes a novel’s plot or narrative development.
Here’s some context. I once sat with a student attempting something basic—how to use a dictionary. It was fundamental, alphabet, phonetics, and a dictionary entry. I gave the young man a word and then handed him the dictionary with the simple request: Look for the word which I had just sounded out.
He was flummoxed and looked at me and said, sweetly, “I don’t know how to use the air conditioner.” The issue was severe dyslexia.
There’s a kinship between this small narrative and Sara Baker’s novel: In a Georgia small town, Josh Lovejoy, whose aspiration in life is to become a filmmaker, drives home late at night uncharacteristically “high.” Accidentally he hits a jogger, David Masters, placing him in a coma. In all likelihood, Josh owns some hidden disabilities, living as he also does in a fragile household.
The incident is shattering, more so because Josh is already estranged from his father, who sees little value in Josh’s aspirations. The consequence of living with a “distant” father is Josh’s loneliness and lack of self-worth.
He’s adrift at an important moment in his life and culpable for the accident. He takes up his court-ordered community service while waiting to see if his culpability will change when and if David Masters dies. Josh works at the Good Shepherd School for Disabled Children.
Baker places the reader, then, in the heart and soul of a troubled young man; the plot, however, is diagnostic, addressing not only the Josh’s “troubles” but the delicate equilibrium of his family and the Masterses’ family.
It’s a “case study,” in other words; Josh’s father is a clockmaker whose sense of things is more devoted to the timepieces he keeps running but with the same disinterestedness he brings to his family life. His “shop” is the place to which he retreats. Josh’s mother, on the other hand, is equally preoccupied if not depressive.
In the novel’s time, then, as those hidden disabilities and wounds emerge against the background of the claims and limits of community, Josh faces a certain kind of annihilation which would include the “good” that’s in his heart.
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Anton Piatigorsky, Author of “Al-Tounsi”
In Arts & Letters, Books, Creative Writing, Criminal Law, Fiction, Humanities, Justice, Law, liberal arts, Literature, Novels, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Philosophy, Writing on October 4, 2017 at 6:45 amAM: Thanks for discussing your debut novel with me, Anton. It’s titled Al-Tounsi and involves U.S. Supreme Court justices who are laboring over a case about an Egyptian detainee held on a military base in the Philippines. How did you come up with this premise for a novel?
AP: I was interested in the intersection between contemporary legal and political issues and the personal lives of the justices. I was particularly impressed by the ways in which the writ of habeas corpus has been used (and suspended) throughout U.S. history.
The Great Writ is a heroic call to responsibility—a demand made by the judiciary for the executive to live up to its obligations to imprisoned individuals. While it has obvious political and social ramifications, it also has philosophical ones. It encourages moral and psychological reckoning: what are our responsibilities to others?
I was excited about writing a novel where two strains—the political and the personal—overlap and blend. I realized that if I fictionalized the important 2008 Guantanamo Bay case Boumediene vs. Bush—by changing key events, decisions and characters—I could use it as the basis for a novel about the Court that explores all my interests.
Anton Piatigorsky
AM: How did you decide to change directions and write about the law? Did this case just jump out at you? Your previous writings address a wide variety of subjects but not, that I can tell, law.
AP: I came to the law, strangely enough, through religion. I’ve long been interested in how religion functions, and especially in the ways that secular systems mimic religious ones. When I started reading about American law and the U.S. Supreme Court, I saw those institutions as a part of an Enlightenment era secular religion. From this perspective, law is a system of rituals, codes and writings that helps establish an identity for a community, a set of shared values and beliefs, and a way for people to function within the world. I found that fascinating. It inspired all sorts of questions.
What are the general beliefs about people and the world that lie beneath the American legal system? How are those beliefs enacted in cases, courts, and legal writings? How do they play out in the rituals of the Court? How do the justices of the Supreme Court —who are, in some ways, high priests of the legal world — reconcile conflicts between their personal beliefs and the foundational beliefs of the legal system they guide?
The fictional stories I wanted to tell about justices’ lives grew out of these general questions. Those questions also led me into an investigation of the main case before them.
AM: One of the most fascinating parts of the book, to me, is the Afterword, which consists of the concurring opinion of the fictional Justice Rodney Sykes.
