Archives for November 2019

Guest blogger Jason S. Farr, of Marquette University, concludes University Press Week with his profound and personal post on disability and perception.

When I was 29, I suddenly found myself struggling to hear professors speak in the graduate seminars I attended. Conversations with friends and classmates became minefields of misunderstanding and sources of frustration. My physician referred me to an audiologist for a hearing test. She sat me in a dark booth and placed heavy headphones over my ears. Alone and filled with anxiety, I went on to fail an impossible test: somewhat discernible beeps followed by faint beeps followed by silence and the ringing oblivion of my tinnitus. The audiologist showed me the exam’s results, a line graph which plummeted at the mid-to-high frequencies. The diagnosis shocked me: I was severely hearing impaired.

The audiologist advised me to purchase behind-the-ear hearing aids but I opted for the completely-in-canal ones because they were less visible. They would require more repairs and would be uncomfortable to wear, she warned me, but I was ashamed. To have a visible indication of diminished capacity was unthinkable to me at the time. In retrospect, I wasn’t just confronting profound cognitive disorientation due to the mechanized, digital soundscapes I was learning to process; I was reconciling myself to how people reacted when they noticed the hearing aids themselves. The question that I came to dread in casual conversation was “what happened to you?” which may as well have been, “what’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you able-bodied?” For a young man navigating the body-driven subculture of gay San Diego, hearing aids called attention to my disability, and disability was something I regarded as compromising the body I was building in the gym and on basketball courts. Coming out as gay seven years prior to all of this was grueling, but coming out as disabled offered an entirely new set of challenges. In many ways, claiming my disability was even more difficult than claiming my gayness because of how deeply embedded and unchecked ableism is in our social and medical systems.

In the face of all this, I continued through the PhD program in Literature at UC San Diego where I would soon become acquainted with disability studies. One of my professors, Michael Davidson, introduced me to this vibrant interdisciplinary field and, consequently, to new ways of thinking about myself and others. In disability studies, for instance, disability is conceived of as a social and cultural phenomenon, not merely a physical one. Disabled people are often regarded as defective. But by reading disability activists and scholars, I soon learned that disabled people are manifestations of biological and cultural diversity, impaired perhaps in our bodies and minds but ultimately constrained by the communities we navigate, by the systems of thought to which we are exposed, and even by language itself, which reinforces ableism with clichéd metaphors of blindness-as-ignorance, of deafness-as-obtuseness, and of crippling-as-inhibiting.

When it came time for me to write my dissertation, I turned to disability studies to help me understand how literature reimagines social and political structures. I began by writing about Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, published in 1762. Scott’s utopian novel depicts a British country estate run by variably-embodied women whose utter abhorrence of heterosexuality and patriarchy is matched in intensity only by their boundless love for each other. Curiously, all of the servants of the estate, and the inhabitants that live within the estate’s walls, are what we would today call disabled—deaf, blind, maimed, short-statured, neuroatypical, and so on. What I eventually realized was that, in writing queer and disabled bodies into her narrative, Scott imagines a social order that remedies the wrongs of her day. In Scott’s utopian reckoning, variable bodies and queer intimacy work together to reform a society that prizes freak shows and treats women as property.

The book that eventually came out of my dissertation and which was recently published with Bucknell University Press, Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature, is the culmination of years of research and rewriting. It argues that Scott’s novel and other fictional narratives from the eighteenth century reveal the extent to which ableism and homophobia govern social life, but it also shows that, through the disabled and queer bodies that they imagine, authors opened up new avenues of lived experience for readers from the eighteenth century forward.

Much like the fictional characters in the novels I write about, becoming disabled has enabled me to perceive myself and the world differently. It helps me to discern more acutely the plights of the people who compose the communities I inhabit. It spurs me to try to improve these communities in my own imperfect and limited ways. I don’t want to downplay the exhaustion I feel at the end of classes and office hours, after listening as attentively as possible to the ideas, questions, and concerns of students and colleagues. But I’m also motivated and energized by my impairment. Like the fictional characters of eighteenth-century novels, my body is novel, it is extraordinary, and it is rewriting the script that was designed for me. My hearing is unwieldy, to be sure, but it is also directing me toward new social landscapes whose expansive vistas I am only just beginning to perceive.

