Smith's Essay Research Articles

Women in the Writings of Mari Sandoz ed. by Renée M. Laegreid and Shannon D. Smith

Reviewed by: Women in the Writings of Mari Sandoz ed. by Renée M. Laegreid and Shannon D. Smith Nicole Gray Renée M. Laegreid and Shannon D. Smith, eds., Women in the Writings of Mari Sandoz. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2019. 168 pp. Paper, $30; e-book, $30. If ever there was a time to acquaint or reacquaint yourself with the writings of Mari Sandoz, this is it. Fortunately, the first volume of a new Sandoz Studies series has recently been published. Edited and with an introduction by Renée M. Laegreid and Shannon D. Smith, the collection draws together critical essays, photographs, and short or excerpted writings by Sandoz herself under the topic and title Women in the Writings of Mari Sandoz. John Wunder's foreword notes that the series was meant in part to be a publication outlet for papers related to the activities of the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society, and several of the essays included in this volume emerged from presentations given at Society meetings. Members of the Society will doubtless be delighted at the success of this first production, but the content of the collection is likely to appeal to anyone interested in Sandoz or topics in western American literature. Some of the collection's most compelling essays are by the editors themselves. Laegreid's opening piece, whose title, "These Were the Sandhills Women," is a spin on Sandoz's own These Were the Sioux, provides a historical overview of Anglo European women in the settlement and mythos of the Sandhills region. Smith's essay, a companion piece to an excerpt from "What the Sioux Taught Me," situates Sandoz's work within the historiography of Native American studies. Both make clear the ways in which Sandoz was ahead of her time in transcending common stereotypes of women in the West and of Native American culture and history. The collection also includes one of Sandoz's earliest published works, a story titled "The Vine." Following and reflecting on this story is an essay [End Page 396] by Lisa Pollard on the kinds of gendered pressure—metaphorical and actual—exerted by drought. An excerpt from Sandoz's Slogum House is paired with a republished Great Plains Quarterly essay by Glenda Riley exploring Sandoz's decision to cast her "will-to-power individual" in that novel as a woman, the vicious and despicable Gulla Slogum (70). An essay by Jillian Wenburg on how Sandoz's female characters fit into or challenge gender binaries and expectations concludes the volume. Multiple contributors note that Sandoz did not embrace feminism, and the collection does not go out of its way to engage more recent deconstructions of gender identity or explorations of sexuality. Instead the focus is on Sandoz's defiance of the common tropes of her time and her insistence on creating distinct, complex, and often difficult female characters. The selections show the breadth of her depictions, from the homesick Meda ("The Vine") to Gulla and her noble daughter Libby to Sandoz's own encounters with Native American women as she was growing up. These characters and figures respond to the landscape and challenges of the Plains in diverse ways, and the accompanying essays help readers place them in biographical, historical, and historiographical contexts. Several essays feature excerpts from Sandoz's letters that disclose her wit and personality as well as her battles with publishers and, occasionally, readers. One of the collection's many likable features is its structure. Reproductions of photographs of Sandoz and other Sandhills figures and scenes add engaging breaks between the chapters. Captions connect the images to Sandoz, to the Sandhills, or to the essays that follow. The pairing of Sandoz pieces with critical essays makes the book feel like a dialogue, allowing readers to evaluate the virtues and shortcomings of the essays with direct reference to primary sources. The fine precision of Sandoz's descriptions of people, weather, and landscape combine with the historical and literary analyses and the photographs to create an animated, three-dimensional sense of the Sandhills region. The collection is about women in the writings of Sandoz, but ultimately its most captivating picture is of Sandoz herself, one of the most...

Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe ed. by Wolfram Koeppe (review).