AP: I have always loved novels of ideas, when a character’s emotional journey overlaps with their complex thoughts and beliefs. Whenever that type of fiction really works — as it does with Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov — the character’s philosophy or worldview stands alone as a work of non-fiction. And so the novel becomes part fiction, part critical thought. It functions as a critique on ideas that circulate in the real world.
That’s what I hoped to achieve for Justice Rodney Sykes’s formal opinion in the novel’s Afterword. I wanted Rodney to reach a powerful critique of basic tenets of the American legal system. I wanted him to address what our responsibilities are (or aren’t) towards others in the legal system, and the problems with that system’s fundamental faith in individual actors. In his concurrence, Rodney takes an unorthodox and unlikely stance for a Supreme Court Justice, but that’s what makes it a work of fiction. A novel can be the perfect forum to discuss how a real person might come to a radical decision, and how that decision might revolutionize their thoughts and actions.
AM: Who are your favorite living writers?
AP: I particularly admire J.M. Coetzee and Alice Munro. I think about their works often while I’m writing and editing my own.
Coetzee has written several fantastic “novels of ideas.” Both Diary of a Bad Year and Elizabeth Costello manage to incorporate far-reaching critiques into their larger stories about characters, and they do so while using imaginative formal techniques. I also love Coetzee’s cold and austere style in his less overtly intellectual books. They’re cleanly written, shockingly honest, and endlessly compelling.
Alice Munro—although it’s almost a cliché to praise her at this point—shows remarkable insight into her characters, gradually revealing their motivations, resentments and surprising decisions without ever erasing their fundamental mysteries as people. Her stories are complex formally, but in such a quiet way that I often don’t notice their structures until I’ve read them a few times. Her writing is a great model for how to show characters’ lives and decisions with efficiency and imagination while maintaining mystery.
AM: Do you intend to continue in the novel form in your own writing?
AP: Absolutely. I would love to write more legal fiction, as well. I’ve spent years learning about the law, but know that I’ve barely scratched the surface. There are so many potentially interesting legal stories. I’m also at the early stages of a new novel, which is not explicitly about law, but does feel like an outgrowth of Al-Tounsi in certain ways.
AP: It must be fascinating to work on the diverse cases that roll through a court. I can only imagine how many potential stories you and other lawyers, judges and court workers can recall—ideas for a million novels and movies and plays.
I think legal stories are particularly exciting for fiction because they distill big questions into concrete human situations and personalities. The giant subjects of guilt and innocence, love and betrayal, responsibilities towards others as opposed to ourselves, community or self-reliance, greed, jealousy and ambition all play out in specific facts and events, in the concrete details of a case. It’s just like in a novel. And since the American legal system is, in my mind, an application of an entire Enlightenment, philosophic worldview, these test cases and stories also pose huge philosophical, ethical and moral questions. It’s no coincidence some of the best novels ever written involve detailed legal plots.
AM: That reminds me of something Justice Holmes once said: “Law opens a way to philosophy as well as anything else.” But it sounds as if you and I would go further and say it might open a way better than many other things do.
AP: Law is like applied philosophy; It puts general ideas to the test in the real world. If a philosophy remains theoretical it never really touches what it means to live it, inside it. The answers theoretical philosophy provides are always tentative.
A huge inspiration for my novel was the work of the late French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. While Levinas’s writing is often arcane and difficult to get through, I find his thinking to be a powerful and searing indictment of basic Enlightenment principles. While I was writing Al-Tounsi, I used Levinas’s insights—directly—to help me construct Justice Sykes’s final concurrence. It was hugely inspiring to find a concrete way to use this philosophy I have long loved. All the questions and problems I was interested in exploring were present in this genuine legal situation, in the constitutional habeas corpus case, Boumediene vs. Bush, on which I based my fictional case of Al-Tounsi vs. Shaw.
So, yes, I completely agree with you and Justice Holmes!
AM: So glad we had this opportunity to talk. Let’s do it again.
Allen Mendenhall Interviews Paul Goldstein About His Latest Novel, “Legal Asylum”
In Academia, Arts & Letters, Books, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Law, Law School, Law-and-Literature, Literature, Novels, Teaching, The Academy, Writing on March 1, 2017 at 6:45 amPaul Goldstein is an expert on intellectual property law and the Stella W. and Ira S. Lillick Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He is the author of an influential four-volume treatise on U.S. copyright law and a one-volume treatise on international property. He has also authored ten books including five novels. Some of his other works include Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox, a widely acclaimed book on the history and future of copyright, and Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business. Havana Requiem, his third novel, won the 2013 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.
