As for so many early twentieth-century women writers, modernism for Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was at once a blessing and a curse. It stimulated her best work, and then scorned her aesthetic. It incorporated her theatrical innovations, and proceeded to ignore their creator. It made her reputation, but only to repudiate it. In order to understand these seeming paradoxes, that slippery term, “modernism,” or, more accurately, “modernisms,” must be defined in its gendered American historical context before we turn to Susan Glaspell herself.

Much of the exuberance of American nineteenth-century literary culture arose from the belief that art and life are indivisible. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, who greatly influenced Glaspell, concludes in “The Poet”(1842), “The poets are thus liberating gods … They are free, and they make free”(236). Although Emerson addressed his exhortations to “men,”women, too, believed that their writings would and should affect the lives of their compatriots. One of the major goals of the so-called domestic and sentimental novelists of mid-century was to evoke feeling or “sentiment”in their readers, but feeling was the means to an end, not the end itself. In her “Concluding Remarks”to her best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe admonished her readers, “There is one thing that every individual can do, - they can see to it that they feel right”(624), and then act upon that feeling to end slavery. When Abraham Lincoln addressed Stowe in 1863 as “the little lady who made this big war,”his condescending comment did acknowledge that Stowe’s art moved her readers to profound change in American life.

Peter Taylor has had two separate careers, one, stretching from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, as a writer of short stories, the other, commencing in 1986 with A Summons to Memphis, as a novelist. The métier of his stories is upper-middle-class life in middle Tennessee. He has a special gift, in such stories as “A Wife of Nashville” and “Cookie,” for portraying the complicated relationships between upper-middle-class white families and their African American cooks. He also is a master of tales of delicate grotesquerie and sexual uneasiness in such stories as “A Spinster’s Tale,” and “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time,” tales that owe some of their strangeness of atmosphere to Carson McCullers but that are also presented with a restraint and understatement unlike that of any other writer of the Southern tradition. Finally, in such stories as “Heads of Houses,” and “In the Miro District,” Taylor captures generational conflicts that are also cultural conflicts, and, since the children are usually less self-consciously Southern than the adults, regional conflicts as well.

In A Summons to Memphis, Taylor also treats a generational quarrel that is also a regional one, in that the entanglement of the protagonist’s family history is also an entanglement with his native region, and fleeing the former is a way of fleeing the latter. The novel provides a metaphorical way of describing the literary predicament of a belated generation of Southern novelists, a generation that must sever its consuming ties with the Renascence generation but must also risk its vitality as novelists if it succeeds in breaking the tie.

When Eudora Welty was a young woman just out of the University of Wisconsin and Columbia Business School, she briefly was a “publicity agent, junior grade” for the Works Progress Administration, and in that capacity she traveled over the eighty two counties of Mississippi, bringing her Kodak with her on bookmobile routes, into juvenile courts, and into Holiness Churches. Republishing those photographs many years later in One Time, One Place (1971) - she pointedly calls them “snapshots,” not only to make clear the casual and amateurish way she took them but also to make clear the relaxed, personal, one-on-one quality of the relationship between the people on both sides of the lens - she reflects that although these pictures were taken in the depth of the Depression, she was grateful that her beginner’s luck gave her what a more practiced method could not have given, “the blessing of showing me the real State of Mississippi, not the abstract state of the Depression.” In particular, she finds that the pictures she took conveyed more about their subjects than any thesis about the South she might have been attempting to prove.

Introduction

Although it is the noblest and most profound in tone of the violin family, the cello is probably the youngest member and certainly the most recently perfected in form and proportion. Although its large size makes it particularly vulnerable to damage, its design (as with its smaller relatives, the violin and viola) has given it a remarkable longevity, and instruments made three hundred years ago are still used and treasured by discerning players.

The cello is a mechanically simple but acoustically complex instrument. (See Fig. 1.1.) The four tapered tuning pegs for adjusting the strings, tuned C–G–d–a, are made usually from hard rosewood (dalbergia latifolia) or boxwood (buxus sempervirens) for durability, and project laterally from a backward-curving pegbox. Proportionally, the pegbox is much broader than that of the violin, in order to accommodate thicker strings, and has distinctive squared shoulders at the lower end. At the upper end is the scroll, a Baroque adornment which is a characteristic feature of all the instruments of the violin family. The slope of the pegbox tensions the strings across the ebony nut, which is slotted to locate and raise them just clear of the surface of the ebony fingerboard, against which the strings are stopped by the fingers of the left hand.

The fingerboard is glued to the neck, which is carved in one piece with the pegbox and scroll from maple (acer pseudoplatanus). It has a curved top in cross-section, usually with a flattened area beneath the C string to allow for the wider vibration of this, the heaviest string. The fingerboard increases in width from the nut to permit wider string spacing at the bridge, allowing easier movement of the bow in string-crossing. The neck joins the body of the cello at the root, which extends to the full depth of the ribs, whilst the fingerboard extends further above the body.