Reviewed by: Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe ed. by Wolfram Koeppe Mark A. Meadow (bio) Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe Edited by Wolfram Koeppe. New Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2019. Pp. 308. This exhibition catalog, richly illustrated and furnished with nine brief but significant essays, accompanied the exhibition of the same name held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, 2019–2020. The focus of Making Marvels is technology, as revealed in the 154 entries, which include Renaissance and Baroque mathematical and musical instruments, automata, tools, finely crafted jewelry, furniture, turned ivory, cups, and other vessels. The title itself, which gives an equal emphasis to the production, or "making," of these objects as well as to their reception, the "marvel" that they elicited from their original owners and from scholars and museum-goers today, makes the book's double imperative evident—to demonstrate that these objects exemplify an important period of technological innovation and are visually stunning artifacts worthy of our aesthetic attention. The paired terms "science" and "splendor" in the subtitle similarly signal a conceptual duality at work in Making Marvels: on the one hand, the book advances a claim that the creation and use of these objects and instruments generated knowledge, and on the other, it acknowledges that they also served as resplendent signs of princely power and prestige. The catalog is divided into four sections, each containing one or more essays accompanied by catalog entries. In the first section, "Setting the Standard: Forging a Culture of Magnificence," Wolfram Koeppe, the exhibition curator and the catalog's editor, frames this exhibition of technology within the contexts of the "marvelous" and courtly "magnificence." Many of these objects certainly were showpieces that served to glorify their collectors, and many were clearly designed as clever amusements, but as Koeppe and the other contributors to the catalog make clear, this is only one facet of their value, which should also be measured in the advancement of technologies, including metallurgy and metalworking, alchemy, glass-making, horology, mensuration, and many others. The second section, "The Kunstkammer: A Haven of Splendor & Study," is devoted to examining the Kunstkammer (the German term for museums in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often called "curiosity cabinets" in English) as a locus of technology. In his contribution, Dirk Syndram provides a brief history of princely Kunstkammern, particularly those in German-speaking territories. Pamela H. Smith's essay offers some important insights on the lessons to be drawn from the exhibition as a whole; especially salient is her observation that the exigencies of courtly statecraft and display required the amalgamation of knowledge and practice from which modern [End Page 1241] science proceeded. Paulus Rainer takes up the place of foreign rarities in Kunstkammern, correctly noting their perceived utility in advancing knowledge of the world. Florian Thaddäus Bayer's essay is devoted to the Esterházy Kunstkammer, the only early modern collection to survive intact in its original location. The third section, "Princely Education & Entertainment," shifts attention from the collections in general to particular classes of objects, each exemplifying the meeting of pure and applied knowledge that typifies courtly interest in technology. Peter Plassmeyer provides a concise history of the sponsorship of European princely courts as patrons and consumers of useful mathematical instruments such as astrolabes, sundials, and astronomical clocks. Finely crafted artifacts made of ivory turned on the lathe are the topic of Noam Andrews's essay, which he rightly explains as instantiations not just of craft skills but also of applied geometry. Lathework was a particular passion of prince-practitioners, as was alchemy, the subject of Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie's essay. As she summarizes, the quest for transmuting base metals into gold was certainly a motivation for princes, but alchemy was also embraced for its practicality in producing medicines and other useful chemical products. The catalog culminates with a section on "Clocks & Automata: The Art of Technological Development," which contains a single essay by Koeppe. As the pinnacle of period craft skills and technology, these were Kunstkammer treasures and the stars of Making Marvels. More emphatically than in his introduction, here...

The Religion of Confrontation: Concepts, Violence, and Scholarship

AbstractJonathan Z. Smith's essay “Religion, Religions, Religious” discovers the invention of religion as a generic term in colonial adventure. The move is notable: religion is born in violence, but it can be repurposed as a term without determinate content by which to compare cases. Smith's origin story is to empower scholars to pick up “religion” as they do the terms “language” and “culture.” There are reasons, however, not only to revisit the story but also to ask whether it is not missing a move—whether the reclamation of a violent term requires more from the scholar than Smith's structuralist reversal, his reinvention of colonialist invention. I compare Smith's resourcefulness with the conquistadors to Edward Said's critique of Orientalism. Both thinkers are asking questions of violence, invention, and use. Said more squarely addresses problems of thinking with and beyond guilty concepts. Yet Smith's story is an important counterpoint. Together, these thinkers help the humanities lay ground for a more expansive and self-conscious theoretical future.

Narrative Communication or Communicating Literature?