Paul Goldstein
AM: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview. What has been your colleagues’ reaction to this satire?
PG: My colleagues are, by and large, a sturdy and good-natured lot, and most of the reactions I’ve received have been very positive. Several have told me that they actually found themselves laughing out loud while reading the book. Still, there are a couple of colleagues who I know have read the book, but who seem curiously silent, and avoid my glance in the hallways. Who knows what they’re thinking!
AM: Were you afraid your colleagues might push back against the novel, seeing themselves in the characters?
PG: I decided at the outset not to make Legal Asylum a roman a clef—a genre that I find cowardly and mean-spirited, and that I put in the same category as practical jokes. At the same time, there are certainly recognizable types of legal academics in the book, and it’s been a good deal of fun talking with colleagues about which group they put themselves in—Poets, Quants or Bog Dwellers.
AM: In an interview with Jon Malysiak, the director of Ankerwycke Books, you stated that you’d spent 50 years thinking about the absurd and eccentric features of legal education. What are some of these?
PG: One absurdity of course is the grim-faced crusade of law school deans to secure for their institutions a higher and still higher slot in the US News law school rankings, or at least not to slip from their present perch. That’s the question that drives the story: Can a law school make it into the US News Top Five and lose its ABA accreditation, all in the same year? Another absurdity highlighted in Legal Asylum is that, where in other university departments academic advancement, including tenure, turns on publication in peer-reviewed journals, American law schools commit the credentialing function to second-year law students who run the law reviews.
AM: Your book is funny. Why is humor a powerful mode of critique?
PG: I’m glad you found the book funny! As to why humor is such a powerful mode of critique, it is because, for humor to work, it has to surprise the reader. Wait…she said that! He did what! And it’s that surprise, that unexpected twist, that turns the reader’s angle of view a fraction of a degree—or if it’s a belly laugh, maybe a full degree—so that the subject of the lampoon suddenly appears in a different light. To discover, for example, that the emperor is wearing no clothes, is not only funny, but it’s also a powerful critique of a certain kind of political leader.
AM: You’ve called your protagonist, Dean Elspeth Flowers, a hero. Why?
PG: For a literary hero to be at all interesting, she or he needs to be flawed—the deeper the flaw the better—because it is only character defects like pride, willfulness and grandiosity that will get the hero in trouble, and without trouble, what kind of story do you have? Several readers of Legal Asylum have told me how shocked they were to discover that, by the end of the book, they were truly rooting for Elspeth.
AM: Is there anything good about the obsession with law-school rankings and the so-called “arms race” between law schools?
PG: I’m sure there are some beneficiaries of the law school rankings game. The companies that publish all those glossy brochures touting law school achievements to prospective respondents in the US News polls certainly come out ahead. So do the airlines that fly admitted students to the law schools that are recruiting them like prized football prospects. And of course there’s US News itself, for which rankings must be a rare profit center in a bleak economic landscape for news media.
AM: It’s interesting that the American Bar Association doesn’t dodge satire in the book, yet the ABA—or a division of it—published the book.
PG: I have a wonderful and brave editor at Ankerwycke, and he didn’t once bat an eye at the parts of the story that poke fun at the A.B.A accreditation process.
AM: Did you ever consider writing about lower-ranked law schools, or did you, a Stanford law professor, write from the perspective you knew—from a top-ranked law school? I’m thinking now of Charlotte Law School and the troubles it’s been facing in light of the Department of Education’s decision to revoke federal funding there. It seems to me that law professors and administrators at these schools, who are in crisis mode, may not be in the mood for humor about legal education.
PG: My first law teaching job was at a state law school and, although this was long before the rankings game got underway, I can say that, like countless other schools today—state and private—that haven’t made it into the top tiers, it was preparing its students for the practice of law as effectively as any law school in the country. Are there law schools that shouldn’t be in business today? I expect that there are, and that has nothing to do with the US News hierarchy. But other schools have a legitimate grievance against rankings that pretend that their fine-grained hierarchical distinctions convey any useful information.
AM: Why the noun “asylum” in the title of the book? It’s provocative and suggestive.
