Updated Reading List : What’s Left Out of the Canon but Worked Within the Harlem Renaissance

3-5 Secondary Sources:

  1. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. Taylor and Francis, 2002.
  2. DuCille, Ann. “Phallus(Ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical ‘I.’” Callaloo, vol. 16, no. 3, 1993, pp. 559–573. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2932256.
  3. Ezell, Margaret. Writing Women’s Literary History. Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.
  4. Gates, Henry Louis. “’What’s Love Got to Do with It?’: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom.” New Literary History, vol. 18, no. 2, 1987, pp. 345-62. JSTOR, doi: 2307/468733.
  5. Hyot, Eric. “On Periodization.” On Literary Worlds.” Oxford UP, 2012.

 

Journal:

Callaloo (An African American Literature and Criticism Journal that focuses more on moderating canon inclusion, see DuCille’s piece above.)

Primary Sources:

  1. Fauset, Jessie Redmon. Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral. Beacon, 1990.
  2. Huges, Langston and Zora Neale Hurston. Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life. Harper Perennial, 1991.
  3. Lewis, David Levering, editor. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader. Penguin, 1994.
  4. Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. Negro Universities Press, 1969.
  5. Toomer, Jean. Cane. 3rd, Norton, 2011.

Keywords:

  1. Canon Formation
  2. Category Definition v. Reality
  3. Harlem Renaissance

 

Explanatory Essay:

For this assignment, I met with Professors Harris and Seiler because they have a lot of experience in the era I am fascinated by at this moment and would like to explore. I am interested in canon formation in general and the authors who do not fit the defined characteristics and subjects that have been accepted as that era’s hallmarks. While this can be applied to any time in literary history, the Harlem Renaissance is uniquely interesting for a few reasons. I am interested not only in canon as formulated by elites of the general literary establishment, but also the elites within nontraditional literary movements. Women played a huge role in the Harlem Renaissance movement through working with periodicals, writing, and bringing other artists together to those gatherings a current audience knows were sources of amazing inspiration and the germ for works we study today. The Harlem Renaissance was recent enough to provide a decent record of these women’s contributions, and I want to know how they were simultaneously accepted in the social scene and excluded from the list of names associated with this time’s work. What were their interactions with their male peers, who sometimes served as colleagues at publications? How did so many women get defined by one scandal, such as Larsen’s possible later-career plagiarism, as justification for not acknowledging their work’s quality? What do authors like Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jessie Redmane Fauset’s works say about other issues and themes than we see in black male narratives that traditionally make up the definition for that movement. I am starting here with some theory about canon formation from newer, black critics and more recursive ones. From there, I anticipate reading some of the movement’s own authors’ writing about the politics of the time along with their fictional work and its breadth of subject matter and emotional exploration. I want to explore the way other authors might change our understanding of the period and who was active within it. The formulation of the canon affects the writing of generations who study it, so what effect might a reformulation have on future writers reading and studying this period today?

 

Update:

My blog posts, particularly my examination of Henry Louis Gates’ piece, led me to add Ann DuCille’s article to my Secondary source list. I think that comparing their conflict to that of similarly gender-based racial disagreements of the Harlem Renaissance is interesting. One of my primary texts, Mule Bone is a joint effort by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and the edition includes essays and letters that show their arguments and tension I think allowed for some of the exclusion of black women’s writing from the initial pattern. It also speaks to the record of women’s deep involvement in the literary elite, which contradicts their initial representation in works remembered from that time. I include Nella Larsen and Jessie Redmon Fauset as two women who are still lagging in notoriety compared to Hurston, but that were similarly integral to the Harlem Renaissance elite. Jean Toomer’s Cane is an extremely woman-centric novel, and Toomer’s groundbreaking formal style and content which was very queer and sexual, was not met with common acceptance at its inception and has grown to prominence today. The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader is a great source for shorter works and essays from key Harlem Renaissance figures and those who were overshadowed. I want to explore the themes, tropes, and literary strategies of these fictional works to identify what textual elements suppressed them and what led some to rise later, as well as the case study presented by the relationship between Hurston and Hughes.

Updated: Reading List for Norse Religion, Sagas, and Mythology

Secondary Texts:

 

  1. Littleton, C. Scott. “The Comparative Indo-European Mythology of Georges Dumézil”. Journal of the Folklore Institute. Vol 1, No. 3. Dec. 1964, pp.147-166. JSTOR

 

  1. Baker, Peter S. Introduction to Old English. Wiley-Blackwell: Feb. 2012. Print.

 

  1. Hill, Thomas D. Sources of Wisdom: Old English and Early Medieval Latin Studies. University of Toronto: 2007.

 

  1. Byock, Jesse L. Viking Age Iceland. Penguin UK: Feb. 2001. Print

 

  1. Byock, Jesse L. Feud in the Icelandic Saga. UCLA Press: 1982. Print.

 

  1. Jakobsson, Armann, and Jakobsson, Sverrir. The Routledge Research Companion to Medieval Icelandic Sagas. Routledge: 2017. Print.