Narrative Communication or Communicating Literature? Stefan Iversen (bio) The invitation to partake in this special issue of Style called for a "considered opinion and scholarly analysis" of James Phelan's target essay. This is quite the daunting task for several reasons. Not only is the essay in itself rich, challenging core concepts of narrative theory, suggesting innovative solutions to methodological problems while offering eye-opening close readings; it also brings with it long traditions of critical thinking while pointing, as its subtitle explicates, towards the future, hinting at the contours of a position still being developed. I happily accept the invitation because it gives me an opportunity to return what I have learned from Phelan, an important favor in the sciences of humanities (as well as anywhere else): the attempt to try to understand. Anyone who has had any scholarly or personal contact with Phelan is sure to have experienced his tenacious yet gentle insistence on understanding literary texts, theoretical texts, theoretical concepts, positions, purposes, and people. During the last twenty years, Phelan has, based on a core set of assumptions and definitions, developed a comprehensive and influential critical apparatus, rethinking existing concepts as well as coining new insights on topics central in particular to the study of narrative fiction: the recursive relationships between reader, text, and audiences; progression; tension/instability; unreliability; the mimetic/thematic/synthetic; fictionality; and ethics of telling/the ethics of the told, to name just some of the ideas with most impact. The target essay's thoughts on character narration and on improbabilities add to this impressive body of work, even as the general ambition of the essay exceeds this adding of further concepts. The essay takes aim at a concept at the heart of narrative theory, namely, what is commonly referred to as the narrative communication model. My comments retain "authors resources audiences" in the following center on Phelan's rethinking of this model through the suggestion of what he calls the author–resources–audience (ARA) chart. More specifically, I zoom in on the question: what type of cultural artifacts does the chart apply to? [End Page 88] The chart is presented as covering "Constants and Variables in Narrative Communication" (Phelan, "Authors" 7), with the last two words offering a form of delimitation of its zone of interest or relevance. It is about a subset of communication, labeled narrative communication, and thus it appears to cast a fairly wide net in the seas of genres and modes; the types of texts included in "narrative communication" would range from fragmentary, spontaneous acts of verbal interaction to everyday storytelling to journalism to well-formed historical accounts to highly complex pieces of fictionalized discourse. However, the overall project framing the ARA chart is referred to as a "rhetorical poetics" or a "rhetorical poetics of narrative", which seems to signal a more restricted corpus. A poetics is typically concerned with understanding poetry or the poetic, interested not in the dynamics of declaring what happened but in the dynamics of declaring "what may happen," to borrow Aristotle's formulation (qtd. in Phelan, "Authors" 14). So is the ARA chart an attempt to explain any form of communication that narrates, or is it an attempt to explain how (the somewhat smaller dataset of) narrative fiction works? This question, I believe, is key to understanding what Phelan calls "the explanatory power" of the chart and furthermore, key to understanding a more general aspect of what Phelan's position as such is contributing to our thinking about narrative and to our thinking about literary art. I will approach an answer by comparing the definition and principles, upon which the chart rests, to ideas and concerns, voiced by Barbara Herrnstein Smith's essay "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories," originally published in Critical Inquiry's now canonical 1980 issue on narrative. Acknowledging that origins have a tendency to fade into the obscurity of the "dark backward and abysm of time" (1.2.49), as Shakespeare's Prospero puts it in The Tempest, Phelan begins his essay by referring to Shakespeare's play as well as to Phelan's own Narrative as Rhetoric, with the latter serving as the place of origin for what has become known...

“How drie a Cinder this world is”: Dissociation of Sensibility Redux

Although T.S. Eliot's phrase “dissociation of sensibility,” applied to the changes in poetry during the seventeenth century, made a stir when he introduced it in the review essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in 1921, it draws less attention now, and seems never to have been adequately explained. Since Eliot's claims are, in part, historical, it makes sense to consider the most historically significant changes occurring during the seventeenth century. It is during this period that the Reformation culminates and its effects become permanently established. Several recent studies of the Reformation by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, and Carlos M.N. Eire provide clues about how the religious and social cataclysm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have affected the poetic imagination. James Smith's classic essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” offers a way of analyzing the figurative language of seventeenth-century poetry in order to grasp the impact of the religious change. The investigations by Taylor, Gregory, and Eire into the dynamic of the reforming tendency, beginning in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Scotist and nominalist intellectual underpinnings of the Reformation, prove to be pertinent to Eliot's insight regarding seventeenth-century poetry. The growth of individualism, personal anxiety about religious choice, and materialism portend a general movement towards secularization and influence the way poets see the world. Dissociation of sensibility can thus be understood as a result of the effect of the religious and social dislocations of the Reformation in the realm of poetry.

The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory ed. by Bradley R. Clampitt