The Native American poet Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) describes the decade of the 1960s as “inspirational,” “creative,” and “invigorating,” because it was a “worldwide phenomenon of third-world peoples decolonizing themselves and expressing their indigenous spirit, especially in Africa and the Americas.” And, Ortiz argues, this “process of decolonizing includes a process of producing literature.” Describing “the condition of the Chicano” in 1972, Luis Valdez, the director of the radical Teatro Campesino, writes, “Our people are a colonized race, and the root of their uniqueness as Man lies buried in the dust of conquest. In order to regain our corazon, our soul, we must reach deep into our people, into the tenderest memory of their beginning.” And then he quotes the poet Alurista:

What many Native American, Asian American, and Chicano writers learned from the experiences of the 1960s is that literature has a crucial role to play in the formation of ethnic identity and the creation of ethnic pride. Asked to compare the so-called Native American Renaissance to the “Harlem Renaissance in black writing,” N. Scott Momaday pointed to Dee Brown’s best-selling revisionist historical account Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), researched and written during the 1960s, as a water-shed; according to Momaday, the publication of Brown’s book created “a sudden disposition to understand the experience of the American Indian. The kind of burgeoning that we’re talking about really happened in the publishing world rather than in any sort of social or political arena.”

Protagoras and Gorgias are the most significant of the early sophists. Although philosophy as we understand it was not their chief business, they taught views and methods of argument that have fascinated subsequent philosophers. In their own context they exhibit the spirit of the new learning, the cultural and intellectual revolution of the fifth century B.C. in Greece. This revolution - or, rather, the reaction against it - is illustrated in Aristophanes' comic play, The Clouds, by a character enrolling in a sophistic school in order to learn the “unjust argument.” This, he has heard, can win a jury's favour for the worst of offenders. The syllabus, he finds, involves science as well as rhetoric, both laughable in this satire. What is not laughable is the popular animosity against the school that leads to its incineration (at least one student included), a grim sign of the strong feelings that would later contribute to the death of the man whose name Aristophanes uses for the leader of his imaginary school - Socrates.

Tennessee Williams’s sense of an oppressive social world, of the diminishing space available to the embattled self, was a product partly of conscience and partly of paranoid vision, but it was shared by his fellow writers. O’Neill’s Yank, trying to embrace the animal when his body is bent to adjust to the mechanical; Miller’s Willy Loman, scattering his seed — literal and symbolic — on the stony ground of his backyard; and Laura Wingfield, defeated by the typewriter and retreating to the cold purity of her glass animals, are all examples of the human defeated by the mechanical. It is a matter, too, of space: the cage and the stokehold of O’Neill, the enclosed backyard of Miller, and the cellular living units of Williams all embody a drastic shrinking, a radical diminution of possibilities that lies at the heart of the work of all these writers. American rhetoric is one of expanding frontiers, proliferating possibilities, unformed selves, economically and politically free individuals. American reality, as portrayed in their work, is constrictive, disillusioning, and deforming.

America is a failed Utopia, an impossible project, built on a Puritan rhetoric of recoverable innocence and an enlightenment polemic of perfectability. It is the grandiloquent nature of America’s promise to itself, and to a world to which it offered itself as a great experiment, that provoked a literature of disillusionment and betrayal. That strain is strong in a drama characterized by its oppositional stance. Thus, O’Neill suggests that his plays have in essence been concerned with the sacrifice of individual to material values; Williams, that his characters are romantics in an unromantic world.

Wittman Ah Sing, the protagonist of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), has a problem. Named for the great poet of American individualism and steeped in American cultural history, Wittman wants to be a latter-day Jack Kerouac, but to his chagrin, he comes to realize that the real Kerouac would never have seen him as a protégé. To Kerouac, Wittman could only have been another Victor Wong, preserved for posterity in Kerouac’s novel Big Sur (1962) as “little Chinese buddy Arthur Ma.” In other words, Wittman wants to be an American Artist — he wants to carve a place for himself in American cultural history — but finds that first he must disengage himself from the subordinate place that American culture has made for him on the basis of his ethnicity.

Wittman’s manic narrative registers the pain of being caught between two cultures, of being increasingly drawn away from the Chinese culture of his ancestors, which he admires, by the dominant, mainstream culture of Whitman, Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, and the University of California at Berkeley, which he also admires. Wittman wants to define an identity for himself that can truly be called “Chinese American,” but to do so he must prevent his Chinese inheritance from being transformed into a safely exotic form of cultural residue: he must prevent the “Chinese” from being marginalized by the “American.” Wittman’s goal is to create a form of public art that can redefine what it means to be “Chinese American” — redefine it for himself, his community, and the larger culture of which both he and his community are a part.

