In the August 10 & 17th New Yorker, the talented Malcom Gladwell weighed in with his thoughts about Southern liberalism in To Kill a Mockingbird with a piece entitled “The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism”. Last Saturday, the early morning was soggy and damp again. When I poured the coffee and sat at the kitchen table, I opened the latest New Yorker and was delighted to find that the Mail page contained four letters talking about the article. Here’s a link to this issue: scroll down to mail and click on each writer’s name to read their thinking on the piece.
I thought, “What an interesting place to begin a novel study.”
To Kill a Mockingbird has long been on high school summer reading lists, being taught ubiquitously around the country. First question to mull over: Why is this book part of the high school canon? Gladwell paints a very direct picture of Jim Crow that is still largely submerged in the secondary school classroom (in our culture, too). Ideas appeared before me as I thought about providing background knowledge. How about including Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holiday? Breaking the silence about lynching in America is long overdue and is background knowledge that will add to the study of this novel by offering a realistic view of the 1930s South.
Then I started thinking about the film. So many of us see Gregory Peck when we hear the name Atticus. The film is widely used in teaching the book and Horton Foote’s screenplay is an excellent example of what author John Nickel calls liberal conscience films. You may want to retrieve a copy of Nickels excellent article Disabling African American Men: Liberalism and Race Message Films from Cinema Journal, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Autumn, 2004). Nickels states:
In the history of race message movies, no character better fills the shoes of the
uplifting white father figure than lawyer Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) in To Kill a
Mockingbird. He is benevolent paternalism writ large.
Harper Lee and Horton Foote as author and screenwriter were involved in the zeitgeist of the times. McCarthyism had taken a toll and at the same time a nascent civil rights movement was coming to the foreground of our culture. Go ahead and rent the movie and look at Atticus through the lens offered by Nickel. See if you can observe his assessment:
White paternalism seeps into all facets of To Kill a Mockingbird. Even one of
the central themes of the film and of liberalism generally-the importance of understanding-
is not immune. Understanding is one of the lessons Atticus teaches
on the swing: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from
his point of view … until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” The
concept of understanding, though, is not always innocent, particularly if, in the
terms of Atticus’s comment, “you” are white and the other person’s “skin” is black.
Viewed in this way, white Americans are likely to treat a black person as a specimen
to be examined under a microscope.
The fame accorded this book, a Pulitzer Prize winning classic is of great interest to me. While I agree that the novel is a terrific piece of fiction, isn’t it possible that it’s hallowed place in the canon is part of an awakening white American need to have a way to assuage the way we denied genuine equal rights for so long?
A few days before leaving for Rome at the end of June, I saw the news that Michael Thomas had been awarded the Impac Dublin Prize in a terrific New York Times article by a fine journalist, Larry Rother. I headed straightaway to The Toadstool in Peterborough and packed a copy. On the plane from Boston to Rome and in our cool and welcoming room at the Albergo del Senato after daylong touring and eating, I devoured his book in our four days in Rome. The novel itself covers a period of four frenetic days in the life of an extremely burdened man, a man living in spheres of blackness and whiteness, sobriety and dependence, wealth and poverty, white collar and blue collar… the list is a litany of modern man in so many ways.
The work itself flows energetically and engaged me in a most visceral way. Thomas writes intimately one moment and then paints broad brushstrokes of details that allow the reader breathing space needed to digest, process and survive the dialogue. And like other works dealing with taboo topics, Thomas makes masterful use of humor as a means to keep us working on the novel. One view of this book is through an African-American lens, but a more catholic readership will find much to consider in Man Gone Down.
This book belongs on high school reading lists for a number of reasons, but I am skeptical that we will see it widely taught. But if we are trying to connect our secondary school readers to the importance of the novel, this contemporary offering provides a world that they inhabit and have considerable background knowledge about. And as many reviewers have observed, Thomas is a literary writer and his work offers connections into works by many authors resident in the canon of American literature: think Ellison, Twain, Diaz, Cather and Alvarez to name just a few!
Sorry for not posting. I’ve been so busy. Can’t manage much more than plurk-sized thoughts – might be a problem! While we hear so much about all the whiz bang hi-tech stuff at Christmas, (gee, I was kinda thinking of a Kindle myself), there is nothing so wonderful as receiving those little atoms of ideas – “books, the original laptop” – (full disclosure – I have a t-shirt that makes this assertion)…
Books are always something I like to give and receive, so here are a few possibilities this season.