Reviewed by: The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory ed. by Bradley R. Clampitt Rowan Faye Steineker The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory. Edited and with an introduction by Bradley R. Clampitt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. vii + 184 pp. Map, list of contributors, index. $25.00 paper. The eight essays included in The Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory provide a window into complex military, political, and social issues that do not fit easily within the traditional narrative of the American Civil War. Inhabitants of the sovereign tribal nations in Indian Territory, including tribal citizens, slaves, and Euro-American settlers, serve as the focal point of the volume. Thus, the collection marks a significant departure from the typical focus on the Union and the Confederacy in Civil War scholarship. It joins other recent contributed volumes, including Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States, edited by Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, and Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West, edited by Virginia Scharff, in exploring the impact of the Civil War in the trans-Mississippi West. The slim volume also complements When the Wolf Came, Mary Jane Warde's comprehensive narrative of the Civil War in Indian Territory. Collectively, the essays in the volume demonstrate that while the battles in Indian Territory did not significantly affect the military outcome, the distinct sovereign status of the Five Tribes complicated the larger political and social landscape of the Civil War era. For instance, the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations negotiated an alliance with the Confederacy because the terms of the treaty offered them better opportunities to protect their political autonomy than previous relations with the federal government had afforded. Essays by Clarissa Confer and Linda Reese also highlight just how disruptive the conflict and reconstruction efforts proved for the diverse population of Indian Territory, particularly women and newly emancipated slaves. Contributing to growing scholarship on Civil War memory and commemoration, Amanda Cobb-Greetham and White Edward's contributions illuminate the unique and complicated legacies of the American Civil War in Oklahoma. F. Todd Smith's essay, "'The Most Destitute' People in Indian Territory: The Wichita Agency Tribes and the Civil War" skillfully chronicles the ways in which smaller Native groups in Indian Territory suffered devastating losses in the midst of the larger conflict. Further essays covering the Plains Indian tribes would have been a welcome addition to the book. More rigorous ethnohistorical research and interpretations would have strengthened some of the individual essays. For instance, Christopher B. Bean's "Who Defines a Nation?: Reconstruction in Indian Territory" relies almost exclusively on secondary sources and does not adequately problematize previous scholars' assumptions. In particular, the emphasis on political factionalism and a "traditional" versus "progressive" binary obscures the political, cultural, and racial diversity that characterize the Five Tribes. As a whole, however, the volume effectively explores the complex history of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Indian Territory with a particular emphasis on the diverse experiences of various Native communities. It will appeal broadly to students and scholars of Native American history and Civil War history. [End Page 147] Rowan Faye Steineker Department of History and Geography University of Central Oklahoma Copyright © 2017 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Writing the Contemporary Encounter in the Museum: Dorothy Cross and Trove at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014–15*

Writing the Contemporary Encounter in the Museum:Dorothy Cross and Trove at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2014–15* Niamh NicGhabhann (bio) In his exploration of contemporaneity and its discontents Pedro Erber argues that "in brief, to be contemporary is to (in a subtle, particular manner) refuse contemporaneity." Drawing on the theories of Marc Augé, Giorgio Agamben, and others, Erber parses contemporaneity in the context of an assumed shared globalized condition. The different registers of contemporaneity discussed by Erber include the condition of "coevalness" (after Johannes Fabian), based on the "dialogic interaction between human beings" and on "time shared though action, interaction, and communication" rather than on a "mere chronological relationship." Complicating this position, however, is the concept of "allochronism"—referring to the construction of distance following the period of "coevalness"—that is created through processes of transcribing, writing, and analysis. This conceptualization suggests a collapsing of clear boundaries of the contemporary and an increased emphasis on the imprecise contours of what can constitute "contemporary" experience or contemporaneity. These challenges lead Erber, drawing on the field of anthropological research, to consider Agamben's proposal in his essay "What Is the Contemporary" (2008) that "those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it." The idea that contemporaneity [End Page 244] requires a level of critical distance is further explored by Erber in relation to shared existence across different times and different epochs. Quoting Naoki Sakai, Erber argues that this condition can be based on "participating in the same discourse" or "sharing the same discursive register," opening the possibility of contemporaneity between objects or ideas from different points on a chronological spectrum.1 These different perspectives on the condition of, obstacles to, and potential for contemporaneity provide a useful frame through which to consider Trove by Dorothy Cross, an exhibition held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) from 3 December 2014 to 8 March 2015.2 In order to create Trove, Cross selected a series of objects from a range of Irish museums and arranged them in conversation with each other in the gallery space. Cross's curatorial practice in Trove reflected Terry Smith's conceptualization of curating as "making contemporaneity visible," but also challenged the limitations of the visible through her exploration of time, allusion, and humor across the exhibition.3 Cross's exploration of time and her use of museum objects as materials complicate the idea of contemporary art and her own position as a contemporary artist, resisting (and perhaps refusing) classification in a way that reflects Agamben's proposal and responds to Sakai and Erber's contention about possible conditions of contemporaneity. This essay therefore examines the idea of the contemporary as constructed by and refracted through Trove. It first describes the exhibition itself, a contemporary show curated by a contemporary artist based on chronologically wide-ranging historic objects encompassing ammonites of the Jurassic age, with an estimated age of 200 million years, to work produced in more recent years, such as the 1997 portrait of Louise Bourgeois by photographer Annie Leibovitz. The essay proposes interpretations of the exhibition and the curatorial choices made by Cross, and the practice of curating the exhibition is examined as an extension of her engagement with ideas [End Page 245] of time, Surrealist juxtaposition, and contemporaneity. Trove is then positioned within the context of Cross's broader installation-based and site-specific works. The perspectives on contemporaneity outlined by Erber are valuable in the context of the use of the designation "contemporary" within the sphere of visual art. The concepts of coevalness, allochronism, critical distance, and shared discourses can be used here to negotiate the ideas of the contemporary as employed within art-critical or art-historical discourse. Terry Smith has outlined the growth and formation of the subject of contemporary art as a specific field of art-historical investigation.4 Smith's essay is helpful not only in parsing the different definitions of the term contemporary, but also in the way that he describes the use of...

