Summer Symposium
Announcing the 26th Annual PLS/GP Summer Symposium
June 2-7, 2024
"This Land: America in Imagination and Reality"
Once again, the Program of Liberal Studies will offer a week of seminars for alumni/ae of the Program, their relatives and friends, and anyone else eager to read and discuss important texts and ideas as part of a welcoming and lively intellectual community. This year's seminars will feature a multi-faceted reflection on how the idea of America has been shaped by interactions with and reflections upon its landscape and the groups and individuals who inhabit it.
The Seminars:
Seminar 1 | “It seems like I already heard these stories before”: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Landscapes and Tellings
Professor Katie Bugyis
3 Sessions
Texts:
- Leslie Marmon Silko, “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories,” “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” “Yellow Woman and Beauty of the Spirit,” and “Fifth World: The Return of Ma ah shra true ee, the Giant Serpent,” in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) ISBN-13: 978-0-684-81153-6
- Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin Books, 1977, repr. with introduction by Larry McMurtry, 1966) ISBN-13: 978-0-14-310491-9
Description:
The famous Woodie Guthrie song, which the theme of this year’s Alumni Summer Symposium riffs on, declares that America, “this land” we all live on, enjoy the fruits of, wonder at, and, at times, take for granted, “was made for you and me.” It urges us to imagine that America can, somehow, be both yours and mine without anyone being displaced or excluded. But such imaginings often fail to recognize how such possessives, especially mine, have been used to take “this land” from those who first inhabited and cared for it. This three-day course will ask participants to wrestle with the question of whose “this land” is through select writings of the celebrated Laguna Pueblo poet, essayist, and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948). We will begin with four of her essays, collected in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996), to understand better the landscapes, peoples, creatures, spirits, and stories that have shaped the Laguna Pueblo and inspired Silko’s creative work. We will then turn to Silko’s first novel, Ceremony (1977). It admittedly defies the genre of novel. The Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday thought it should just be called a “telling.” In Ceremony, Silko invites us to accompany Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo of mixed parentage, as he struggles with the traumas of fighting in a war of others’ making and witnessing the desecration and destruction of the land and people that made him. He must return to the stories that have long sustained the people, for only they can restore strength, balance, and beauty. The Spokane and Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie insists that Silko’s Ceremony is “the greatest novel in Native American literature. It is one of the greatest novels of any time and place.” It will demand all of our empathy and humility to learn from its wisdom.
Schedule:
- Day One: Select Essays
- “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories”
- “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”
- “Yellow Woman and Beauty of the Spirit”
- “Fifth World: The Return of Ma ah shra true ee, the Giant Serpent”
- Day Two: Ceremony, 1–105
- Day Three: Ceremony, 105–244
Seminar 2 | For Those With Their Backs Against the Wall: Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited
Professor Eric Bugyis
2 Sessions
Text:
- Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Beacon Press, 1996).
Description:
Reverend Howard Thurman (1899-1981) is a somewhat forgotten giant of 20th-century American religious life. Born the grandson of former slaves at the turn of the century in Daytona, Florida, Thurman was educated at Morehouse College, where he was classmates with Martin Luther King, Sr., and at Rochester Theological Seminary, where he was one of two black students admitted each year. After being ordained in the Baptist church, he served as a pastor in Oberlin, Ohio, before returning to teach at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. He then went on to Howard University in Washington, D. C., and built a national reputation as a sought-after preacher and lecturer on the YMCA circuit. In 1934 he was asked to be part of a "Negro Delegation" to India, where on February 21, 1936, he met Mohandas Gandhi, who suggested to him that "it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world." Thurman's most recent biographer, Peter Eisenstadt, has made the case that one could do worse than to date the beginning of the civil rights movement in America to this encounter. Shortly after Thurman returned to the States, he had dinner with his old Morehouse friend, King, Sr., and told him all about his journey. A 7-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., was in earshot. A little more than 20 years later, in 1958, Thurman was called away from his duties as a professor of theology and the dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University to minister at the hospital bedside of King, Jr., who had been stabbed at a book signing. In King's briefcase was Thurman's 1949 book, Jesus and the Disinherited, which was a constant companion for King as he traveled the country and served as inspiration for both his words and actions on behalf of his own disinherited generation of black Americans. In this seminar, we will read this book and consider what its message has to say to us and, perhaps more importantly, to those of our fellow citizens "with their backs against the wall."
If you are interested in learing more about Thurman, I recommend the recent documentary Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story by Martin Doblmeier, who has also made a film about Thurman's contemporary Dorothy Day.
Schedule:
- Day 1 : pgs. xix-63
- Day 2: pgs. 64-102
Seminar 3 | “Like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed”: Willa Cather’s America
Professor Jenny Martin
3 Sessions
Text:
- Willa Cather, My Ántonia (New York: Vintage Classics, 2018) (the Willa Cather Foundation 100th Anniversary Edition).
Description:
This three-day course will invite a close reading of My Ántonia (1918), perhaps one of Willa Cather’s (1873-1947) most beautiful novels and the culmination of her Great Plains Trilogy, including O, Pioneers! (1913) and The Song of the Lark (1915). The novel invites reflection not only upon how the shape of American geography may shape American identity and self-understanding, but also elicits significant questions surrounding immigration, belonging, identity, cultural assimilation, community, memory, nostalgia, suffering, the fleetingness and precarity of life, and the stories we tell to ourselves and to each other. While the charming characters loom quite large—Jim Burden, Jake Marpole, Otto Fuchs, Mrs. Shimerda, Pavel and Peter and, of course, Ántonia herself—it could perhaps be argued that the landscape itself is the most significant character. As Jane Smiley’s introduction puts it, the novel “all comes back to landscape, to humans changing and being changed by the difficulties and the beauties of the world they must contend with” (xviii-xix). Cather describes her landscapes, particularly the lively, dynamic geography of the American prairies, in utterly luminous, sensual prose, bringing these lovely but often melancholy spaces to life in the readers’ imaginations. Even as it attends to the concrete detail of all the flora and fauna of Nebraska and beyond, the novel does not cease also to be quite philosophical, haunted, as it were, by its epigraph from Virgil: omnia dies…prima fugit.