 

 

Journal: Vikings and Medieval Scandinavia. Brepols. http://vms.asnc.cam.ac.uk

 

Keywords: Translation theory, Vikings, Norse, Saga

 

In order to study the primary texts that I will use for my thesis, I need to first be able to read them. Since I cannot begin to decipher ancient Icelandic or Old English, I must be working from translations alone. Professor Skalak pointed out that I need to consider translation theory since I cannot close read the original text. Baker’s Intro to Old English will help me with Beowulf, and I’m going to look in the academic journal for help with the original sagas. Then, I want to break down the sagas and find common tropes or story patterns. Jesse Byock is an expert and a great writer, and I’ve read him before. I’m going to study at least two of Byock’s books. Part of the reason I am so interested by the Nordic gods is because they look nothing like the Judeo-Christian-Muslim monotheistic god, or even the gods and goddesses of the other pagan religions. They are immoral and mortal.  They lie, have sex, fight with each other, and die. So, a question I had to frame my research is a more complex version of “what’s the point?” If the gods and goddesses, weren’t created for a didactic purpose, or to show people that believed in them how to live, what purpose did they serve? What real life application came out of the pantheon? What was the nature of mythology, and how did it form? What about the Christianization of the Scandinavian countries? How did the one religion give way into the other, and what was the effect of this transformation on the mythology, folklore, and legend? Depending on what direction my interest takes, I may also want to study shamanism. I will probably also look at the conceptions of masculinity, since it was such a “macho” society. Finally, I am considering re-watching the series Vikings on HBO for a modern-day recreation of the lives of the Vikings. Both myself and my professor of Nordic Mythology last semester found this series to be astonishingly accurate in its portrayal of the religion and shamanism. Sometimes I can tell which primary source the show-makers are getting their information from. I may study some of the film theory that we have been reading recently to apply this to my thesis.

 

 

Primary Texts:

 

  1. Translated by Seamus Heaney. Norton Anthology of English Literature, 9th ed., vol. A, Norton, 2012. pp. 41-108.
  1. The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, translated by Jesse L. Byock. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Print.
  1. The Saga of Grettir the Strong, translated by George A. Hight. London: Dent, 1965. Print.
  2. The Saga of Erik the Red, translated by J. Sephton, Icelandic Saga Database, Sveinbjorn Thordarson (ed.), URL = <http://www.sagadb.org/eiriks_saga_rauda.en>
  3. Egil’s Saga, translated by W. C. Green, Icelandic Saga Database, Sveinbjorn Thordarson (ed.), URL = <http://www.sagadb.org/egils_saga.en>
  4. The Story of Burnt Njal: From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga, translated by George W. Dasent. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1911.

 

 

I am taking a different approach to thesis research than I was planning on. I felt as though my early decision to study Beowulf was starting to limit my scope of texts to read, because I was trying to select texts that I thought Beowulf was most identifiable with. This severely limited my thesis topic, because I was not sure how everything was going to relate and connect to one another. So instead, I decided to consult Dr. Christine Schott, who is professor of English at Erskine College, and who was recommended to me by Professor Skalak. She suggested that I read Grettir’s Saga, and pointed out a relation to Beowulf, which was my original plan. I decided to broaden my scope of research and include sagas that I might previously have overlooked, since they aren’t clearly connected to Beowulf. Instead of starting with a plan and finding books to fit that plan, I want to read a whole range of sagas, particularly fornaldarsaga (legendary sagas), and islendingasogur (family sagas). I am going to start reading these sagas soon, since I have no particular direction or things I am looking for (yet). I want to read the legendary and family stories early on and find patterns, similarities, differences, or things I find otherwise strange, and not think (yet) about their connections to Beowulf. After I read all five sagas, some of which are pretty short, I’ll start planning my argument, or something new that I bring to the scholarly discussion. I think this will broaden my horizons of research, as well as train me to adapt to changes in my writing process.

 

 

Updated: On Salvadoran Diaspora, the Salvadoran Civil War, and Resistance: a reading list

(i) Secondary & Theoretical Texts

  1. Poets and Prophets of the Resistance: Intellectuals and the Origins of El Salvador’s Civil War (2017) Joaquín M. Chávez.
    Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago and Jeffrey L. Gould. “Memories of La Matanza: The Political and Cultural Consequences of 1932.” To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932. (2008)
  2.  U.S. Central Americans: Reconstructing Memories, Struggles, and Communities of Resistance (2017) ed. Karina O Alvarado; Alicia Ivonne Estrada; Ester E. Hernández.
  3.  Arias, Arturo. “Central American-Americans: Invisibility, Power and Representation in the US Latino World.” Latino Studies (2003): 1.1.
  4. Rodriguez, Ana Patricia “Diasporic Reparations: Repairing the Social Imaginaries of Central America in the Twenty-First CenturyStudies in 20th & 21st Century Literature (2013):. 37: 2.3
    Rodriguez, Ana Patricia. “’Departamento 15′: Salvadoran Transnational Migration and Narration.” Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational Histories, Literatures and Cultures. University of Texas Press, 2009
  5. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options.
    Cárdenas, Maritza/ “From Epicentros to Fault Lines: Rewriting Central America from the Diaspora,” Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: Vol. 37: Iss. 2, Article 8. 2013.
    (ii) Academic Journal
    Latino Studies.
    ed. Lourdes Torres. Palgrave Macmillan UK, ISSN: 1476-3435 (Print) 1476-3443 (Online)

(iii) Key terms
Central American Civil Wars, Salvadoran Diaspora, Transnational Migration

(iv) Primary Texts

Primary texts:

  1. Javier Zamora, Unaccompanied. Copper Canyon Press, 2017.
  2. Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Matria, Black Lawrence Press, 2017.
  3. William Archila, The Art of Exile. Bilingual Review Press, 2007.
  4. Yesika Salgado, Corazon. Not a Cult Press, 2017.
  5. Javier Zamora, Selected Poems: “El Salvador,” “Saguaros,” Poetry Foundation.
  6. Yesika Salgado, Selected Poems: “Translation,” “Brown Girl,” “On The Good Days,” YouTube.
  7. The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the U.S. ed. Leticia Hernández-Linares, Rubén Martínez, and Héctor Tobar. Tia Chucha Press/Northwestern University Press, 2017.
  8. Kalina: Theatre Under My Skin, Contemporary Salvadoran Poetry / Teatro bajo mi piel, poesía salvadoreña contemporanea. ed. Alexandra Lytton Regalado. Editorial Kalina, 2014.
  9. Manlio Argueta, Un Dia en La Vida. (1980) UCA Editores.