The Margaret Chase Smith Essay: Can Maine Prosper? Leadership, Research, and Partnership for Economic Growth

The Margaret Chase Smith Essay: Can Maine Prosper? Leadership, Research, and Partnership for Economic Growth

Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times ed. by Melissa A. McEuen, Thomas H. Appleton Jr.

Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times. Edited by Melissa A. McEuen and Thomas H. Appleton Jr. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. [xvi], 432. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4453-9; cloth, $89.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4452-2.) How have women shaped Kentucky history? This well-edited collection of seventeen essays provides an answer in biographical form, profiling twenty-three notable women. Their stories span three centuries and encompass an ambitious range of topics, including life, marriage and divorce, public widowhood, Civil War Unionism, suffrage, social settlements, art and literature, civil rights, politics, and entrepreneurship. The legacy of Kentucky's past, consciousness of regional and border-state identity, and tension that women faced in reconciling family and societal expectations with individual ambition are recurring themes in collection's essays. Craig Thompson Friend's opening essay introduces the female frontier and pioneering women as frames for volume (p. 10). Friend challenges gentle tamer paradigm often used in histories of pioneering women with an intersectional approach addressing privilege and oppression in an essay that contrasts lives of Shawnee warrior-chief Nonhelema Hokolesqua, Jemima Boone Callaway, and Matilda Lewis Threlkeld, an enslaved woman. Many of subsequent essays profile elite white women who were indeed pioneers in challenging gender constraints, although they often held tight to privileges and prejudices. Angela Esco Elder's essay about Emilie Todd Helm and her sister, Mary Todd Lincoln, contrasts Helm's influential seventy-year career as Confederate widow with her older sister's unpopular public persona as a diva of grief (p. 84). While Helm fulfilled expectations for public mourning and facilitated national reconciliation among whites, Elder argues that Helm also helped legitimate concepts of Confederate nationhood and Lost Cause. Likewise, Andrea S. Watkins's essay about diarists Frances Dallam Peter and Josie Underwood highlights Kentucky's deep divisions during Civil War. Both Peter and Underwood families remained staunchly despite pressure from neighbors and occupying troops, but as Watkins shows, Unionist was not synonymous with abolitionist. Peter rejected abolitionism, and Underwoods were slaveholders. The Clay and Breckinridge families, both politically prominent during antebellum era, produced daughters who played key roles in Progressive-era reforms and who feature prominently in this collection. William Kuby's essay on Mary Jane Warfield Clay reveals economic vulnerability of nineteenth-century women during marriage and after divorce. Mary Jane Smith's essay on Warfield Clay's daughter, Laura Clay, highlights tensions between gender and race in movement for woman suffrage. Lindsey Apple's essay persuasively argues that Madeline McDowell Breckinridge (a worthy heir to her great-grand-father, Henry Clay) used her political skills to promote an ambitious reform agenda that included education, children's rights, and woman suffrage. However, like most southern Progressives, Breckinridge devoted little public attention to racial segregation. …

Margaret Chase Smith Essay: Maine and Climate Change: The View from Greenland

Margaret Chase Smith Essay: Maine and Climate Change: The View from Greenland

The Explanatory Critic:

The Explanatory Critic:

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Against provincialism: Australian-American connections 1900–2000

This article offers an analysis and critique of Terry Smith's well-known essay “The Provincialism Problem”. Against Smith's argument for the “subservience” of Australian art vis-a-vis American, we sketch a long history of Australian-American artistic interaction throughout the twentieth century, and indeed the involvement of many highly-placed Australian artists in American art. We suggest that from a “contemporary” perspective not only does a whole new history of Australian art come into view but we can see that the “provincialism problem” never existed.