In recognition of day #4 of UP Week, two staff members tell you what it’s really like to be part of the small but dedicated team that makes up the Bucknell University Press.

Working for the Bucknell University Press has been one of my favorite parts of my college experience. We’re a small press, which means that I’ve had the opportunity to see so many parts of the process of scholarly publishing. I’ve written contracts, interviewed authors, and helped make acquisition decisions. Of course, not all of my friends entirely understand what I do. Three years in, I still have to explain to my fellow students that no, I do not work for the university newspaper; the BUP is a real press that publishes scholarly monographs. They’re usually surprised to hear Bucknell even has a university press like we do. The BUP is truly one of our campus’s hidden gems.

–Nate Freed ’21, Bucknell University Press Presidential Fellow

I originally came Bucknell for a position as the Museum Fellow at the Samek Art Museum. I had previously worked in museums and other visual arts organizations so I was new to the publishing world when I started at Bucknell University Press. I am a lifelong book lover, so it has been great to see the publishing process from start to finish. One of my favorite parts of the job is getting to look over manuscripts. I check them for formatting issues and make notes of things that authors need to correct or sometimes I correct issues myself. Once a manuscript is ready to move forward in the publishing process, getting to assign them ISBNs is exciting as well.

–Emily Owen, M.A., Bucknell University Press Editorial Assistant

Guest blog post by BUP author Tim Wenzell in recognition of University Press Week 2019

As humanism has evolved over the centuries, it has maintained and nurtured itself through empathy—having it, expressing it, and passing it on. In the humanities and literature, passing it on through the written word, through poetry, fiction, and non-fiction has functioned as a way of inducing action through reading and thinking:

*Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle to expose the appalling working conditions in the meat-packing industry. His description of rotten and contaminated meat, and the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants, shocked the public, all the way up the ladder to President Teddy Roosevelt, and led to the busting of the beef trusts and new federal food safety laws.

*Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath as a means of communicating the flawed system of growing and distribution (refusal of crop rotation crucial to the soil for profit = Dust Bowl) present in 1930s America. Political and activist movements focusing on the plight of migrant workers arose from this increased awareness from reading this important novel. Steinbeck stated that he wrote the novel with the express intention of shaming those in power responsible for the misery of the Great Depression. Steinbeck said, ”I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”

*Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring and the environmental movement exploded across American consciousness, turned the light on environmental destruction for the sake of profit, and paid attention to chemicals and poison being dumped into the air and water. It was a book to which Senator Gruening remarked, “Every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history.”

But can books alter history today in the same manner, or at least in the same large increments, that they did in the past? With so many books to read now, and so many ways to read them, is there not enough time left to think and act? More specifically, in the wake of Rachel Carson over half a century ago, how can we, as stewards of an environment that is rapidly collapsing on us, accomplish the task of getting the public to read, think, act?

Silent Spring was a wake-up call and frightening for sure. But do we, as would-be stewards of the environment, need to frighten in order to get the public to act? While climate change and its implications can clearly frighten, and we have been saturated by this from climatologists and ecologists, from social media to academic presses, is fear enough in the 21^st century to alter the course of history? While action is being taken to combat climate change, attention paid to these concerns has been diluted and supplanted by other threats and spectacles that take up more room in the news than a changing planet, fueling more localized fears of economic downturn, of mass shootings, of illegal immigration, among others. Because of these distractions, climate change loses its rightful place as Number One imminent threat to humanity.

This is the direction to which humanism must now gravitate: empathy toward the non-human, through an understanding that the non-human informs the human. Instead of relying solely on climatologists and ecologists delivering facts (and with them fear), another approach might be working to increase empathy. Instead of attempting to provoke thinking and action through fear of a planet turning against us by our own design, humanists are uniquely positioned to influence thought and action by teaching, writing about, and reading writers who focus on the natural world. In so doing, our students and readers may come to a more organic understanding of what is being lost. Humanists can make readers lovers of diverse cultures, but through attention to the literatures and landscapes of those cultures, rather than through fearmongering.