PG: I like book titles that are at once evocative and descriptive. It’s hard to beat Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, for example. There is of course an asylum for the criminally insane that figures in the plot of Legal Asylum, but the book’s title also aims to evoke the sheltered craziness that passes for legal education at the state law school where the story takes place.
AM: Thanks again for the interview. Any closing comments about how readers can find your work?
PG: It was a pleasure. Readers can buy the book at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, and Shop ABA.
Part Three: Allen Mendenhall Interviews Mark Zunac about his new edition, “Literature and the Conservative Ideal”
In Academia, America, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, British Literature, Conservatism, Fiction, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Liberalism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Postmodernism, Scholarship, Teaching, The Academy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on November 23, 2016 at 6:45 am
Mark Zunac
Mark Zunac is associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Editor of Literature and the Conservative Ideal, he researches revolution, writing, and the rise of intellectual conservatism in Britain following the French Revolution. He received his Ph.D. from Marquette University in 2008.
AM: James Seaton is a good friend. He and I began corresponding roughly a decade ago, and we first met in person about six years ago at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta, Michigan. His edition of Santayana had just come out with Yale University Press, and he was there to give a lecture on it. Seaton opens his essay for your volume with the following sentence: “Neither Henry James nor George Santayana were active participants in the politics of their time.” Don’t you think there’s something inherently conservative in this very distance from one’s own cultural and political moment? I’m thinking of Kirk’s admonition that conservatism is about the rejection of ideology.
MZ: It was actually James Seaton who, some time ago, in an innocuous but characteristically trenchant review of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism published in The Weekly Standard, provided for me the framework for thinking deeply about literature’s authenticity and its exploitation by postmodern criticism. I very regrettably lacked a lot of exposure to more traditional approaches to literature and, while I instinctively eschewed the most obscure theoretics, I remained unaware that the critic could do more than scamper around the edges of territory claimed by Jürgen Habermas and Paul de Man. To Kirk’s point, I think I had always rejected the ideology – I just wasn’t fully aware that there might be a viable alternative to it.
I do think there is something to be said for one’s distance from the cultural and political moment. The conservative disposition doesn’t really lend itself well to the act of politics, and this is perhaps why conservatives have been consistently rolled in nearly every public debate over culture for the last half-century. Being always on the defensive and lacking the language to explain the intuitive – Lee Harris calls this the “visceral code” – puts the conservative at a rhetorical, if not moral, disadvantage. For me, the everyday analogy to Seaton’s statement is the conservative tendency to focus on the admittedly prosaic underpinnings of civic life – largely the familial and the associational. As we are witnessing with the ever-increasing presence of the state in the daily lives of individuals, the absence of participation in politics by those whose disposition might be called “conservative” is conspicuous.
AM: I remember where I was when I read Seaton’s review that you mention. In his book Cultural Conservatism, Political Liberalism, in the context of remarks about E. D. Hirsch, he says that “’[c]ultural literacy’ would be particularly valuable for those now termed the ‘culturally disadvantaged’ in achieving individual economic mobility,” and he adds that the “spread of cultural literacy would also promote political democracy, since discussion can only take place on the basis of at least some shared assumptions and common vocabulary.” Do you agree with this?
MZ: I would agree wholeheartedly. There has been much invested, however, in facilitating a kind of cultural amnesia. Some of it has been inadvertent, but much of it has not. As reflexive relativism has taken hold, any semblance of commonality has been superseded by historical moral equivalencies. Consequently, we are left with little more than recriminations and collective guilt. Western culture perhaps has much to atone for, but past transgressions cannot be the sole basis for self-definition. There just may be certain shared values and traditions that could serve as the basis for a common culture and a source of pride, but it is often more expedient to assign particular beliefs and behaviors to discrete and easily identifiable groups.
This may be cynical, but I think there is much to be gained politically – the recent election notwithstanding – from the veneration of difference. I’m not sure the individual is or ever has been truly dignified when human worth is either enhanced or degraded by how that individual is situated during any given cultural moment. It is difficult to argue that this is not what is happening now, at least to some degree. Perhaps by expanding our very narrow conceptions of diversity, we would have a much greater chance of constructive dialogue, which might then enact a more conscientious effort to promote this notion of cultural literacy. The deliberately false promise that multiculturalism is the surest path to unity and a common, mutual understanding has generated much confusion and it has, against its fundamental premise, created self-defeating forms of tribalism. The multiculturalist program has sought to validate rather than engage and evaluate global cultures, and its underside has been the raw factionalizing that consumes so much public discourse.