Don’t miss this little gem of a book. A Guide to the Birds of East Africa is Nicholas Drayson’s tale of Mr. Malik, a widower living in Nairobi, mostly retired, but still much engaged in the business of living.
The book has much to do about people and a little less about birding. Birders and others will enjoy imagining themselves birding in Nairobi and other Kenyan settings, but our souls will delight is this examination of virtue and love, of our struggles to make our way through a world that is typically familiar and foreign simultaneously.
It is great to see paperback availability of Hazel Rowley’s, Richard Wright: The Life and Times. It is a masterful biographical work. Ms. Rowley is exceptionally adroit at crafting beautiful work in this form. I am hoping to see a copy of her bio of Jean-Paul and Simone, Tete-a-Tete under my tree.
Wright is an important American novelist, but as I studied the man and his work, I found myself newly intrigued by his later work, his travel writing. If you are not familiar with Wright’s efforts in this genre, begin with Pagan Spain. This late 1950’s piece combines RW’s terrific power of storytelling with his much developed outsider’s view of post empire, post civil war Spain: a complex and hugely contradictory culture. Though circumstantially different, Wright’s Spain offers vignettes not so unlike the then contemporary American culture. Out-of-print for decades, a renewed scholarly interest in Wright has resulted in many of these “minor” works back in print.
While I’ve yet to read, The Private Abuse of the Public Interest, by Brown and Jacobs, I have chosen to add it it to the reading list of The Political, Social and Economic Aspects of Business. Though I departed daily work in the corporate sphere some years back, it was a serendipitous day a few years back when the dean of the business school asked if I’d like to teach a liberal arts perspective on business to his graduate students. In many ways, it has become a favorite experience: we get to explore the myths necessary to maintain social momentum as we weigh our responsibilities to ourselves and others as we gain greater potential influence.
It was through Pinsky and Dietz’s most laudable An Invitation to Poetry that I discovered Szymborska. Find a book of her work and read about poetry as the asking of questions leading to some construction of meaning or perhaps, to a new level, full of new questions to ponder.
As I plurked the other day, Jim Harrison has a new novel out, The English Major. His autobiography is interesting, though you can get a quick peek at this author in this 2007 NY Times article/interview. On one level, I am thankful for Harrison because I always feel healthy and fit compared to his robust and some would argue reckless verve for life.
Teachers hopefully have a well-worn, dog-eared, heavily annotated copy of Eric Jensen’s 1995 Super Teaching. I was delighted to see a new edition appear – the 4th edition ISBN 978-1-4129-6332-9 just in time for the gifting season. Shred your old copy and pile it on the compost heap. The new volume is slimmer, and reflects new understandings of brain-based learning.
Poet Donald Hall, has published an autobiography, Unpacking the Boxes. I want to read this one over the holiday school recess.
While I love the convenience of online booksellers, I’ll make sure to go to my independent booksellers at The Toadstool this season. Be well, readers.
One is not taxed;
one need not practice;
one simply tips
the throat back
over the spine axis
and asserts the chest.
The wings and the rest
compress a musical
squeeze which floats
a series of notes
upon the breeze.
I think this Daily Show segment of the New Yorker Obamas cover could fuel a terrific 1st class discussion in a high school media literacy or social studies class.
The Fourth Estate seems to have lost its way in their changing profession. I recommend several chapters from Good Work,an excellent and thought provoking work regarding what it means to do ethical and moral work in this time. The authors, Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner examine two: genetics and journalism and seek to determine how to synthesize high-performance and social responsibility.
The theses presented in Good Work applies to our teaching profession also. We bandy about phrases about student engagement and promoting higher-order, critical thinking. This succinct and serious piece from Stewart will be instantly recognizable to our secondary students. How many of them would benefit from seeing this in a school context?
Sharing, Conversation and Collaboration must be integral in our instructional design – and collective action is a means by which the progressive educators can ignite/incite a evolutionary leap in K-20 education.
,an excellent and thought provoking work regarding what it means to do ethical and moral work in this time. The authors, Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner examine two: genetics and journalism and seek to determine how to synthesize high-performance and social responsibility.