Cathy N. Davidson

No More Separate Spheres

No More Separate Spheres! challenges the limitations of thinking about American literature and culture within the narrow rubric of “male public” and “female private” spheres from the founders to the present. With provocative essays by an array of cutting-edge critics with diverse viewpoints, this collection examines the ways that the separate spheres binary has malingered unexamined in feminist criticism, American literary studies, and debates on the public sphere. It exemplifies new ways of analyzing gender, breaks through old paradigms, and offers a primer on feminist thinking for the twenty-first century. Using American literary studies as a way to talk about changing categories of analysis, these essays discuss the work of such major authors as Catharine Sedgwick, Herman Melville, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frederick Douglass, Catharine Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Maria Ampara Ruiz de Burton, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Cynthia Kadohata, Chang Rae-Lee, and Samuel Delany. No More Separate Spheres! shows scholars and students different ways that gender can be approached and incorporated into literary interpretations. Feisty and provocative, it provides a forceful analysis of the limititations of any theory of gender that applies only to women, and urges suspicion of any argument that posits “woman” as a universal or uniform category. By bringing together essays from the influential special issue of American Literatur e of the same name, a number of classic essays, and several new pieces commissioned for this volume, No More Separate Spheres! will be an ideal teaching tool, providing a key supplementary text in the American literature classroom. Contributors. Jose F. Aranda, Lauren Berlant, Cathy N. Davidson, Judith Fetterley, Jessamyn Hatcher, Amy Kaplan, Dana D. Nelson, Christopher Newfield, You-me Park, Marjorie Pryse, Elizabeth Renker, Ryan Schneider, Melissa Solomon, Siobhan Somerville, Gayle Wald , Maurice Wallace

No! In Thunder

The first time I met Ed Cady he taught me a word I didn’t know. It was in September of 1988, when I came to Duke to give my job talk and to meet everyone associated with American Literature. I was beginning to think about what it might mean to become the first female editor of the journal. I was regarded as a ‘‘theorist’’ and a ‘‘feminist’’ who was doing ‘‘cultural studies,’’ as someone who did ‘‘interdisciplinary work’’ and who had made a mark ‘‘expanding the canon.’’ I have put scare quotes around those words because it was the very height of the culture wars and, for some people, those terms were scary. I knew that taking this job, becoming a member of the infamous Duke English Department, would put me at the center of the fray. Ed Cady had been editor of American Literature from 1974 to 1986. He was a former football player who had spent a good bit of time in the Midwest. Since I had taught at Michigan State University, we began our meeting by exchanging stories about the Big Ten before moving cautiously on to literature. We discussed three novelists I was teaching that semester at Princeton:WilliamDeanHowells, EdithWharton, and Charles Chesnutt. Going carefully, we talked with varying levels of enthusiasm about each of the three. We were each pleased, I think, to find enthusiasms we could share. 1988 was a year when you were either a dinosaur (a relic from a long-dead past) or Godzilla (destroyer of all Western culture). There wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver in between. Ed and I were friendly with one another and polite. He offered me something alcoholic to drink and I realized immediately that I had

New Essays on The Sun Also Rises: Decoding the Hemingway Hero in The Sun Also Rises

“Maybe a story is better without any hero.” –From an early draft of The Sun Also Rises D espite its increasing currency in literary debate, the term “deconstruction” still prompts in many readers a sense of apprehension and unease. Partly it is a matter of critical language: Much deconstructive criticism turns, like the term itself, on neologisms designed to address new critical concerns in new ways. The unversed reader, like a tourist in a foreign land, longs for a familiar idiom or at least a phrasebook. Partly it is a matter of critical stance: The deconstructive critic often posits different relationships between critic and text, between writer and reader, from those presumed and explored by previous criticism. Nevertheless, and as Barbara Johnson has recently argued, the basic principles motivating the deconstructive enterprise are not radically different from those implicit in other types of criticism. As is suggested by the etymological root of the term itself, the primary task of criticism – from the Greek verb krinein , meaning to separate or choose – is to differentiate. According to Johnson, “The critic not only seeks to establish standards for evaluating the differences between texts, but also tries to preceive something uniquely different within each text he reads and in so doing to establish his own individual difference from other critics.” The deconstructive critic fully acknowledges the subjective aspect of reading a text (or writing one, for that matter), and, instead of attempting to make a particular reading seem somehow universal, emphasizes the value of individuality, plurality, subjectivity, and particularity in all responses to texts and in texts themselves. Instead of trying to resolve differences (of responses, perspectives, parts, whatever), the deconstructive critic attempts to exploit them.

Our Digital Age: Implications for Learning and Its (Online) Institutions

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This chapter, excerpted from our book, The Future of Thinking, does not promote change for the sake of change. Implicit in its sincere plea for transformation is an awareness that the current situation needs improvement. In advocating change for learning institutions, this chapter makes assumptions about the deep structure of learning, about cognition, about the way youth today learn about their world in informal settings, and about a mismatch between the excitement generated by informal learning and the routinization of learning common to many of our institutions of formal education. It advocates institutional change because our current formal educational institutions are not taking enough advantage of the modes of digital and participatory learning available to students today.

Reading Independence@@@Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America

Revolution and the Word offers a unique perspective on the origins of American fiction, looking not only at the early novels themselves but at the people who produced them, sold them, and read them. It shows how, in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the novel found a special place among the least privileged citizens of the new republic. As Cathy N. Davidson explains, early American novels--most of them now long forgotten--were a primary means by which those who bought and read them, especially women and the lower classes, moved into the higher levels of literacy required by a democracy. This very fact, Davidson shows, also made these people less amenable to the control of the gentry who, naturally enough, derided fiction as a potentially subversive genre. Combining rigorous historical methods with the newest insights of literacy theory, Davidson brilliantly reconstructs the complex interplay of politics, ideology, economics, and other social forces that governed the way novels were written, published, distributed, and understood. Davidson also shows, in almost tactile detail, how many Americans lived during the Constitutional era. She depicts the life of the traveling book peddler, the harsh lot of the printer, the shortcomings of early American schools, the ambiguous politics of novelists like Brackenridge and Tyler, and the lost lives of ordinary women like Tabitha Tenney and Patty Rogers. Drawing on a vast body of material--the novels themselves as well as reviews, inscriptions in cherished books, letters and diaries, and many other records--Davidson presents the genesis of American literature in its fullest possible context.

Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum; or, Gothic Castles in the New Republic

Despite its European provenance in a romantic revitalization of surviving vestiges of the medieval past, the gothic novel has a long and honorable New World history. It was one of the first fictional forms borrowed from the burgeoning eighteenth-century English novel. Along with a few other newly transplanted varieties of fiction—for example, the sentimental novel, the picaresque adventure, and the travel narrative—it also thrived in the newly independent Republic. That first flourishing is attested to by such noteworthy early American Gothics as Charles Brockden Browns Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798) and Isaac Mitchells The Asylum; or, Alonzo and Melissa (1811)—the former one of the best novels of the period, the latter one of the most popular. The form then reached what was surely an artistic apogee when, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne labored in its haunted gardens. This full flowering has in our time become, to alter the metaphor, a flood. In drugstore and supermarket, wherever inexpensive paperbacks are sold, book racks abound with almost identical volumes, their “covers featuring … gloomy, foreboding castles and apprehensive maidens in modified nightgowns.” Clearly, Americans still have an affinity for castles in literature, particularly if those castles ominously loom over young, beautiful, vulnerable heroines.