AM: It is interesting and bothersome to see how multiculturalism has degenerated into a monolithic orthodoxy, which is by its very form and function against diversity, not for it. I wonder what would happen if we exposed more students to political theory in the vein of Michael Polanyi of F. A. Hayek, thinkers whose intelligence and theoretical sophistication have to be taken seriously by those who study literary theory and criticism. The forms of devolution and subsidiarity advocated by these men might provide challenges to the prevailing consensus among many students and teachers in English departments about the kind of ideas motivating certain figures on the right.
MZ: I do believe that radical multiculturalism militates against diversity, and in this regard the university has failed in one of its stated core missions. The failure to cultivate an inclusive campus community has been made evident not only by civil disobedience and other visible forms of unrest, but also by the imposition of predictable bureaucratic programs aimed at solving problems that the administrative bureaucracy has itself made worse. Obsessing about difference and instituting special privileges for certain groups, and then pontificating about equality just seems disingenuous. Current narratives on race as well as the devaluing of our common culture have been toxic for the university, as a lot of students, I think rightly, feel as though justice in this context is punitive. If there is any palpable hostility to the learning process or to intellectual climate on today’s typical campus, perhaps we as the academy should look inward rather than to historical prejudices that we can conveniently circle back to after having tried to address all of them through administrative means and a thoroughly politicized curriculum.
Moreover, as politics has regrettably become a proxy for character, even reasoned opposition to progressive ideals, particularly on the campus, is delegitimized and discounted as having been informed by sinister motives. I argue in the book that too often conservative ideas are either ignored by their critics or deliberately distorted so as to identify an enemy against which the social justice war may be fought. There is ample evidence of this, and I hesitate to identify any one event or episode to draw conclusions. Yet I recently find myself coming back to a video passed along to me that recorded the Young Americas Foundation at the University of Kansas being aggressively confronted at one of their meetings by protesters. What strikes me in that video is that the person behind the camera seems to be officiating the ensuing debate, commenting on and critiquing every gesture or utterance made by members of the YAF group, essentially flagging them for violations of rules to which they never agreed. The concept of civil discourse is applied so lopsidedly that only one set of ideas is allowed to prevail. I think this is by design, even though, as you suggest, a serious consideration of conservative ideas and philosophies would broaden minds and better prepare us all for the responsibilities of civic life.
AM: Do you worry about our habits of reading in our technological and digital age? I recall Harold Bloom once saying that we all read “against the clock.” Readers of the Bible, he says, read with more urgency than, say, readers of Shakespeare, but there’s always the problem of the limitations of time: Life just isn’t long enough for us to read everything worth reading. Thinking about that has sometimes led me into a feeling of existential angst, especially after I spent a few years on a self-imposed reading diet that included the consumption of a canonical work from Western Civilization per week. When I finished the program each year, I was distraught at how little I’d actually read. I’m concerned that we’re wasting a lot of precious time reading texts that just aren’t that fulfilling or edifying.
MZ: The reading project you describe is an ambitious one. I merely committed to reading a page of Waugh every day this year, and I couldn’t even do that. On a related note, a current depressing irony for me is that I have volume I of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time sitting on my shelf, and I have spent precious minutes staring at it, wondering if I could actually ever get through all 7 volumes. There are a lot of reasons for our society’s detachment from literature, and reading has definitely been made very difficult in the digital age. The sheer amount of available information is daunting, and it has led to a frenetic search for the quick, easy, and thereby ungratifying.
I think, though, that while the internet has shifted our ability to focus and perhaps even changed how our brains process information, it has also caused a loss of discipline. It appeals to human nature to swipe to the next task if something becomes intellectually difficult, and this is made almost compulsory by technology, especially for those young people who have been immersed in it almost literally from day 1. Maybe I’m just projecting, though. I struggle with it as well, and I also find myself often wondering, in this day and age of always needing to be busy, how much we all might benefit from slowing down and reading a little Austen.
AM: This has been a fun interview for me. One last question: are you working on any projects right now that readers should know about?
MZ: Thanks, Allen, for the opportunity to talk with you. I have enjoyed it as well. I have shifted my research focus a bit from literature toward the state of the university more generally. Editing Literature and the Conservative Ideal prompted much thought about the future of higher education and the increasing importance of broad-mindedness on the campus.