My research process thus far in compiling this list has built upon the following logic: If I am setting out to write a thesis focusing on literature of Salvadoran diaspora, then I cannot do so without also thinking critically about immigration. And if I am to discuss Salvadoran immigration in my thesis, then I cannot do so without centering the 1980’s Civil War as a main cause of influxes of Salvadoran refugees fleeing El Salvador to immigrate to the U.S. Joaquín M. Chavez’s book will provide a more contextual background of both general and specifically literary resistance relating to the events leading up the Salvadoran civil war. Otherwise, the next three sources on my list are texts that provide contextual understandings and summaries of how the twentieth century civil wars in Central America have shaped the Central American diaspora in the United States. I spoke with Professor Vazquez about these sources, with the goal of narrowing down to select texts that will enable me to understand the current critical/scholarly conversation on “Central American-Americans.” I have also specifically selected scholars whose work engages directly with literature or who have otherwise done research or written about Central American literature, both in homeland and diaspora. As I browse through journal issues of Latino Studies I also aim to maintain my focus on what critics are saying about Latino literature as a whole, or aspects/regions that I could study in comparison to Central American/Salvadoran literature.

Ultimately, I want to study the ways in which Salvadoran literature is informed by historical contexts including legacies of colonization and U.S. neoliberal intervention, which is precisely where Mignolo’s writings on decoloniality in Latin America will help provide a more theoretical backing to my work. Further, I want to specifically examine how Salvadoran writers use story as a means of resistance in opposition to wider systemic oppressive frameworks. Some of the questions I am beginning to raise are: How do writers of Salvadoran origin use their literary work to engage with and comment politically on key political events in the twentieth century (specifically, the 1932 uprising and the 1980’s civil war) and their aftermath? How do Salvadoran writers use story as a means of resistance, and what, specifically, do their stories resist? What happens to Salvadoran writing when it moves beyond Salvadoran borders, and what does this writing reveal?

Research update 10/23/17:

The updated changes and additions to my reading list are motivated primarily by my efforts to continuously refine my research topic. As I expand my knowledge on Salvadoran literature, I have been conscious of selecting sources that are as close and specific to the questions I seek to address. I aim to focus on Salvadoran poets writing in the United States and examine the ways in which their writing reflects resistance and/or resilience. As previously mentioned in my original post, in order to do this, I know that my research and analysis needs to maintain a consciousness for the conditions of migration and the related historical contexts. For this reason, I have sought out sources that directly discuss Salvadoran migration and Salvadoran literature in diaspora.

While Joaquín M. Chavez’s book provides a comprehensive analysis of the events and movements that led up to the Salvadoran Civil War, I realized that what I was most interested in was studying the catalyzing event: the 1932 indigenous uprising; so, instead of reading Chavez’s work, I selected a critical article that specifically analyzes the effects of that revolution in regard to the way it is remembered in Salvadoran communities. Rather than trying to understand all the complexities of the twentieth century historical contexts (an impossible task, given my research time frame), I am making efforts to select specific significant events, so as to use my understanding of those events to shape my analysis of their lasting impact. I swapped out one of Ana Patricia Rodriguez’s articles on Central American migration for one that focuses more specifically on Salvadoran migration to the United States. Finally, when I began to read through Walter Mignolo’s book, I realized that although his theoretical framework on decoloniality will be useful, it is not as relevant to the specific questions I am raising regarding diaspora. I intend to keep his work in mind and refer to it if and when applicable, but I opted to swap this source out in order to focus on one that deals more critically with what it means to write from Central American diaspora.

My primary texts feature the poetry collections of four key Salvadoran poets writing in the United States (Zamora, Regalado, Archila and Salgado), as well as a few additional poems from two of them(Zamora and Salgado). I have included two videos of Salgado’s work as a poet and performer in U.S. poetry slam communities. Her performances of her poems add a new layer of analysis, particularly in considering her impact in popularizing Salvadoran narratives via her powerful social media presence. In addition to these works, two other primary texts are anthologies of Central American writing and Salvadoran writing respectively. The only work on my list written by a “homeland” Salvadoran writer is Manlio Argueta’s Un Dia en La Vida and I am most interested in its representation of U.S. intervention in the Salvadoran Civil War.

Updated: POW Literature and Trauma Theory

Secondary or Theoretical Works (3-5)

Danilei, Yael, Nigel S. Rodley and Lars Weisaeth. International Responses to Traumatic Stress. Baywood Publishing, 1996.

During, Simon. Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2005.

Pederson, Joshua. “Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory.” Narrative, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 333-353.

Perez, Rober. “Guantanamo and the Logic of Colonialism: The Deportation of Enemy Indians and Enemy Combatants.” Radical Philosophy Review, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 25-47.

Primary Sources (4-8)

 Brown, Ed. A Soldier’s Fortune and Other Poems: Moving Past PTSD and Creating A Fun-loving Life. Agio Publishing House, 2014.

Falkoff, Mark. Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. University of Iowa Press, 2007.

Lange, Dorothea. Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese Internment. W.W. Norton, 2006.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf, 1987.

Morrison, Toni. Home. Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

Okada, John. No-No Boy. Combined Asian American Resource Project, 1976.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Penguin Books, 2006.