Hartz Is Dead. Long Live Hartz

Hartz Is Dead. Long Live Hartz François Furstenberg (bio) Mark Hulliung , ed. The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered: The Contested Legacy of Louis Hartz. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2010. 296 pp. Notes and index. $34.95. What accounts for the staying power of Louis Hartz' The Liberal Tradition in America, a book continually in print since its publication in 1955? A dazzling account of American political ideology written by a brilliant young academic, his career tragically cut short by mental illness, The Liberal Tradition condensed the ideas of a generation of postwar left-wing anticommunist intellectuals. Though its flaws are manifest, it remains on graduate reading lists (in departments of political science at least) and continues to shape scholarly debates—as the volume under review testifies. Many people lump the so-called consensus historians together, but this is a mistake, for Hartz, unlike many of his contemporaries, was no friend to American liberalism. His argument was a virtuoso performance but simple in conception: The United States was "a liberal society, lacking feudalism and therefore socialism and governed by an irrational Lockianism." Because Americans had been "born equal," no dialectical spark ever ignited History's motor. American history—if one can even call it that—was just a long, essentially uninterrupted unfolding of the liberal seed. Hartz had come not to praise American liberalism, nor even to bury it; he came to lament "the psychic heritage of a nation 'born equal'" whose "colossal liberal absolutism" entailed "the death by atrophy of the philosophic impulse": a crushing intellectual tradition "reducing insight to platitude, transforming philosophy into the complacent after-dinner speech" of "a thousand chamber of commerce epigoni." But liberalism's hegemony in America was not just an aesthetic or intellectual problem for Hartz; it was a political and perhaps even existential one: "the tyrannical force of Lockian sentiment" had exerted so great a "compulsive power" on the United States "that it has posed a threat to liberty itself."1 Such a no-holds-barred assault on U.S. political thought could not have been further from the triumphal, celebratory liberalism of a Daniel Boorstin or the muscular, defensive liberalism of an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Only Richard Hofstadter came close, but even he—scholar of paranoia, social Darwinism, [End Page 319] and reactionary populism—never plunged as deep into the darkness of the American psyche as Hartz. Collections of essays are notoriously hard to summarize, and this one is no exception. As if to taunt the reviewer, the editor even remarks that these essays "represent a plurality of points of view and do not lend themselves to a definitive conclusion" (p. 267). Indeed. Some themes, and perhaps even a political project, nevertheless emerge from the book's eight chapters. Mark Hulliung, editor of this volume and historian of liberalism in France and America, opens with an essay that paints Hartz as a New Dealer whose early work "set out to deflate 'the myth of laissez-faire,'" and whose "central preoccupation"—in Hartz' words—was "the role of the state in attaining a free society" (p. 14). The insight provides fascinating perspective into Hartz' critique of American liberalism, particularly given the Cold War context during which he wrote. The excellent essay is marred, however, by its insistence on glorifying its hero by building up an army of "cold war liberals," all of them apparently adherents of simplistic and monolithic ideas, for Hartz to slay. Conceding that Hartz' perspective has severe limitations, including its inattention to race, religion, and ethnicity, Hulliung closes with a Churchillian call-to-arms: "Whether there is and will be a liberal tradition in America," he writes, "is our burden, our calling, and our quest" (p. 46). This quest—to lay the intellectual groundwork for a renewed American liberalism—is what ties these essays together. It certainly motivates Rogers Smith's essay. Smith is an eminent political scientist whose magisterial account of American political culture challenged Hartz by showing that liberalism was never the sole intellectual tradition in U.S. political culture, but that it always existed alongside several others, not the least of which he calls an "ascriptive" tradition of racial, ethnic, and gender exclusion.2 Although Smith...

Introduction

Introduction

Heroes of Hell Hole Swamp: Photographs of South Carolina Midwives by Hansel Mieth and W. Eugene Smith

