Archive for the ‘Scholarship’ Category

Paul Samuelson, Northwest Indiana’s Gift to Economics, Dies at 94

Monday, December 14th, 2009

Paul Samuelson has died at his home in Belmont, MA.  He won the second Nobel Prize in Economics (1970) and wrote the textbook  Economics which transformed the field from a saddlebag of observations, hunches and fables to a rigorously analytical social science.

Read the New York Times obituary here.

Accounts of Samuelson’s life give his birthplace as Gary, Indiana and it is true that he grew up there. But Samuelson told this writer in person once that he was actually born in the town of Wheeler, IN, six miles west of Valparaiso. Our meeting happened when a delegation of Valparaiso University faculty was attending the Tenth Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in 1974  at which Samuelson was an honored guest.

Samuelson’s life experiences growing up in Gary and Chicago during the boom and depression of the 1920s and 1930s strongly motivated him to choose economics as a profession. The luxury and misery he saw with his own eyes deeply influenced the direction,  intensity, and purpose  of his intellectual analysis.  His life and work demonstrate clearly how advanced academic research can change the lives of ordinary people for the better – and even change what we all think is the gold-standard of everyday living – “common sense.”

We hope that a biography worthy of Professor Samuelson will not be too long in the writing.  Here are links to other tributes:

Paul Krugman

Bruce MacLean

The University of Chicago Magazine Alumni News

List of 2009 Modern Language Association Convention Papers on Midwest Topics

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

Source: PMLA Vol 124.6 November 2009

DIVISION MEETINGS

American Indian Literatures

213. Languages in American Indian Literatures

“Oshknishinaabezhibiigejig/New Anishinaabe Writers and Why We Need Them,” Janis Fairbanks, Michigan State University.

526. American Indian Literature and Traditional Ecological Literature

“Anishinabe Ecology in Louise Erdrich’s Master Butcher’s Singing Club,” Marie Satya McDonough, University of Chicago.

Black American Literature and Culture

650. Reading and Race in the Obama Era

“The Obama Phenomenon, Race, and Liberalism,” Justin Leroy, New York University.

“From Ellison to Obama: Dreams of Ultraraciality,” Christopher Powers, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez.

Gay Studies

472. Critical Exuberance

“The Curious Queer Politics of a ‘Post’-racial Obama Nation,” Marlon Bryan Ross, University of Virginia.

“The Neo-New Deal and Why Obama Doesn’t Want to Think about Sex,” Janet R. Jakobsen, Barnard College.

“States of Crisis: Economic Pain and Political Hope in the Age of Obama,” Lisa Duggan, New York University.

Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century American Literature

14. Protomodernisms

“What Did Hamlin Garland Mean by ‘Modernism’?” Christine L. Holbo, Arizona State University.

“The Experimental Realism of William Dean Howells,” Brian McGrath, Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

“Oz’s Colorful Pedagogy; or Modernism in the Kindergarten,” Nicholas Gaskill, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Nineteenth Century American Literature

570. Time after History

“Space into Time: Ambrose Bierce’s Phenomenological Reduction of History,” Jonathan Elmer, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Non-Fiction Prose Studies, Excluding Biography and Autobiography

22. The Open Letter

“The Open Letter from Phyllis Wheatley to Langston Hughes,”  James D. B. McCorkle, Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

Poetry

567.  Poetry and Publics

“Walt Whitman and the Death of Lincoln,” Michael Cohen, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.

Prose Fiction

96. Justice

“Something Rogue: Justice and Commensurability in Toni Morrison’s Later Fiction,” Megan L. Sweeney, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Sociological Approaches to Literature

352. Futures of Collectivity

“Susan Glaspell’s Stages of Thought,” Katherine Biers, Columbia University.

ALLIED AND AFFILIATE ORGANIZATION MEETINGS

American Theatre and Drama Society http://www.atds.org/

281. Drama and Lincoln

“Not-So-Civil War: Lincoln’s Image as Presented in Confederate and Copperhead Drama, 1861-63,” Scott Irelan, Augustana College

“Augustin Daly’s ‘Republic of Suffering’: Catharsis for the Middle Class after the Civil War,” Celia Braxton, Graduate Center, City University of New York.