Academic Journal (1)

 Journal of International Relations and Foreign Policy  

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

Far-reaching Keywords/Key terms (1-3)

  1. Colonialism
  2. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder/Trauma Theory
  3. Prisoner of war literature

Description of Reading List

I started this list with a book that covers a very broad topic, and then narrowed those general topics down as I went further into my research. I located these sources by posing two basic questions to myself: “how did colonialism help to shape a culture of conquest, and therefore, a culture of legal imprisonment that carries into the modern day – specifically from WWII and on?” and “how does literature that comes from prisoners of war differ from literature published by peripheral sources who merely report on war?”.

To answer these questions, I started with a book discussing cultural studies as a theoretical lens that would be applicable to the culture of war, both in the past and present, and how cultures develop based upon the way they engage with other cultures across the world. I wanted to use this blanket term as my theoretical lens so that I can accurately understand the way a culture, both in its contemporary and its past sense, can contribute to the development of war, and how other aspects of culture (media, the public sphere, etc.) contribute to the progression and continuation of war.

From there, I decided to focus on colonialism theory in relation to modern day examples of war and imprisonment to better define the effects of colonialism, and the way colonialism can lead to war, imprisonment, and empires. I chose an article that encompasses this idea of colonialism, while also applying it to Guantanamo Bay to give it a more contemporary edge – and one that starts delving further into my interests with prisoner of war literature. I then chose two articles that deal directly with the responses to trauma and stress – specifically that trauma and stress as it is derived from war and unfair imprisonment. One focuses more on the way literature acts as a point of relief from trauma, which will help to lead into some of my primary sources about prisoner of war poetry and inmate literature. The other focuses on how the world views traumatic stress, and how trauma theory (later coined post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD) are accepted or pushed back on in society.

Updated Reading List Description

 My reading list hasn’t shifting very much in terms of theoretical or secondary works, but I’ve made some definite headway in terms of some primary sources I plan on engaging with to progress my ideas about trauma theory and PTSD. Although I placed a lot of emphasis on colonialism and how it affected the current culture of imprisonment (from WWII and on), I’ve been dealing with a lot of primary texts that deal with reports of trauma, stress and homelessness (as in, a feeling of a lack of a true “home”) to play further into the side of PTSD and the affects of trauma after war, imprisonment, etc. I’ve had some really great conversations with Professor Seiler about the primary texts that would be appropriate to incorporate in my work, and how they can further my understanding of how these traumatic events take action on the minds and self-awareness of victims of trauma.

Both Poems from Guantanamo Bay and A Solider’s Fortune and Other Poems show how literature has helped to aid in the recovery of people experiencing PTSD, while Beloved, Home, No-No Boy and Ceremony explain the aftermath of trauma in someone’s life, in terms of hallucinations, alcoholism, self-destructive behavior, isolation from friends and family, and heightened anxiety. I also added a book (Impounded) that details the lives of the Japanese during the time of internment in the US in hopes of adding another main event in US history to my realm, and to place more emphasis on imprisonment and PTSD as well. Although I’m still adding and deleting things from my primary source list, I feel as though the books I’ve chosen to focus on shed light on some of the main touch-points of trauma theory and PTSD that I want to focus on.

In addition to choosing my primary sources, I also found a new academic journal I plan to work with that is more relevant to the ideas I want to focus on in my research. The articles in this journal focus on the history of colonialism, starting in as early as the 10th century and into the current times, which aligns perfectly with what I want to focus on in terms of how colonialism spawned the ideas of war and imprisonment, and how those practices have continued on into the modern day.

 

 

Updated Reading List: East Asian Literature Through a Feminist Lens

Updated: East Asian Literature Through a Feminist Lens

(I) Secondary/ Theoretical Works:

  1. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, edited by Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel, 2011.
  2. Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature, Edited by Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton, 2016
  3. The Woman’s Hand: Gender & Theory in Japanese Women’s Writing, by Paul Gordon Schalow, 1997.
  4. The Princess, the Witch, and the Fireside: Yanagi Miwa’s Uncanny Restaging of Fairy Tales, by Mayako Murai, 2013.
  5. “The Uncanny”, Sigmund Freud

 

(II) Academic Journals:

  1. The Journal of Japanese Studies
  2. AATJ Journal: Japanese Language and Literature

 

(III) Key Words:

  1. Gender
  2. Japanese/Literature
  3. Post-colonial
  4. Sexuality
  5. Psyche
  6. Grotesque

 

(IV) Primary Sources:

  1. The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa, 1990 & 1991
  2. The Gangster we Are All Looking For, Le Thi Diem Thuy, 2003
  3. Revenge, Yoko Ogawa, 1998
  4. The House Keeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa, 2003

 

(V) Updated Paragraph:

This updated version of my reading list has omitted some of the sources I previously had. I needed to narrow down my journals and some of my theoretical works, and I stuck with the most relevant ones that include information of Japanese literature and East Asian studies. Although most of my research is centered on Japan, I would also like to branch out to other countries in East Asia such as Vietnam. One of my primary sources, the Gangster We Are All Looking For is written by a Vietnamese female author through the eyes of a young Vietnamese girl who has recently immigrated to the United States. This book centers on her growing up as a young Vietnamese girl and what this means for her in her life as she grows into maturity. My other primary texts are all by the same author whom originally inspired me to pursue this topic, Yoko Ogawa. She is a Japanese writer who has an ability to capture the female protagonist and their desire for romance and the grotesque and uncanny qualities that go along with it. By using multiple books by the same author I hope to find many parallel themes that can help to develop my thesis of the female body and the perception of it through a grotesque lens.