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 1940, Life photographer Hansel Mieth traveled to Hell Hole Swamp, an impoverished and predominantly African American community in the Low country of South Carolina, where she photographed doctors, nurses, midwives, and patients in a remote rural clinic. The published photo-essay, Birth Control: South Carolina Uses It for Public Health (1940), combined two of Mieth's passions: medical progress and race relations. She had envisioned the story as a profile of Pat Clark, the African American nurse who was her guide and became her friend. But when she saw how the editors selected, laid out, and captioned her photographs, she was appalled: There was the picture of Pat delivering the baby, but it showed her back and it could have been any nurse. All the pictures with feeling had been carefully culled out and only the ones kept in that showed in statistical order the job the State of South Carolina was doing. How it had found a way to control its runaway Negro population through control of As a working-class immigrant woman, Mieth often felt like an outsider at Life, but this assignment revealed the depth of her isolation and filled her with anger and guilt: are cutting the heart out of everything I do. I am sick of it. I am sick of the whole damned job ... They can shove their rotten magazine ... Those people in hell-hole swamp [sic] are real people ... I had promised that I would stand up for And now this. Now I'm nothing but white shit to them. (1) Eleven years later, W. Eugene Smith traveled to the same place on a similar assignment for Life, but his 1951 photo-essay Nurse Midwife told a very different story. Most of his photographs feature Maude Callen, an African American Episcopal missionary nurse who ran a clinic in her Pineville, South Carolina, home, where patients sometimes arrived in the middle of the night after traveling by oxcart on unpaved roads. Nurse Midwife made Callen famous and generated $27,000 in contributions for the construction of a modern clinic, where she worked until her retirement in 1971. The notoriously self-critical Smith considered it his most successful essay. He later wrote about Callen: Tears cut deeply and hot through me. No story could translate justly the life depth of this wonderful, patient, directional woman who is my subject--and I love her, do love her with a respect I hold for almost no one. Humble, I am in the presence of this simple, complex, positive greatness; on and on in her self appointed rounds beyond paid-for duty. Years later, he recalled, There were three things about the midwife story that were important: its medical significance; the fact that it was a story of a great human being; and third, I was fighting racism without ever making racism the point. I had long crusaded against racism, not by hitting people over the head with a hammer, but by compassionate understanding, presenting something that people could learn from, so they could make up their own minds. (2) Mieth and Smith shared a belief that photography could bring social change. They viewed Pat Clark and Maude Callen as heroic healers whose stories would inspire racial understanding. Both photographers shot powerful images of the most visceral human experiences: birth, death, sexuality, and disease. But Clark is barely visible in Mieth's Birth Control, while Callen is the star of Smith's Nurse Midwife. Smith's essay has been celebrated by photo historians and journalists, while Mieth's has quietly faded into obscurity. The stories behind the photo-essays, however, suggest that both photographers tried to challenge stereotypical and demeaning images of African Americans. Why did Mieth fail to achieve her vision in 1940? And why did Smith succeed in 1951? Although these questions have no simple answers, they promise to deepen our understanding of Mieth and Smith, the practices of photojournalism, and the visual construction of race and gender. …

Emerson for the twenty-first century: global perspectives on an American icon

Barry Tharaud, ed. Emerson for Twenty-first Century: Global Perspectives on an American Icon. Newark: U Delaware P, 2010. 610 pages. Breaking mold of seeing American within its national context, Barry Tharaud has collected twenty essays that examine Emerson from a transnational point of view. Tharaud observes that essay collection's global approach has recently become more common in literary studies (2). Though majority of writers of collection's essays hail from universities in America, one teaches in Germany while Tharaud teaches in Istanbul, as well as editing and publishing international journal Nineteenth-Century Prose. Tharaud sorts essays in collection into four categories: Emerson, Europe and Beyond; Emerson and Science; Emerson Thinking; and Emerson and Activism. Tharaud's own essay begins collection, concerning Emerson's influence on a variety of writers, especially Paul Bowles. Essays by Stephen L. Tanner and TS. McMillin then discuss Emerson's English Traits (1856) as a transatlantic work. Adding a French element, Wesley T. Mott juxtaposes Emerson's 1845 Boston lectures on 'The Uses of Great Men against portraits of such men that LouisPhilippe commissioned and displayed in Boston. Susan L. Dunston takes Emerson studies beyond Europe, looking at Emerson's relation to Persian poetry from thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Similarly, Steve Adisasmito-Smith broadens Emerson's intellectual context beyond West, to India rather than Persia, and focuses mainly on Emerson's early reading of Hindu works. Adisasmito-Smith points out that Ghandhi regarded Emerson as an influence on him: Did any ideas or images from Indian texts, perhaps transformed, facilitate Ghandhi's appropriation of them? (131). Jan Stievermann ends first section of collection with an essay boldly arguing against labeling Emerson an American writer who bolsters the campaign for a distinctively national culture and literature (165). Instead, Stievermann examines Emerson's use of German romanticism to show that Emerson should be seen as an exemplar of American literature's unparalleled receptivity to traditions from across world (189). Michael P. Branch begins collection's section on science with an examination of Emerson's early natural history lectures, as influenced by scientists such as Kepler, Galileo, Pythagoras, Goethe, and Newton. Branch explains his purpose as largely pedagogical, for he hopes understanding Emerson's early lectures will lead students to better grasp Nature (1836). Branka Arsic moves beyond Branch's study of Emerson and physical science to psychology, discussing Emerson's notions about dreams that were influenced by Novalis. David M. Robinson moves beyond psychology into other social sciences while exploring Emerson's lecture tour in England during 1847-48. During his tour, Emerson was shocked by living conditions of English working class, which caused him to re-examine his ideas (288). Robinson discusses influence of physical scientists Emerson talked with during his tour, such as Owen and Faraday, on Emerson's view of social conditions. Robinson seeks to build a bridge between scholarship on Emerson and science, and recent scholarship on his antislavery writings of 1840s and 1850s (285). In her essay, Laura Dassow Walls handles a related topic, examining specific influence of Faraday on Emerson, for Emerson applies physics to morality regarding slavery and Civil War. The third section of collection, which focuses on Emerson's philosophy, starts with Gayle L. Smith's essay. Smith explores how Emerson's Nature is shaped by its author's European journey, study of science, and personal exploration of nature. …