“From Broadway to Gettysburg: Forrest and Lincoln Perform Politics,” David J. Carlyon, Larchmont, NY.

“Suzan-Lori Parks’s Lincoln: An Interrogation Revisited,” Jayne Austin Williams, University of California-Irvine.

750. Presidents and Plays

“’Damn Job’s a Pain in the Ass’: President ‘Chuck’ Smith, Lesbians, and International Adoption in David Mamet’s November,” Robert Vorlicky, New York University.

College English Association http://www2.widener.edu/~cea/

169. The Profane Prairie: Controversial Stories from the Upper Midwest

“Bianca’s Body,” Teresa Milbrodt, Western State College.

“Twin Jack,” Stephen Powers, Gordon College.

“Expect Major Delays,” Zeke Jarvis, Eureka College.

Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society http://www.hemingwaysociety.org

59. The Hemingway Letters Project: The Making of the Cambridge Edition of the Collected Letters.

Sandra Spanier, Penn State University, University Park; Michael Dubose, Penn State University, University Park; Linda P. Miller, Penn State University, Abington; Robert Trogdon, Kent State University, Kent, OH. 59

698. Hemingway and African American Writers: New Readings and Teachings

“The Unlikely Couple: Ernest Hemingway and Alice Walker (with a few words on Toni Morrison),”Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, University of Notre Dame 698

“Ellison, Hemingway, Wright: Tracing relations inside the Transparent Jug,” Gary Holcomb, Ohio University, Athens.

“Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin: American Masculinity in Crisis,” Jessica Kent, Boston University

Langston Hughes Society http://www.langstonhughessociety.org/

38. Langston Hughes and Transnational Liberation: Aesthetic Overtures

“Literary Migrations: Transnationalism in the Poetry of Langston Hughes,” Sharon Lynette Jones, Wright State University

“Black Transnationalism and the Political Aesthetics of Ask Your Mama,” John t. Lowney, Saint John’s University, NY

“Langston Hughes and the stereo Acoustics of Global Black Solidarity,” Tsitsi Jaji, University of Pennsylvania.

737. Langston Hughes and Transnational Liberation: Ideological Underpinnings

“Langston Hughes: The Father of a World Black Consciousness Movement,” Tara T. Green, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

“James Mercer Langston Hughes: ‘Poet Laureate,’ ‘Dean of Black American Writers, a Self-Proclaimed ‘Literary Sharecropper,’ ‘Radical Socialist,’ ‘Cultural Ambassador,’ and ‘Possibly One of America’s Earliest Postcolonial Thinkers,” Karima K. Jeffrey, Hampton University

“Engagement in the antifascist Movement and the transnational Liberation of Minorities in the Literary Works of Langston Hughes,” Char Prieto, California State University, Chico

Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature http://www.ssml.org/

67.  Sex, Literature, and the Midwest

“Babbitt’s Fairychild,” Marcella Frydman, Harvard University

“ ‘A Fresh Green breast of the New World’: The Great Gatsby and Lolita,” John Rohrkemper, Elizabethtown College

“ ‘It Might Be Something Awful’: The Movement of Sex in the Plays of William Inge,” Michael S. Schwartz, Widener University

“ ‘I’m Fine. I Just Got the Plains’: Geography and Sex in Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County,” Marilyn Judith Atlas, Ohio University, Athens

725. Midwestern Literature: Explorations of Nature and the Natural

“Hamlin Garland and the Landscapes of American Populism,” Jonathan Berliner, University of Southern California

“Familiar with Walden: Gene Stratton-Porter’s Plunge into Indiana’s Swamps,” Carol Elizabeth Dietrich, DeVry University, OH

“Ecology and the National Identity in Lockridge’s Raintree County,” Frederick Oswin Waage, East Tennessee State University

“James Wright, Franz Wright, and Blessing of Compost,” Beverly J. Hogue, Marietta College

Mark Twain Circle of America http://www.honors.illinois.edu/files/mtcircle/

579. Mark Twain in the New Millennium

“Staying Power: Twain’s Place in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom and Beyond,” Jocelyn Ann Chadwick, Discovery Education

“The Reading Group in Huckleberry Finn,” Anthony Joseph beret, Saint Joseph’s University