Updated: Food in Crisis – Late Victorian, Turn of the Century, WWI, and WWII British and American Working- and Middle-Class Food, Viewed through Contemporary Cookbooks and Food Articles, Personal Accounts, and Autobiographical Fiction

Secondary Works

    1. Bentley, Amy. A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age. A Cultural History of Food, vol 6. Gen eds. Fabio Parsecoli and Peter Scholliers. Bloomsbury, 2016.
    2. Bruegel, Martin. A Cultural History of Food in the Age of Empire. A Cultural History of Food, vol 5. Gen eds. Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers. Bloomsbury, 2016.
    3. Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Reader. Routledge, 2013. 3rd Print.
    4. Freedgood, Elaine. “Introduction: Reading Things.” The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning about the Victorian Novel. The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
    5. Grigson, Jane. Food with the Famous. Hollen Street Press, 1979.
    6. Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Collins, 1986.
    7. David, Elizabeth. Spices, Salts, and Aromatics in the English Kitchen.
    8. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Massimo Montanari, and Albert Sonnenfeld. Food: A Culinary History. Columbia University Press, 2013. Web. 

Academic Journal

  1. Food, Culture, & Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research. Published quarterly. Routledge. Run by The Association for the Study of Food and Society.

Primary Sources

  1. “Artificial Milk.” The Food Journal, v. 3. 1873. J.M. Johnson & Sons. 23-25.
  2. Beeton, Mrs. (Isabella Mary). Beeton’s Book of Household Management. 1861. Oxford University Press, 2000.
  3. “Domestic Hygeine, No. 3: Drains.” The Food Journal, v. 3. 1873. J.M. Johnson & Sons. 10-12.
  4. Eating for Victory: Healthy Home Front Cooking on War Rations. Foreword by Jill Norman. 2007.
  5. John Burnett, ed. The Annals of Labour: Autobiographies of British working-class people 1820-1920. Indiana University Press, 1974. Notable sections: Gabriel Tschumi, chef, p. 193-202, and Lilian Westall and Lavinia Swainbank, house-maids, p. 214-226.
  6. Lynch, Reah Jeannette. The Win-the-War Cookery Book. St. Louis County Unit, 1918.
  7. Powell, Margaret. Below Stairs. St. Martin’s Press, 1968.
  8. Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Harper Collins, 1947.
  9. Wescott, Alice M. “Pure Food Laws.” The American Journal of Nursing. 13.4. 1913. 274-277.

Keywords and Key Terms

  1. “Food culture/society”
  2. “_____ British Cookbooks” (insert Victorian, Edwardian, turn of the century, WWI, 1940s/WWII)
  3. “Food history”
  4. “Gastronomy”
  5. “late nineteenth and early twentieth century British food”
  6. “Cuisine biography, food accounts”

Description:

I compiled this list based on: two syllabi provided by my aunt, Professor Alison Anrather at Wagner College, who teaches classes on food history and society; stumbling upon books in the food studies section of the library; typing my keywords into Jumpstart; and a conversation with Prof. Su. Because I am not yet sure what portion of the world or segment of history I want to focus on in my thesis – though I am leaning towards Western Europe and perhaps focusing on nineteenth century English food consumption – I intentionally kept my list over-arching and broad. Food: A Culinary History, Food and Culture: A Reader, and A Cultural History of Food will act as sturdy frameworks to contextualize the gradually narrowing scope of my research. Spices, Salts, and Aromatics in the English Kitchen and Food with the Famous will offer more detailed explorations of English-oriented food research and literary traditions of food writing.

Many questions currently frame my inquiry, some academic (in an effort to gear my food hobby towards a researchable topic), and some originating from pure intellectual curiosity. Why has food become the central focus of societies, and why would I argue that it has? What historical events – wars, famines – or traditions signify that cultures operate around the production of food and the social aspect of eating it? What were the food “norms” in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Early Modern Period, and the past two hundred years, and how do all those varying approaches to or treatments of food illuminate the state of a culture’s economy, commerce, or government? In summary, how does history support the notion that food is a cultural signifier? I realize the scope of history that I am exploring is extremely wide but I am excited to investigate my questions and hopefully emerge with a more detailed, exclusionary (in that it will provide specificity, not a limited perspective) focus for my thesis.

Update:

I am now focusing on mostly British (and some American) food consumption in the late Victorian, Turn of the Century, WWI, and WWII eras. My guiding questions are: How do cookbooks reflect morphing American and British cultural attitudes toward food, as affected by political or economic challenges, national crises, or technological advancements such as the industrial revolution? How does a close reading of these cookbooks expose era-specific anxieties relating to food and resources? I want to examine food as affected by major infrastructural changes, for instance the industrial revolution, WWI, and WWII. Those three moments in history saw a transformation in the way citizens were forced to view food consumption. Though I wish to mainly focus on Britain, because they experienced more dire shortages than America during the world wars and because they are the makers of the Victorian era, I have chosen one American cookbook and novel for lack of British examples.

I have selected two volumes from the Cultural History collection that explore adaptations in nineteenth and twentieth century food attitudes. I added the Freedgood article because Prof. Kersh suggested it to me as an ideology to apply to food in the literature and nonfiction works I am examining; the article focuses on using objects in novels as evidence of cultural anxieties. Shapiro’s book applies directly to my interest in domesticity and home cooking during the Turn of the Century.

