Short Update

I have been so busy this term, reading and even writing, but it has been more formal than what I had originally intended for this blog. I have been reading books for a reading group on 19th C. American conceptions of nature, and mostly articles and book chapters for one course on The Darwinian Revolution and another on History of the Modern Physical Sciences. I'll put up some reflections, along with some of my reading responses, once break starts.

Emulation and Invention

Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1981).

In a 2001 obituary, Judith McGaw called Hindle's Emulation and Invention his masterpiece. I, on the other hand, find it a beautiful but confused text.

On the one hand, it seeks to demonstrate the historical coherence of the notion of "emulation," a term which he situates in apprenticeship practice. Emulation, Hindle shows, was the notion of copying exemplary models with the intention of going beyond the masters' perfection; not just copying, emulation was about aspiring to be like the best, and then better than the best. An apprenticeship spent in emulation would be concluded by the production of a "masterpiece," a piece of workmanship which presented something new born out of the old. Hindle draws attention to this notion of emulation as key to training artists as well as craftsmen, and holds up the ways of thinking it inculcates as key to the two major 19th C American inventions: the steamboat and the telegraph.

But Hindle has another agenda. He is worried about engineering education, and in particular about the balance of finger-knowledge and book knowledge being given to engineering students. On this front, his argument seems to be: we need to teach engineering students in the way that they were taught in the 19th C or we will not have great inventors like Morse.

He pulls together the two points with a long but superficial discussion of how the brain works, essentially saying that these inventors were able to do what they did because they were right-brain people, either by nature or by training, and that we need to encourage right-brain skills in training engineers. A weird way to end the book, to be sure.
---
Ok, I've been sitting on this little essay for too long without posting it, and leaving it pending is holding me back from moving onto other works. So here's my summary.

Emulation and Invention has a lot of fantastic material on the lives of American inventors, but it left me confused as to it's intended audience and intended purpose, as much of the work being done in the text is not what I would consider 'historian's' work. This text also made me reconsider some of the kinds of questions I have been asking about the Clarks… because I worry that questions like "How did he do what he did," will end up mired in weird discussions about mental skills, vague and un-substaintiable connections, etc. Hindle made me think hard about how I want to be framing my questions on this project, although I haven't come up with good answers yet.

The Machine in the Garden

Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).

365 pages, assigned by Ron Klien.

When I settled down to tackle Ron's book list, I began by sorting out the books I could get for $10 or less. I bought those: about half the list. Then I sorted those chronologically and began with the earliest. That is this book.

While I had certainly heard of The Machine in the Garden before I started, I had not realized that it is rooted in literary studies. Not a history book. Didn't know that. Once I brought myself to terms with the fact that I was reading about Thoreau, Shakespeare, Melville & Co., I began to really enjoy the text. The prose occasionally became thick enough to put me to sleep, but Marx's tone is congenial and engaging, and I was sorry to have to leave him after the last page.

The core question of the book asks how Americans manage to sustain the seemingly contradictory positions of being enchanted with the pastoral-- camping, gardening, cowboys, etc-- and in love with technology-- railroads, factories, steamboats, etc. He introduces the notion of a complex pastoral mode to describe a primary theme in esp. 19th C American literature. This complex pastoral mode recognizes but ultimately fails to diffuse the contridiction: while earlier authors seem to prefer a "middle path" between the primitive and the industrial, using technology to improve upon nature, later writers seem resigned to the permanace of the conflict between nature and machines. He is careful to distinguish this 'complex pastoral' from the 'simple pastoral'-- the sort of primitivist longing for the country that causes urban flight and makes cowboy images such powerful tools for marketing cigarettes, beer, and cars. The complex pastoral, on the other hand, explicitly recognises the impermanance or contradicion inherent in our love for such scenes-- recognizes the dilemma of the presence of the machine in the garden.

Marx's analysis begins with, and repeatedly references, a short essay by Nathaniel Hawthorn from his notebook-- eight pages written while sitting in the woods, in an area called "Sleepy Hollow." Marx calls our attention to the fact that although the essay is informal, it nontheless has a distinct narrative form. Hawthorn begins with small observations on his setting, the sights and especially sounds of nature that surround him. He then begins to notice the sounds of men: mowers sharpening scythes, the striking of the village clock, the tinkle of a cowbell. Then, his reverie is suddenly broken by the sharp shriek of the train whistle: "harsh, above all other harshness... [telling] the story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street... men of business... it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace." Marx sees varients of this episode throughout 19th century American literature: Thoreau hearing the train in Walden, Ishmael's wierd evocation of a textile mill in the midst of a primitive island in Moby-Dick, or the moment when Huck and Jim are torn from their idyllic raft journey by an approaching steamboat plowing through their small craft in Huckleberry Finn.

After introducing his themes through Hawthorne's essay, Marx begins his more meaty analysis with Shakespeare's The Tempest. While the action of The Tempest does not explicitly take place in America, Marx ties its content and themes to several accounts of travellers to the 'New World,' in particular, one from Virginia. These accounts combine admiration for the beauty and bounty of America, and horror at its brutal wildness. Similarly, Marx sees the core of Shakespeare's story as a conflict between Gonzalo's naive embrace of a simple pastoralism and Prospero's recognition that human art is necessary to create and preserve the ideal society. Marx uses The Tempest to illustrate that even before many Westerners arrived in America, the American wilderness was already heavily burdened with symbolic value. The pastoral ideal, developed so thoroughly in Western literature, seemed able to take concrete form in the New World-- and the ideas developed in this literary tradition became a part of the understandings and expectations that Americans had for their nation.

After treating Shakespere, he moves on through a staggering diversity of authors and works: Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Robert Beverly's History and Present State of Virginia, Celadon's The Golden Age, Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Tench Coxe's powerful and little-referenced speech An Enquiry into the principles, on which a commercial system for the United States of America should fe founded..., Hamilton's Report on Manufactures, Schiller's Letters upon the Aesthetical Education of Man, Thomas Carlyle's "Life of Schiller" and his "Signs of the Times" and Timothy Walker's attack on that essay in the North American Review, Emerson's "The Young American" and Nature, Henry James' The American, Thoreau's Walden, Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand," Melville's Moby-Dick, Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and finally Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In each of these works, he finds elements of the struggle of complex pastoralism, emphasizing the fact that while each author presents the dilemma in a variety of ways, none of them satisfactorally reconcile the conflict.

to be continued...

First Post: Brainstorming Goals

As I think about my A-exams, which are still a year off, I worry about my ability to retain material. Of course, no one retains all of what they read, but I feel like if I am going to put the time in to slog through 150 books, or whatever the final number is going to be, I ought to make an effort to keep track.

The other thing is that, regarding discussions I've had so far, my exams themselves will be largely based on my own ability to formulate questions about the material I'm working with, the themes and time periods I'm interested in, etc. So it is important that I actually work with this material, that I discuss it (with myself, at the very least) and begin to formulate questions about it.

The third thing is that I will be teaching writing for all of next year, and one of the things I want my students to learn is the value of writing down drafts, brainstorms, and ideas-- the value of writing even when it isn't 'required,' and even when it isn't 'good.' The value of writing as part of thinking. The trouble is, I'm very bad at internalizing this lesson. I know that it is so, I've certainly had experiences that inforce that for me. But I've never been able to make it a habit. This blog is part of an effort to do so.

I envision this blog as a combination of book-review type essays and more open-ended thought pieces. I want to get main themes and interesting points recorded, and also to give myself room to think about the material. I may post while in the middle of a book, or may reflect upon it once I have finished reading. I would love to see feedback on anything I write here-- it will be nice to have more voices than the ones in my head.