I am currently editing a collection for Rowman & Littlefield tentatively titled Remaking the University: Liberal Learning, the West, and the Revival of American Higher Education. I am also in discussions to publish a separate volume entitled Defending the West: Finding Culture and Common Humanity in the Postmodern Age. Both books seek to build on a long tradition of support for free expression and the pursuit of truth as well as Western culture’s influence on both. After our discussion, though, I am realizing I might need to just be doing a bit more reading.
AM: We all need that. Thanks for the interview, Mark.
Part Two: Allen Mendenhall Interviews Mark Zunac about his new edition, “Literature and the Conservative Ideal”
In Academia, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, British Literature, Conservatism, Fiction, Humanities, liberal arts, Liberalism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Politics, Scholarship, Teaching, The Academy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on November 16, 2016 at 7:00 amMark Zunac
Mark Zunac is associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Editor of Literature and the Conservative Ideal, he researches revolution, writing, and the rise of intellectual conservatism in Britain following the French Revolution. He received his Ph.D. from Marquette University in 2008.
AM: In your essay “Conservatism, Liberal Education, and the Promise of the Humanities,” one of two essays you contributed to the edition, you state, “There is a broader philosophical conflict at hand between the very principle of academic freedom, encompassing the rights of individuals to engage in scholarly inquiry and espouse contrarian views, and policies currently governing campus discourse.” What do you mean by this?
MZ: Quite simply, the state of campus discourse is, by its very essence, incompatible with the rights of faculty – and students themselves – to engage in the search for truth. When conduct, particularly verbal conduct, can be reported and penalized through mechanisms designed to “protect” students, we might sense that something much greater is afoot. If such fundamental rights as speech and due process are curtailed – as I feel they have systematically been on today’s campus – then we are no longer interested in educating an informed and responsible citizenry. The great irony in this is that even as faculty and administrators maintain the conceit that students must confront dissonant viewpoints, the viewpoints that qualify are limited and selective. Therefore, I think the fear of faculty to approach teaching or research from a conservative angle, or even to introduce conservative arguments in the context of intellectual debate, is very real. Some things are better left unsaid, especially when tenure, promotion, or funding are on the line.
On the other hand, the concept of academic freedom has been so narrowed as to apply almost exclusively to members of the faculty. The dearth of conservative faculty in the humanities and social sciences makes it difficult to determine the degree to which this privilege might be invoked as a defense against charges of offending progressive student sensibilities. The case of Marquette professor John McAdams that I discuss in the book is not promising. It is fortuitous that the demands of students to be protected from certain ideas are often in harmony with the ideological makeup of the faculty. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the freedom claimed by a largely progressive professoriate is not afforded to the student body, which labors more under the onerous regulations governing speech and conduct.
Aside from being able to report the utterance of harmful words, students have very little stake in academic freedom’s fundamental premise, and their rights have ceased to be part of the conversation on classroom conduct. I don’t count the imposition of trigger warnings and the creation of safe spaces as really striking a blow for freedom or the intellectual pursuit. Faculty might be able to proselytize under the banner of academic freedom, but students have little recourse when scholarly inquiry descends into partisan demagoguery. It speaks volumes that today’s campus will often charge conservative student groups for added security at their events in anticipation of disruption and unrest. The campus in this case is refusing to guarantee what is essentially the safety of free expression. It has been said that the greatest beneficiaries of a political and ideological monoculture are conservative students, who are consistently challenged to refine their arguments and confront opposing viewpoints. But that’s perhaps little compensation when those arguments are preemptively dismissed and delegitimized by an institution unwilling to entertain them. Some critics have been ambivalent about either the extent of curricular politicization that exists on today’s campus or its impact on students. I don’t think either can be overstated.
AM: The question I hear a lot—and in different contexts—is “what can be done?” Do you have an answer to that question in light of what you’ve just said?
MZ: To answer that important question I would probably qualify some rejections to otherwise bad ideas. Federal funding should not be tied to the amount of money students can be expected to earn upon graduation. However, at some point students must be expected to see some material returns from the meteoric rise of tuition and administrative costs. We have seen an intense regulatory push directed exclusively at for-profit colleges over the last eight years. The question of value in higher education is a good one, and perhaps it shouldn’t only be asked of these for-profits.