“Science Fiction’s Modest Witness: Ethical Consciousness and the Narration of Destruction and Creation of A Connecticut Yankee,” Juliana Chow, University of California, Berkeley

For abstracts, visit www.honors,uiuc.edu/files/mtcircle

765.  Mark Twain’s Nineteenth-Century Context

“Race, Liberalism, and Huckleberry Finn,” Philip Goldstein, University of Delaware, Wilmington

“Never the Twain Shall Meet: Travel and Double-Consciousness in the Works of Mark Twain and James Weldon Johnson,” Richard Hardack, University of Delaware, Wilmington

“The Persecution and Comfort of Mark Twain’s Fan Letters,” Courtney Bates, Washington University

Final Thoughts on New Ideas in Midwestern Literature

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

After I finished writing my final paper for New Ideas in Midwestern Literature a sense of relief came over my body. Of course, that is the way I always feel when I get done writing or completing a final exam. Although I must admit that I also had a sense of sadness that this course was completed. I truly enjoyed the cultural and intellectual exchange that took place in our classroom and I learned more about the
Midwest than I thought possible. I also was pleased with the variety of topics we covered during the course of the semester diving into art, music, writing, and film. It always seemed that no matter what topic we were covering that a fellow classmate had a connection in some way to the material. I can honestly say that isn’t always the case with every course I have taken in my academic career. One of the reasons I think this connection existed was because of the success of the blog.

            On another note I also felt that we were encouraged to explore our writing skills particularly about how to become writers of the soil. I have always thought that my best writing comes from my own life experiences since it tends to lend a sense of credibility about regional topics. I truly hope that the genre of Midwestern Literature continues to grow in academia because of its importance to expanding the field of writing to a new generation of writers. As the world becomes flat and communication more readily available I think we will see a positive acceptance in the literary community of new styles of writing and thought. Lastly, it is certainly exciting to be a part of an academic movement in which new ideas are recognized and promoted to the outside world.

First Contact

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

I realize that I am a bit behind the curve on this posting, but I hope that you will find it interesting anyhow.  Two years ago I had the pleasure of getting paid to hear and record a great book review on a book by Charles Mann, called 1491.  The year 1492, as anyone who grew up in the U.S. well knows is the year that Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain across the Atlantic in search of an east-to-west route to Indian and/or China.  Instead, he blundered into the Caribbean Sea and died convinced (or at least trying to convince others) that he had succeeded.  The significance of that date is that it was considered the first contact of Europeans with American (New World) cultures.  (There is some evidence that Vikings and/or Irish monks made it to Newfoundland as early as the mid-fourteenth century, but that’s another story.  See The Brendan Voyage by Timothy Severne for more on that and see Farley Mowatt’s Book, The Farfarers: Before the Norse. Both are compelling reads, but neither have been accepted by the historic/archaeological communities as fact.)  But back to Charles Mann: In his book, 1491,  he very thoroughly examines the historical accounts and archaeological research on just what the pre-Columbian peoples of north, central and south Americas were like.  He makes three basic claims about all of these people: the populations were much greater than most historians thought; the cultures were much more advanced than we have given them credit for; and finally, that the lands on which they lived were carefully managed and even transformed by the people who lived there.

Scholarship

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

William Barillas, The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland

Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray, eds.,  The Identity of the American Midwest: Essays on Regional History

Charles L. Crow, A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America

Philip A. Greasley, ed., Dictionary of Midwestern Literature: Volume One The Authors

Allan Greer, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America

R. Douglas Hurt, “Midwestern Distinctiveness,” in The Identity of the American Midwest: Essays in Regional History, 160-179.

Bev Hogue, “Forgotten Frontier: Literature of the Old Northwest,” in Crow, A Companion

Basil Johnston, Ojibway Heritage

Marcia Noe, ed., Exploring the Midwestern Literary Imagination: Essays in Honor of David D. Anderson

Diane Quantic, “The Great Plains,” in Crow, A Companion

James R. Shortridge, The Middle West: It’s Meaning in American Culture

Carl Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880-1920

________, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman

Ronald Weber, The Midwestern Ascendancy in American Writing

Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States