This was the purpose of writing and editing Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature (Bucknell University Press, 2019). Ireland is one small country on the planet, no bigger than the state of Maine, but culturally and historically it is much larger than that—and geographically, too, as one of the most naturally diverse and beautiful countries on the planet. Its geography has had an outsized influence on Irish culture, especially its literature. The anthology moves through time and nature to see, from a humanistic perspective, the relationship between Irish culture and the natural world, presenting a chronicle of voices from the early Irish monks in a forested Ireland to the voices of modern poets and naturalists who speak across a rapidly changing landscape of urban sprawl. All speak from a love of the natural world; this thread unites these writers as a culture and a people. Finally, a collection like this can inspire efforts toward the preservation of Ireland’s natural world; indeed, the anthology closes with a list of environmental organizations in Ireland.

As stewards of the environment, we need to provide more attention to nature literature everywhere, because it is everywhere. As a humanist, writing a book about nature literature that pertains to a particular geography is a way to zone in on environmental issues within that geography by displaying its cultural artifacts together in one place, chapter by chapter through time, as a testament to the living, breathing power of that natural world. Perhaps reading about the natural world will inspire action, fueled by empathy and a love of nature, rather than by fear. This direction in humanism is framed and defined by the non-human, by geography and change. The history and stories of humanity, told from particular landscapes in flux and in danger of disappearing, are vital. Without those particular landscapes, there is no humanism because there is no humanity.

Tim Wenzell

Associate Professor

Department of Humanities

Virginia Union University

Read posts from other presses in honor of UP Week 2019:

Oregon State University Press: http://osupress.oregonstate.edu/blog

University of Minnesota Press: http://uminnpressblog.com

University Press of Mississippi: https://www.upress.state.ms.us/News

Harvard University Press: https://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/

University of Toronto Press: https://utorontopress.com/ca/blog

Barnes, a scholar of early modern literature and gender theory, makes use of source materials—police report, autopsy results, suicide note, and death certificate—to inform his own memories and understanding, and in so doing seeks to come to terms with his brother’s death and their complex relationship as gay siblings in a conservative Midwestern family.

Presidential Fellow Nate Freed posed the following questions to Barnes, who is also the author of Post-Closet Masculinities in Early Modern England (Bucknell University Press, 2009).

Freed: Writing The Dark Eclipse must have required a different approach from that of your last book, Post-Closet Masculinities, a traditional scholarly work. How did you find this transition from monograph to memoir-style essays? How did you conceive of these essays, and how did you think differently about style and audience while writing them?

Barnes: When I wrote Post-Closet Masculinities, I was interested in the historical construction of the concept of masculinity as a (seemingly) stable identity in western culture. My desire to write the book was born out of an intellectual curiosity from having read Shakespeare’s plays and the metaphysical poets like John Donne. But this intellectual desire was also informed by my personal experience of having grown up in a family of seven boys and one girl. My familial experience, that is, had intuitively taught me that there were unspoken rules about being masculine—rules to do with emotional output and behavioral codes—although as a kid these rules didn’t feel natural to me. In many ways I was the antithesis of the masculine ideal that reigned in my family. I don’t know if this feeling of not belonging in that hyper-masculine family came from being a gay kid—a sissy, really—growing up in a conservative Catholic, male-dominated family, or if having a creative personality in a family of practical business-minded people made me more sensitive to the brutal nature of masculinity. Either way, I’d always struggled with my place in such a family and so my intellectual pursuit in Post-Closet Masculinities was to satisfy that question of how one performs that kind of masculinity that I’d witnessed growing up, a performance that I wasn’t able to claim.

As a student in a doctoral program, I was taught that the personal or the emotional is suppressed in order to engage the intellectual, to prove, really, that the research you conduct is unbiased, which is an impossible thing to do. As scholars and intellectuals our desires obviously inform our pursuits although we are taught to hide those desires—at least this is the lesson I took from being a scholar and an intellectual.

While I was researching this book, I was hired as the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. As a liberal arts college embedded in an art and design institute, we were outsiders in every way, and thus as a school we were allowed—or we decided—to ignore the ways such divisions are supposed to behave in the academy. We made up our own rules. This freedom came from the art and design ethos that drove Pratt. This ethos also had a profound effect on how I saw myself as an academic. It allowed me to put aside that notion that a scholar must suppress the personal in order to highlight the intellectual.

In 2015, I decided to get my MFA in Creative Writing to help me with this transition. The research and the research methodologies I used to write The Dark Eclipse were informed by my doctoral training although the narrative arc of the book is informed by my MFA. I think that I achieved what I wanted to achieve; that is, to write a book whose emotional content comes first and whose intellectual premise comes second —the exact reverse of what I was taught to do as a scholar.