Many of the revisions I made to my reading list resulted from wading through primary texts and allowing them to inform the trajectory of my research. I discovered that there were more WWI cookbooks than I could ever study in a thesis, and by exposing myself to 1930s and 1950s materials along with my chosen time periods, I learned that the 1930s and 1950s did not interest me. I am more compelled by infrastructural crises expressed in the home kitchen (i.e. alterations made during the industrial revolution, sanitation and poverty challenges at the Turn of the Century, food shortages during WWI and WWII). The Food Journal provides context for Victorian anxieties over food being discussed in the 1870s, and most of its articles focus on production and sanitation concerns (hence “Artificial Milk” and “Domestic Hygeine No. 3: Drains”). Beeton’s book provides a Victorian example of domestic cooking advice and has been abridged by Oxford University Press, which confers academic value on it – it is not an obscure cookbook existing on the peripheries of the internet, but rather a text already marketed as scholarly. Burnett’s anthology of Turn of the Century autobiographies provides accounts of domestic servants who, though they worked for upper class employers, performed the work and earned the wages of working-class citizens, so their perspectives reflect the home kitchen. The Win-the-War Cookery Book appears to have been printed both in Britain and America, but I can only locate the full American text, so I am using that. I have been unable to find a complete WWII British cookbook and can only locate either anthologized recipe clippings or modernized recipe books marketing themselves as “healthy” rationing books. (There is disturbing misappropriation on the internet of WWII rationing recipes being marketed as weight-loss regimens. Considering that British WWII rationing resulted in serious malnutrition and starvation, I think this appreciation for the scant diet these recipes create is misguided.) I may have to use these clippings as primary sources for WWII. Margaret Powell’s autobiography records her years as a domestic servant from the 1910s-1930s, and Smith’s novel chronicles a working-class Irish immigrant family living in Brooklyn at the Turn of the Century. I selected Smith’s semi-autobiographical novel because much of the family’s poverty is signaled through food consumption and waste and therefore acts as a literary example of my subject.

Posters of Resistance against U.S. Imperialism in Central America

While visiting the Museum of the Salvadoran Revolution in Perquín, Morazan, what struck me most was the museum’s vast dedication to displaying various international posters that specifically address and resist U.S. imperialism in El Salvador/Central America. The posters at the museum ranged in origin from neighboring Latin American countries (Honduras, Nicaragua, Brazil, Guatemala, etc.) to (unspecified) Francophone nations and even the U.S. itself. This demonstrated a global awareness of many of the injustices being perpetuated by the U.S. against El Salvador in the events leading up to and during the civil war. Many of these posters displayed phrases like “Stop bombing El Salvador” and “U.S. out of El Salvador!” in order to address the U.S. government’s instrumental role in supporting the Salvadoran right-wing military through funding, trainings, and other direct involvement.

Upon searching for more information on the Salvadoran Civil War in the Latin American Digital Initiatives through the University of Texas Libraries, I came across the Colección Conflicto Armado, from el Museo de la Palabra y el Imagen (Armed Conflict Collection from the Museum of the Word and Image) in San Salvador, El Salvador. One of the posters I was most interested in is pictured here:

Poster reads: "U.S. Hands off Central America!"
“U.S. Hands off Central America!” poster, from the Colección Conflicto Armado, Museo de la Palabra y el Imagen, El Salvador. Acquired through the Latin American Digital Initiatives from the University of Texas Libraries

The poster depicts a man dressed in attire typical to campesinos (peasant farmers) holding a corvo (or machete) over his head, in preparation to attack the large and imposing clawed hand that digs into the map of Central American land. The clawed hand is representative of the United States, indicated by the sleeve that bears stars and red and white stripes. Further, the specificity in relevance to the Central American region is made clear by the way the poster isolates the region from its neighboring Latin American countries, and thus centers Central America and the U.S.’s particular role in Central American countries. Through its imagery, the poster characterizes the campesino, in an empowered way, as the central force to resisting the U.S. imperial hand.

The use of the corvo as the campesino’s method of resistance is significant in its indication of class—especially in focusing on a war with origins in the exploitation of the poor and widespread socioeconomic inequalities. As Manlio Argueta remarks throughout his novel Un dia en la vida (1980), the first sign of a Salvadoran campesino man is that he treats his corvo like an extension of his own hand—it is a tool essential to his everyday work but it is also a tool necessary to the campesino man’s defense and protection of his family. In the poster, the corvo is presented as the campesino’s means of resisting U.S. imperial power. While the corvo is positioned so as to attack the clawed hand, it is, interestingly, literally attacking the very word “America” at the top of the poster. The poster therefore highlights the campesino’s corvo as a critical to subverting U.S. power.

Ultimately, the poster’s purpose is made clear in its headline: “U.S. Hands Off Central America Now!” Written in English and produced in the United States at Casa El Salvador in San Francisco, CA, the poster targets English-speaking audiences and is especially relevant to American citizens. It is an important record of how American communities and organizations were responding to the Reagan administration’s continued support of the Salvadoran government during the civil war. This is helpful to my research because it enables a continued broadening of my understanding of the Salvadoran Civil War in both ‘homeland’ and ‘diaspora.’

Although my initial research scan to find the exact purpose or role of Casa El Salvador has not been conclusive, its very name leads me to assume that it was possibly a community organization dedicated to issues in El Salvador but likely also one that was invested in Salvadoran communities living in the United States. Especially given its location in California, such an organization would have likely been accessible to many Salvadoran refugees who fled El Salvador in the events leading up to the war or once it had begun. Continuing to research primary documents will be essential to deepening my understanding of the historical contexts and sociopolitical implications of Salvadoran resistance. These sources will further inform my work, as I begin to analyze the role of resistance in Salvadoran writing.

Wilkie Collins and the Victorian Short Story

Although my primary sources may span across the Atlantic to include 19th century short stories from both England and North America, for this blog post I will focus on Victorian literature and Wilkie Collins.

I first read a piece by Wilkie Collins during my class title Victorian Sexualities. I was interested in this author upon reading The Woman in White as I was intrigued by the racialized and gendered language that he used. Not that I am using an intersectional lens to analyze 19th century short stories, it is only appropriate that I start with an author who has sparked my interest in the past.