Schedule
- Day One: pp. 3-106
- Epigraph, Cather’s Introduction
- Book I, The Shimerdas
- Day Two: pp. 107-218
- Book II, The Hired Girls
- Book III, Lena Lingard
- Day Three: pp. 219-272
- Book IV, The Pioneer Woman’s Story
- Book V, Cuzak’s Boys
Seminar 4 | Declaring Rights
Professor Emma Planinc
3 Sessions
Texts:
- Declaration of Independence, 1776
- Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789
- Danielle Allen, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2014)
- H.G. Wells, The Rights of Man (New York: Vintage Classics Paperback, 2017). Also read “Introduction” by Ali Smith.
- H.G. Wells, short essay, “World Order in Being,” from the New World Order (1940). To be supplied as a PDF.
- The UN Declaration of Rights (1948)
Description:
Seminar 5 | Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
Professor Tom Stapleford
3 Sessions
Texts:
- Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (Modern Library, 1999). ISBN: 978-0679640103
Description:
Published shortly after the author's death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919 and remains one of the great autobiographies in American literature. A direct descendant of two presidents (John Adams and John Quincy Adams, his grandfather), Henry Adams was initially immersed in American politics and diplomacy. But failed reform efforts in the 1870s left Adams disillusioned, and he turned his sights to a more critical analysis of American life through history, producing two biographies and a nine-volume History of the United States of America. The suicide of Adams' wife in 1885 (not discussed in The Education) provided another deep shock, and he embarked on a series of trips across the globe, eventually spending much of his time alternating between Europe and the U.S. His time in Europe reignited his interests in the medieval period, leading to one of his last works, an informal meditation on medieval cathedrals and culture, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (published 1913). The Education of Henry Adams reflects all of these threads and tensions: the reflections of an American who spent much of his time in Europe, the scion of a great Bostonian family who struggled with that legacy, and the keen observations of a critic immersed in the present who was also drawn to the medieval past.
We will not be reading the entire book; stay tuned for specific selections!
Seminar 6 | Whitman, America, and Adhesiveness
Professor Robert Goulding
2 Sessions
Texts:
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1860: The 150th Anniversary Facsimile Edition, ed. Jason Stacy (University of Iowa Press, 2009)
Description:
We will be reading from the 1860 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which is the third version of Whitman's ever-changing collection of poems. The first version, of 1855, consisted of 12 poems, including the famous "Song of Myself." This collection attracted the attention and admiration of Emerson and Thoreau. In the next edition, of 1856, Whitman added some central poems of his corpus, and prefaced the work with an appreciative letter from Emerson (published without Emerson’s permission!). The new poems included “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (then called “Sun-Down Poem”), which so impressed Thoreau that he took the uncharacteristic step of travelling to New York, and visiting Whitman in Brooklyn. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the austere Thoreau and fleshy Whitman found that they had very little in common with each other!
The third edition of 1860 is the result of one of Whitman’s most creative periods, between 1857 and 1859. He added 146 new poems to the 32 poems of the second edition. The poems of the Civil War (Drum Taps) and the poems on Lincoln (especially “When lilac last in the dooryard bloom’d”) were still to come; but apart from them, this third edition contains all the poems that posterity would consider to be “great.”
Whitman made several unsuccessful attempts to find a publisher for this huge new edition. Finally, he was contacted by a Boston publisher who happened to be an enthusiastic admirer of the earlier poems (the publication, unfortunately, bankrupted the firm). Whitman took a particular interest in the ordering of the poems in the volume, which was supposed to present a narrative from beginning (“Proto-Leaf”) to end (“So long!”). In his notebooks at the time, Whitman described this work as “the Great Construction of the New Bible.” And, as the United States moved towards Civil War, Whitman really did intend the work, divided into books, chapters, and verses, to be a new holy book of America: a prophetic celebration of Americanness, and a path to American unity.
“Proto-Leaf,” which opens the volume, would later be given the title “Starting from Paumanok” (the Indian name for Long Island). In this exhilarating poem, Whitman celebrates love and democracy—two inseparable elements of his message—with “a third one,” religion. It is in this context that Whitman introduces the heart of his message: “comradeship,” or “adhesiveness” (a term he borrowed from the popular pseudoscience of phrenology); or, to put it simply, erotic love between men. This was the essential ingredient in his recipe for American peace and unity.
In “Proto-Leaf,” we find Whitman in full prophetic mode. In the Calamus cycle (written in 1859 and appearing first in this edition, starting at p. 341), we find what is perhaps the new Bible’s equivalent of the Psalms. The Calamus poems are for the most part poems of love and despair, addressed to the men whom Whitman loved; as love poetry, they are comparable (in my mind) with Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The title, Calamus, has multiple valences. In ancient myth, Kalamos was a young man who, in grief after the drowning of his lover Karpos, drowned himself and was transformed into a reed. The name also refers to the American marsh-plant sweet flag (Acorus calamus), which became a significant symbol in the poem because of its sweet odor, its medicinal properties, and most importantly, its phallic shape.
- Readings for first class
- Please read “Proto-Leaf,” and Calamus 1, 2, 3.
- Readings for second class
- Calamus 4–13, 16, 17, 20, 23–30, 32–45 (I have cut out a few to reduce the reading; but of course, feel free to read Calamus in its entirety!)