Duveronymous Yawp

The Neuroscience of Your Brain On Fiction – NYTimes.com.

A nice, compact, tantalizing run-down of contemporary thinking about what neuroscience has discovered about what goes on in our brains when we read fiction.  Worth the read.

from Theodore Roosevelt, “Socialism, II — Where We Can Work with Socialists” (Outlook 27 March 1909).

I have copied below a couple representative excerpts from part II of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1909 essay on socialism published in the Outlook in 1909.  I have to admit, he caught me off guard a bit.  I was expecting way more fiery anti-socialist rhetoric and for him to go for the throat throughout, but Roosevelt mostly steers a middle course here (and in part I, too, published a week earlier) between what he sees as the excesses of individualism and those of socialism.

My reason for reading the two pieces in the first place was to look at TR’s understanding of what socialism might do to the family (many more things to read in TR on this), and let’s just say it’s not good, according to TR and others, but more on that later, perhaps. Mostly, I like the moderate angle TR takes on the politics of labeling policy as “socialistic” and then rejecting it on those weak, definitional grounds, and not, as one should, taking a good hard look at the policy itself and asking reason- and values-based questions about it.  I think it’s worth sharing. I’m not a huge fan of Teddy (look into his nativism, if you’d like one of my reasons), but I admire his ethical pragmatism here. Continue Reading »

This is probably a useful thing to do, writing a blog post, a way to get some words on paper and, prior to that, some thoughts composed. I’m presenting a paper at the C19 conference in Berkeley in just over five weeks on the representation and rhetoric of sexuality, gender, and marriage (too much to do, really) in turn of the 20th century novels about socialism (for it, against it, defining it, etc.), what I am calling “novels of socialism.” In order to ground my work, I’m looking at the earlier 19th century history of utopian, communal socialist movements in the US, notably the Fourierists, but I will also end up looking into other groups, too (Owenites, for example).

Carl Guarneri’s The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (1991) has been indispensable to this end. Charles Fourier (1772-1837: here’s a good, contextualized run-down of his ideas) offered a wide-ranging, and all-encompassing, to say the least, set of critiques, ideas, and recommendations for social change. His theory accounted for the stages of human history, the working of the universe, and predicted the demise of present religious systems with the growth of a “religion” in which people lived in “unconscious obedience to natural law” (Guarneri 94). Also, nations would fall away, to be replaced by 2 million phalanxes (structured living and working communities of a particular size). But, among Fourier’s ideas, as Guarneri notes, “most distressing” to those reformers who wished to act on Fourier’s critique of modern life and economics and build cooperative communities along the lines he described, “was Fourier’s prediction of a ‘New Amorous World’ that would give full scope to human sexual ‘attractions’ by organizing love in a series of graded ‘corporations’ ranging from ‘vestalic’ virginity to complete promiscuity, both heterosexual and homosexual” (94). Continue Reading »

Gender and Sexual Perversity in Novels of Socialism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Edward Bellamy insisted on describing his utopia as “nationalist” rather than “socialist,” saying in a letter to William Dean Howells that he could never “well stomach” the term “socialism,” not only because of its “foreign” ring, but also because it suggested to him “all manner of sexual novelties.” Nor was Bellamy alone among his colleagues: most utopian socialist writers in the US disavowed the term, many, like Bellamy, coining other labels for their cooperative, manifestly socialist societies.  Certainly socialism’s American detractors had often, and long before Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), gone to the deep rhetorical well of domestic and sexual perversity for arguments against socialism, beginning with reactions to antebellum utopian communities like Oneida, with its institution of “complex marriage,” and those based on Fourier’s model of a “New Amorous World.” But Bellamy and his followers’ conservative gender and sexual politics did not do much, apparently, to disarm the appeal to the imagined sexual and domestic perversity of socialism in the many novelistic replies to Looking Backward.

Continue Reading »

From the back of a Carl Sandburg pamphlet, You and Your Job (Charles Kerr, 19??), which is available from the Eugene Debs collection at Indiana State U http://debs.indstate.edu/s2133y6_1900.pdf.  I would love to have this game and, for good measure, to have the first edition of Monopoly.

ADDENDUM 9/26 — After doing a little web searching to see if this is still out there somewhere (so far, nope), I ran into another, more recent “Class Struggle” game on the Stalin’s Moustache blog.

Little Change in Public’s Response to ‘Capitalism,’ ‘Socialism’ | Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Overview

The recent Occupy Wall Street protests have focused public attention on what organizers see as the excesses of America’s free market system, but perceptions of capitalism – and even of socialism – have changed little since early 2010 despite the recent tumult.

The American public’s take on capitalism remains mixed, with just slightly more saying they have a positive (50%) than a negative (40%) reaction to the term. That’s largely unchanged from a 52% to 37% balance of opinion in April 2010. Continue Reading »

A wonderful inscription appears on the inside cover of a book I am reading for my sabbatical research, Ken Roemer’s The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888-1900 (Kent State UP, 1998). This is a copy from the shelves of our library at the College of Charleston. From the author to his dissertation director, the note reads:

Dr. Cohen,

The margins of this book are blank. But for me they are filled with the hundreds of comments and suggestions you offered. I chose you as a dissertation director because you impressed me as one of the most conscientious teachers I have ever met; your supervision of my dissertation proved that my impression was correct. (To say nothing of going beyond the call of duty–imagine reading a dissertation in Spiller’s cabin!)

Thank you; and thank you for the continual advice and encouragement.

Ken

I have not researched who Dr. Cohen is. I wonder if Spiller’s cabin was the cabin of Robert Spiller, author of the monumental literary history of the US from way back.  But those details, though I would love to know them, really don’t much matter.  The main thing is Wow.  How cool.

List of recessions in the United States – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In the course of my current research, I frequently encounter information about the boom and bust cycles of the American economy at the end of the 19th century, and it never ceases to impress me how many recessions there have been in the US.   There were frequent “panics” and profound recessions throughout the end of the century, for reasons which I’m sure many historians and economists have devoted significant ink.  For my work, I’m less interested in the causes than in the literary/cultural responses. But either way, from our current standpoint, I think it’s worth thinking about how often we been in the soup.

Design Thinking for Educators

Reinvigorating education by thinking about it through the principles of design.  There are great insights here — from reconfiguring classrooms to thinking about instruction as designed, prototyped, and so forth.  I find the whole thing compelling — and much of it familiar, having seen what talented friends do with instruction in college classrooms.  I wonder how I can be more mindful of my own teaching and curriculum as designed.

I’m putting it on file for next fall when I hit the classroom again with a Mark Twain seminar for first year students, an upper-division late 19th century American Lit class, and a graduate class in the same. Funny, now that I am on a research sabbatical, I find myself thinking so much about pedagogy and course design and running across such wonderful resources.