According to Lyn Pyckett’s Wilkie Collins: Authors in Context, Collins was born in London, 1824. In her book, Pyckett dedicates a section to Collins’s relationship to social change, especially that which centered upon gender and sexuality. Within this section, Pyckett explains that Wilkie Collins produced literature for a liberal weekly paper titled the Leader, and that later, He worked for Dickens’s Household Words. The different papers Collins worked for were associated with political and economic pushes for reform. Collins sought to increase conversations surrounding the, “family, marriage, and relations between the sexes,” (Pyckett, 50). He also had a strong interest in the relationship between women and the law, especially in terms of property rights and marriage. Pyckett explains the social context of Collins’s writing as she says, “The legal vulnerability of women, and their position as objects of exchange between men were already staples  of the Gothic plot when Collins began writing, and partly as a result of his efforts they became central to the plots of sensation novels in the 1860s,” (Pyckett, 52). This focus on women as objects and the role of women within the legal system indicates that Collins’ work might use a feminist lens to analyze his contemporary social context.

Not only did Wilkie Collins have a strong interest in women and reform, but he also held a clear curiosity in gender roles, especially women within the social and the familial contexts. According to Pyckett, Collins lived during a period where women became more vocal about their lack of civil rights and as a result, there became a push against traditional roles of the family. According to Pyckett, “Both Collins’s life and his fiction (in common with quite a lot of Victorian fiction) suggest that the Victorian home, family, and gender roles were rather more fluid and complex in practice than they were in this ideological inscription,” (Pyckett, 57). Pyckett then goes on to elaborate that the reality of the family during the Victorian period was that there was a “domestic ideal”, however, this ideal was simply not attainable by everyone. Thus, Collins saw a variety of family lifestyles that do not all adhere to this “domestic ideal.,” in which women were expected to exist within the private sphere to perform domestic duties while the men ventured into the public sphere to receive employment and an education (Pyckett, 56).

Although the scope of my thesis is still very broad, I am seeing different themes emerge already such as women in the family and mental health, the latter being another interest of Collins. According to Pyckett, “Contemporary sexual mores and morality come under scrutiny as Collins investigates the hypocrisies  of ‘respectable’ Victorian society and the relationship between respectable society and the demi-monde,” (Pyckett, 119). Pyckett goes on to explain that Collins was fascinated by the relationship between mental disorders and one’s divergence from sexual ‘norms.’  This might be yet another avenue for me to explore through my intersectional lens; how race, gender, and sexuality intersect to create social positions that constitute as either respectable or not respectable.

 

Lyn Pyckett’s Wilkie Collins: Authors in Context exposes the social context of Wilkie Collins and his writing. Knowing the background of his work will allow me to better analyze his short stories such as “A Terribly Strange Bed.” His interest in women within the realm of legal reform, the family, and sexual morality indicates that his work might be feminist texts that will prove integral to understanding writing about women within the Victorian era. As one of the most famous writers of his time, studying the works of Wilkie Collins along with his background is essential to the purpose of my project.

Works Cited:

Pykett, Lyn. Wilkie Collins. [Electronic Resource] : Authors in Context. Oxford : Oxford University Press, UK, 2005., 2005. Oxford World’s Classics.

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I have no fucking clue what my focal text is. How to Write About Books you Haven’t Read sounds super on the nose, but I haven’t read it and happen to know that it’s had a pretty unremarkable publication history. Pierre Bayard hasn’t led that wild of a life either (his wiki page is two sentences followed by his bibliography).

So, I’m going to talk about Alan Sokal. Sokal and “The Sokal Affair” were introduced to me as something that I “probably wouldn’t be able to avoid” in my thesis — which I’ve been trying harder and harder to figure out ways to do the more I’ve learned about it (while I read an academic retrospective on the affair, the wikipedia page was more succinct and still accurate [as far as I can tell] so I’m mainly referring to that here).

Essentially, Sokal submitted an article titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the journal Social Text, in which he made an intentionally nonsensical argument about how the methods used to study quantum gravity have positive corollary implications for the burgeoning methods of postmodern criticism and philosophy, a school of thought which Social Text subscribed to. His modus operandi was to bait the journal with rhetoric they’d like and a conclusion that appealed to their philosophical and political sensibilities to see if he could get a crappy paper published in the hopes of pointing out that

My thesis is going to have something to do with the faulty  appeal to authority argument implicit in a lot of citations in literary criticism. So, even though the Sokal ‘Affair’ runs pretty tangentially to my topic, it’s going to be hard to talk about people getting away with pretending to know more than they do without bringing up this very famous incident.

However, I’m really hesitant to bring it up for a few reasons.

First off, the Social Text responded to Sokal’s admission of the hoax by saying that they’d asked him to make edits to the paper, but he was able to get away with refusing to do so because he was a well-known figure. That fact calls attention to a couple key points: A- it’s unclear how egregious of an oversight the paper’s publication was and B- Sokal’s celebrity was a very big factor that he didn’t properly take into account. Journals are businesses, and while there is an element of tacit endorsement that they lend to the papers they publish, their readers consist both of people who read everything in the journal because they trust it and people who want to read articles from specific, big names. So, journals have undue pressure on them to publish work from these big names. Therefore, for a big name like Sokal to single out this one journal is pretty unfair.

I’m also hesitant to talk about it because Sokal seems like an ass, got into an ill-tought-out argument with Derrida because of the paper (putting him on the wrong side of history), and because a “study” with the same goal was done much more scientifically to less fanfare before Sokal came along.