Organic Shrapnel: Affect and Aesthetics in September 11 Fiction

Smith's essay examines history, politics, and literary form in September 11 fiction. It begins with the contention that the traditionally conceived relationship between trauma and form poses a problem for the analysis of September 11 fiction. It is often posited that traumatic events produce formal changes in narrative strategies that reflect transformations in historical and political thinking, but many 9/11 novels, like Don DeLillo's Falling Man, do not demonstrate significant formal departures from pre-9/11 works. Others, like Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and IncrediblyClose, offer gestures toward formal innovation but ultimately support sentiments that are tied to a regressive view of history. Yet in turning to a less commonly considered work of September 11 fiction, Laird Hunt's experimental noir The Exquisite, the essay offers another way of thinking about the role of form in relation to political change. Hunt's work shows that formal innovations—in this case, a particularly strange use of ecological metaphor—need not merely reflect historical ruptures, but can also be understood to produce bodily affects that are themselves constitutive of altered attitudes toward the present.

Rephrasing the Question: A Response to Smith

Christian Smith's (2007) essay, Why Christianity Works, is a provocative attempt to explain persistence of religion. His argument employs critical real ism and sociological phenomenology in explaining centrality of emotions to Christianity. He writes the belief content of Christian faith gives rise to cer tain practices and experiences,-particularly emotional ones-that many people find highly engaging, compelling, persuasive, and convincing (p. 167). Smith's article is an important attempt at addressing issues within socio logical study of religion. First, he recognizes that quantitative research is ulti mately unable to explain persistence of religion (p. 167). He also states that religion is likely to continue to persist for foreseeable future (p. 177). These two points demonstrate need for studies such as his: Christianity continues to exert strong influence on people despite opposition from various directions. Attempts to justify religion through what might be termed harder science have proven insufficient. By employing a slightly softer approach, Smith hopes to both supplement this previous research while addressing a lack of attention to sig nificance of emotion for religious practice and tradition (p. 169). While acknowledging these strengths, there are three points at which I think Smith's argument should be developed further: (1) he does not define Christianity nor justify his conclusion that Christianity works; (2) he needs to explain relationship between cognition and emotion, and how Christianity is transmitted to non-believers; and (3) he needs to explain his notion of human nature. I will conclude with a discussion of theological issues in Smith's work.

Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914

‘Germany was not an island’ (p. 1). But the idea that Germany's history should be studied, understood, interpreted and evaluated primarly within the framework of a nation state imagined as an entity with well-defined boundaries has dominated much of the historiography on the German Empire. The editors acknowledge that it has never been the sole way of viewing the period between 1871 and 1914, but argue convincingly that it is time for a new approach which places Germany firmly in its global context. They suggest a further innovation: rather than calling this approach ‘global’ or ‘international’, the term ‘transnational’ is designed to embrace the totality of links between individuals inside and outside the Empire's borders. It provides an umbrella for a view of the Empire from a number of perspectives, which include the history of the first globalization as well as questions raised by post-colonial studies. The volume of essays which resulted from this methodological starting point is an excellent first survey of terrain which could be covered in greater detail in the future. It contains empirical case studies and more theoretical or historiographical articles. The latter group comprises Woodruff B. Smith's essay on ‘Weltpolitik’, ‘Lebensraum’, modernization and globalization; Michael Geyer's plea for a comparative history beyond the comparative history of national narratives of modernization with reference to Japan and Germany; and Helmut Walser Smith's survey of the many boundaries submerged in a history which posits national boundaries as all-important.