Freed: How did you find the craft of life writing? Was there any aspect of tackling this sort of writing that you found surprising, perhaps surprisingly difficult?

Barnes: While promoting this book, people consistently asked me if I had a hard time revealing such personal information and painful events. They also told me that I was brave for writing this book. I didn’t find it difficult nor did I consider myself brave, primarily because I have always been a person who needed to tell my story. I did find that writing about my brother Mike and his suicide was as painful as when I experienced the event itself over 25 years ago. The painful memories were just as sharp writing this book as they were back in 1993 when I traveled to New York to identify his body.

Freed: What has the response been that you’ve received? Was it what you expected and/or, perhaps, hoped?

Barnes: The response to this book has been great, and surprising. First, I realized that many people have had to experience the loss of a loved one through suicide, and that loss is often not discussed because suicide is still taboo. Many people thanked me for writing the book because it allowed them to deal with their own experiences with suicide. 

I was also surprised that many people came up to me and told me their deepest secrets about loved ones who’d died, or about their own attempts at suicide. At first, I was taken aback by their frankness, but then I realized that they were entrusting me with secrets they hadn’t told anyone else because they felt a bond between us. Eventually, I realized that as a memoirist I had a responsibility to accept my readers’ responses even if they made me uncomfortable. That is, I felt an obligation to listen to their stories because they had invested their time and money in reading my stories.

Freed: You write detailed scenes with specific dialogue throughout The Dark Eclipse. How much of this dialogue was literally spoken, and how much is paraphrasing?

Barnes: This question is the question that memoirists have to tackle, and each of us has to answer it in our own ways. I know writers and teachers—some of my own teachers—who insist that dialogue in memoir must be completely accurate to the actual event. I know other writers and teachers—some of my teachers, as well—who believe that dialogue in memoir must be true to the emotional content of the scene, but without being made out of whole cloth. I align with this second group more than the first because memory necessarily plays with the accuracy of past events. 

However, in The Dark Eclipse, there are dialogues that I am certain are completely accurate to the event, especially events that were imprinted so firmly in my hippocampus. For example, the scenes in the book at the morgue and at the lunch after my parents and I identified my brother’s body are 100% accurate. I can never forget those words. For other scenes in the book that contain dialogue, I relied on my memory of the event to capture the emotional essence of that event and used dialogue to relay that emotion as best as I could.

Freed: How did you decide the order in which to place the different essays in The Dark Eclipse?

Barnes: One aspect of the book that I like is that there is a narrative arc that is pretty straight-forward: my brother Mike committed suicide; I travelled to New York with my parents to identify his body; my parents claimed his body and buried it back in our home state, even though I was certain Mike wouldn’t have wanted that. Decades later, at the behest of a therapist, I decide to find out the facts of Mike’s death by looking at the documents that surround his death—the police report, the autopsy, Mike’s account of his illnesses, the death certificate—and other documents that informed my relationship with Mike—the coming out letter, the movie “Prospero’s Book” (which is its own kind of document), and Edith Wharton’s novel “The House of Mirth,” which helped me to understand Mike’s suicide when suicide—and certainly Mike’s suicide—seem impossible to understand. Thus the narrative arc follows the on two tracks: the suicide event from 1993, and my desire to uncover the facts of that event in 2015.

So, the structure of the book is determined firstly by the narrative arc, and secondly by a weaving together of the official and personal documents in the timeframe in which they were produced or in the order I encountered them.

Freed: The jacket copy states that “[You have] not been able to let [your brother Mike] go. This book is [your] attempt to do so.” Would you say that The Dark Eclipse was successful in allowing you to let Mike go?

Barnes: During the two months of radio interviews that I did for this book—interviews that can be heard on my website drawbarnes.com—interviewers consistently asked me this question. I’ve thought about this question a lot, and I think the best way to describe what happened to me in writing this book and putting it out in the world is that it allowed me to cordon Mike into a specific area of my brain, of my memory, where I allow him to live without interfering with my everyday life, which used to be the case. This was especially true when I went through difficult periods of my life and Mike was ever-present as a dangerous example of how I could end the suffering I was then going through. That is, he was a kind of seductive presence, a voice in my head that said I could simply commit suicide and thus end the pain I was going through, as I assume he decided to do. In writing this book, I’ve been able to relegate him and that suicidal voice to a specific area of my memory where it is allowed to live without influencing the way I life my life today.