Also, while the idea has been floated, I do not believe in any kind of affirmative action for conservative professors. However, departments conspicuously lacking in conservative faculty members might take steps to acknowledge the intellectual costs of such insularity and promote viewpoint diversity, a concept propounded by groups like Heterodox Academy, the National Association of Scholars, and the John William Pope Center. These are not conservative organizations but rather ones that care deeply about the state of discourse on today’s campus and how it adversely affects learning.
Furthermore, while we must heed Michael Oakeshott’s warning not to “suspend conversationality for a politicizing counterrevolution,” a more robust rejection of identity’s preeminent place in in the classroom might restore some dignity to the learning process. It is not atypical for composition students, for example, to be assigned anthologies that are promoted as much for the racial, ethnic, and gender identifications of their authors as the dynamism of their prose or the enduring legacy of their ideas. No doubt many of the essays in these collections are worth modeling and are deserving of study, but not because of predetermined genetic variables. Having students read essays by Max Beerbohm, John Ruskin, or Evelyn Waugh – all the while ignoring their “privilege” – might inadvertently put the focus of the class on prose style, rhetoric, and stylistic precision.
Finally, it should remain up to students to choose their colleges carefully. There are a lot of alternative institutions that have placed the pursuit of knowledge above all else. The market for this kind of place is strong, and those charged with administering higher education could do very well to take notice.
AM: At one point in the book you mention a “multicultural canon.” I’m interested in this phrase because I’m interested in canonicity and the idea that there are certain works that are more influential and important than others within a given tradition, and even that certain traditions may produce works that are more influential and important than works produced by other traditions. You often here people dismiss the idea of a canon but urge the reading of certain texts. It seems that any support for a program of reading necessarily entails a view of the canon, however different that might be from prevailing consensus. At a time when English departments are struggling to maintain stable and uniform curricula, and the notion of a canon has become unpopular, what does it mean for a work to be canonical?
MZ: While the idea of a canon has become unpopular, it still exists in every department that embraces the multicultural ethos of the university. And it is equally as narrow as the one it sought to replace and far more intransigent. Like so many revolutions, the spirit of canon reform was swept away by a radical zeal to destroy foundations necessary for, in this case, literature’s survival as part of a college curriculum. To me, literature is universal and it has the potential to speak to a common humanity. In short, it should be valued for its own sake and for its cultural status as an expression of artistic endeavor. It has intrinsic value, and its success lies in part on historical continuity – on its relationship to what came before it. In the book, I mention T.S. Eliot’s “historical sense,” the idea that tradition must be defended against forces that would destroy it out of hand. I think that in many ways this has happened. Today’s literature has become so balkanized as to render impossible the continuance of any sort of shared cultural value system. To that point, I would also argue that an English curriculum consisting predominantly of identity-based literature (African-American, Native American, Women’s, Latinx, etc.) can in no real way be considered diverse. As it is, those who might turn to literature for the truth it tells, for its contemplation of ideas, or for its linguistic execution have been in retreat.
I’m not sure anyone would make the case that the traditional canon was never fluid or that it hasn’t contained glaring omissions. It has, and they should be rectified. But whereas critics in the past denounced the traditional canon as the product of “institutional tastemaking,” today’s demands for courses that aim to represent some unique, singular experience are guilty of the same thing. A canon is necessarily foundational. It isn’t, however, necessarily exclusionary, and an inclusive canon should be exactly that. This is a very long way of saying that a canonical work might be one that embodies an idea or an epoch, or one that masterfully portrays the psychological depth of a character in crisis. There are many divergent opinions as to this question, and I don’t consider myself an authority. But my vision is this: surely others have treated the same subjects as, say, Edith Wharton, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow. We just have to be able to say that few have perhaps done it better. The reader may take his (or her) pick as to what authors deserve special consideration. The point is that the literature’s function and its success as a work of art are what we consider first and foremost. I think that case can be made, and reinforcing the idea of great literature – asserting its very existence – may benefit our discipline greatly.
AM: If a student were to ask you for 10 writers you believed every person must read before he or she dies, who would they be?
MZ: This is a question every literature person longs for, and at the risk of inevitably short-changing some, here is my list, in absolutely no particular order: Ernest Hemingway, George Eliot, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, Saul Bellow, and Vladamir Nabakov.
Part Three coming soon….
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 