To linger on that second-to-last point: the Sokal ‘affair’ has a weird mix of pro and anti-intellectualism to it. If I do end up talking about it, this point will probably be my takeaway. While Sokal was supposedly motivated by a desire to point out a lack of thoroughness in academic work, he also discredited some valid intellectual work (such as Derrida’s philosophy) because it seemed too involved to him. That’s sort of like the opposite of having your cake and eating it too: pointing out that journals need to think really hard about and research the shit out of everything they consider publishing because it’s really hard to tell whether the author actually knows what she’s talking about while simultaneously not thinking hard enough about valid scholarly work because he didn’t want to waste time thinking about something that may have been bullshit.

One takeaway of the double edged sword of cynicism and guillibility this whole thing brings up is that academic-speak of the kind used by Sokal (and the author I’m presenting on tomorrow) really needs to be burned because it makes a really hard job even more difficult. There’s a sort of appeal to authority implicit in overly-complex writing — a suggestion that the author knows what he’s talking about because he can manipulate language and use the words oft associated with academic writing (trust me on this count — in my experience, this is usually a defense mechanism to mask ideological floundering on some level or another).

I’m over the word count so I guess I’ll figure out a more compelling takeaway at a later date (but don’t worry, I definitely know what to make of the whole thing — I read the wiki page).

EDIT: I wrote the title before I knew what I was writing and then I accidentally published without changing it. I was going to think of something that made sense, but then I realized that it actually worked with the writing — you have no choice but to assume it was an intentional statement about something or other, then you probably read a little bit of the post and figured it had something to do with incoherence, then got sort of pissed because it’s a really fucking pretentious thing to do. That works super well because that pretty closely parallels my thought process regarding Sokal’s stunt, which makes it infuriatingly applicable. Since it is applicable, you as the reader must have assumed it was intentional, while it was really a mistake. My concluding point was that it’s damn-near impossible to tell whether writers actually know what they’re doing, so it functions as a really good meta-point. However, the same mechanism that renders is valid (the fact that it was unknowably unintentional) also renders it invalid as an artistic statement because it was an accident and not a statement. Now that I’ve written this, affirming that it was an accident originally, you know it’s now intentional because I didn’t change it. I assume you think I’m a pretentious little shit for doing that, because that’s exactly what I think of Sokal, but since I know I’d hate me I’m somehow better (?).

Setting Oneself Up for Greatness and Setting Women Aside, Gates’ Quest for “Integrity”

Henry Louis Gates’ “What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom” is a critique of a criticism by Joyce Joyce, a well-lauded black female critic who wrote “The Black Canon.” His criticism focuses on a woman’s work, but his evidence almost entirely relies on men’s criticism and literary writing. His connection to Africa through travel and scholarship combined with his appointment to a position named for one of what he feels to be the great African American legends cast this piece in an interesting light, suggesting the critic’s concern for his own legacy.

Gates came from a very working class background, but transitioned to elite institutions of learning. He went to a local junior college and left for Yale University bachelor’s degree in history. After graduating, Gates transitioned into exploring Africa physically and academically. He took a leave of absence after graduating to travel through Africa, serving as an anesthetist in Tanzania. This fact, though unrelated to his later work, made me wonder if he was inspired by differences in treatment of black people in hospitals in America versus Africa. It has been documented that black people in America are often given lesser diagnoses and less pain medication, and I know that many minority scholars who travel to Europe or a country where they are the majority experience a significant shift in their sense of self.

It seems clear that Gates’ travel did impact him in some way because when he moved on to study at Cambridge University, he was under the tutelage of a Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka. Soyinka is the one responsible for persuading Gates to study literature, for which he received a doctorate degree in 1979. He then taught at several institutions, including Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard.

At Harvard, he was appointed the W.E.B. du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. This stuck out to me because in my source, Gates brings up Du Bois multiple times in mixed levels of praise and condemnation. He begins one section by saying that he is going to highlight the “salient points” of Joyce’s piece, which he proceeds to undermine by saying that the first only reveals the stupidity of Joyce’s student quoted in the article. He says of her reaction he deems faulty that any good teacher, including Du Bois, would have told Joyce’s student, “back to the text and told her to read it again” (Gates 354). He goes on to refer to her as not a full teacher and suggests that her opinion that authors have failed to be clear to readers is in fact her own failing as a scholar.

The next mention of Du Bois in the article is to refer to him as, “a mediocre poet and a terrible novelist” (Gates 355). He does this in the part of his argument where he says Joyce is categorically wrong to say the best critics are creatives. In what I think is a clear move to align himself with Du Bois, Gates mocks the almost legendary figure, writing, “Du Bois was probably the very first systematic literary and cultural theorist in the tradition. Rather, we genuflect to Du Bois” (355).

This fact about Gates’ career really changed the way I perceived his treatment of Du Bois in the article. Clearly, Gates thinks highly of himself and his conclusions from his repeated totalitarian dismissal of any others as wrong or rather passive aggressively as “muddled” (356). If Gates feels himself to be in the same group as Du Bois, it would explain more fully the extent to which he takes Joyce’s criticism of respected critics so personally. She suggests that some black critics have attempted to assimilate into whiteness, and Du Bois repeatedly asks his audience if different things he does in his criticism make him “less black.” I am not suggesting that this is Gates’ primary interest, but the article was written two years after he received that title, which might have put Du Bois in his mind as a predecessor or peer. It also seems to make him feel as though he can completely dismiss Joyce and many other ideas. Furthermore, his thoughts should be, as he phrased it, genuflected to. His piece’s themes of “legacy” and “integrity” and repeated defense of himself reflect a goal of legendary status he fears more intersectional criticism might upset. In this way, his response to a women’s criticism of black male writing is very familiar.

 

Gates, Henry Louis. “‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?”: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom.” New Literary History, vol. 18, no. 2, 1987, pp. 345–362. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/468733.

 

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. “Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encylclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 24 Oct. 2014. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Louis-Gates-Jr.