On the occasion of University Press Week 2019, Erin M. Goss, editor of the contributed volume Jane Austen and Comedy, spoke to us about the evergreen appeal of Austen’s work and her purposeful use of comedy therein. She is interviewed here by Samek Museum Fellow and Bucknell University Press editorial assistant Emily Owen.

Jane Austen’s work has remained a part of popular culture for so many years. Why do you think that is?
Because it charms on so very many levels – even on the level of the pedantic English professor (that’s me!) who resists being charmed by it. Austen somehow manages to give just about everybody what they want.

Why did you decide to edit a volume specifically about comedy in Jane Austen?  
The short answer is that I’ve been teaching a course on Jane Austen and Comedy for several years now and have learned a lot from it about ways to think about comedy and humor, as well as about the kinds of assumptions that people bring to thinking about them. A longer answer is that I started teaching that course in the first place because I came to an appreciation for Jane Austen rather late in life for such a thing, and I came to it specifically through a recognition of her humor and laughter. One of the trickiest things to teach and to talk about, I find, is tone, and Jane Austen’s tone is both masterful and the very core of her comedy. When I realized that she made me laugh a lot I found myself finally wanting to give her my time.
An even longer answer is that one of the things that has long drawn me to comedy and to laughter is my own training (one might say conditioning) in what is too often legible as the despair of high theory. I want to find in laughter and comedy a version of thinking that does not rely on tropes of tragedy (the always-already dead subject, etc.) but that still retains the kind of rigor and intensity that drew me into theoretical discourses in the first place. This is maybe summed up best for me by a non-academic writer, Rebecca Solnit, who I quote in the book, when she writes in Hope in the Dark (2004) that tragedy is “seductive” and may well make “the greatest art,” but that it is comedy that allows for survival. Tragedy is sublime, but “Survival is funny.” She’s talking about something different from literary history and critical theory because she’s thinking about the history of leftist political activism rather than the twists and turns of academic discourse, and I guess when I think about comedy and laughter ultimately I am too.

What is something about Jane Austen and her writing that readers can expect to learn from this collection?
Austen’s comedy is multi-faceted, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, of course. But those facets come together as a form of not just entertainment but of thinking. I think Austen thought a great deal about what it meant to laugh, and to make others laugh. Both of these are especially tricky propositions for women, both then and now, when we continue to have absurd debates about whether or not women can be funny at all. I hope that a reader of the book might find new ways to think about the ways that comedy and laughter and humor might matter more than we had previously thought.

What surprised you the most while working on this project? Did you learn anything new? 
Maybe just that it’s quite hard to say anything definitive on comedy and laughter. Even those two terms are so distinct from one another and in some respects not even necessarily related. I started the project with a deep investment to honoring laughter but also to reflecting on a generic or traditional form of comedy, with all its commitments to wish-fulfillment and happy endings. Coming to a clear and definitive position, though, on what those two things necessarily have to do with one another has proven harder than I anticipated. I am so grateful to the contributors to the volume, who certainly helped me think through that question. It’s one to which I will continue to return.

What is your personal favorite Jane Austen story?
Emma, easily. I’ve gained a great appreciation for Northanger Abbey over the years of teaching it, especially as I’ve seen it flummox and sometimes even anger my students. That response has helped me understand some of the apparent weaknesses of the novel (which many call her worst, and so on), but it has also helped me see what it looks like when she hasn’t yet perhaps learned (or decided) to entirely conceal her bite. Emma is a masterpiece of biting without admitting it; Northanger Abbey perhaps reminds too much that the reader is also a subject for amusement.

Would you like to add any other comments? 
I’m so grateful to Bucknell for the chance to work on this book. Thanks for the chance to keep thinking about it here, and happy University Press Week!

Erin M. Goss is associate professor of English at Clemson University, editor of Jane Austen and Comedy, and author of Revealing Bodies: Anatomy, Allegory, and the Grounds of Knowledge in the Long Eighteenth Century (both published by Bucknell University Press).