David Mamet is no less fascinated by personal and national psychosis than Sam Shepard. His America also is cracking apart. Like Shepard, he is drawn to a male world of encoded violence and stresses the all but unbridgeable gulf between the sexes. He, too, is fascinated by myths that have collapsed into fantasy, finds in Hollywood a paradigm of tainted dreams, and offers bleak portraits of American alienation. Like Shepard, he peoples his stage with urban cowboys and dramatizes the collapse of language in the face of experience. Sexual Perversity in Chicago has something of the brittle energy of The Tooth of Crime; The Woods offers a requiem for love not very different in spirit from Fool for Love. Mamet’s characters, like Shepard’s, inhabit a burned-over land in which the past exists only as buried fragments, echoes of half-forgotten myths. Shepard’s True West, in which two brothers trash their mother’s home, is echoed in Mamet’s American Buffalo, in which a character trashes a junk store. The peep show in Paris, Texas is reminiscent of that in Edmond. There are also clear differences, however.

There is, behind Mamet’s American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, a consistent critique of American values, of a promise that has become the basis of betrayal, of a spirit of enterprise that has degraded in the direction of crime. History exists and is invoked but has no functional value. Something has disrupted a moral continuity. His America, once invented by a gentleman farmer, is now reinvented by petty criminals (American Buffalo), depressives (Edmond), and confidence tricksters (Glengarry Glen Ross and The Shawl).

INTRODUCTION

Justice was a major topic of debate at Athens during the period that extends from Aeschylus' Eumenides (456 B.C.), with its celebration of the inauguration of the court of the Areopagus, down to the trial and death of Socrates (399 B.C.), memorialized in Plato's Apology. Historians, dramatists, orators, and philosophers provide a range of perspectives and evidence on one of the crucial issues of the age. In the earliest Greek literature human justice had been very closely linked to divine justice and power, but in the fifth century, the time of tribunals and popular assemblies, what chiefly attracts attention is justice purely in the human sphere. Questions are raised about its origin, its connection with nature and truth, its performance, the conditions that can guarantee its development, and the forces that generate its opposite - coercive power, violence, and injustice.

In order to acquire a general idea of the terms in which these issues were explored at the end of the fifth century, it is enough to read the speeches Plato puts into the mouths of Glaucon and Adeimantus at the beginning of book two of his Republic. These speeches provide the best introduction to our theme because they exemplify the cultural background against which Plato develops his great project in this dialogue. Before turning to details, a few words are necessary on some of the questions that emerge in the preceding book.

When at twenty-three Carson McCullers came to fame in 1940 with The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, her first readers thought they knew very well what to make of her. With Erskine Caldwell (and with a completely misread William Faulkner), she was described as a member of the Southern Gothic school, a purgatorial figment of the Northern imagination to which Flannery O’Connor was also consigned. Of her second novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), Time magazine said, with characteristic fatuity, that it “is the Southern school at its most Gothic, but also at its best. It is as though William Faulkner saw to the bottom of matters which merely excite him, shed his stylistic faults, and wrote it all out with Tolstoyan lucidity.” By the time of Clock Without Hands (1961), her fame had faded considerably, and now few critics put her in the first rank even of Southern writers of her own generation. She did have considerable influence, however; Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945), in its sense of emotional thwartedness and its concern with the overpowering misery and hidden obsessions of its characters, owes a great deal to McCullers, as does the brooding lyricism and pungent sexual strangeness of Truman Capote’s first novel Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). (Indeed, Idabell Thompkins in the latter novel could be the blood sister of Mick Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.)

Around the turn of the century, the German school was still at the forefront, its two leading figures being Julius Klengel and Hugo Becker, both representatives of the Dresden school in a direct line from Grützmacher. Despite their shared inheritance of the need for serious interpretation and rejection of the over-Romantic virtuoso style, they were totally different in their concepts of teaching; Klengel's approach was empirical, whereas Becker concentrated more on scientific aspects.

Klengel was born in Leipzig into a family of professional musicians; his first lessons were with Emil Hegar, principal cellist of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. From early childhood he played chamber music with his siblings, and at fifteen joined the Gewandhaus orchestra, succeeding his teacher as principal cellist at the age of twenty-two; the same year he was appointed ‘Royal Professor’ at the Leipzig Conservatoire. Klengel also appeared as a soloist in Germany and in Russia, where he gave the first performance in that country of Haydn's D major Concerto (1887); but he will go down in history for his remarkable teaching gifts. Paul Grümmer, Emanuel Feuermann, Guilhermina Suggia, Edmund Kurtz and William Pleeth are among his most famous pupils. Klengel never encouraged his students to copy, but always helped them to find their own way of playing; thus they were all individual in their approach. Klengel was also a composer who wrote imaginatively for the cello: his works include several concertos and a Hymn for Twelve Cellos, dedicated to the memory of the conductor Arthur Nikisch.

INTRODUCTION

Ancient Greek philosophy arose in a culture whose world had always teemed with divinities. “Everything is full of gods, ”said Thales (Aristotle De an. 1.5, 411a8), and the earliest “theories of everything” were mythological panoramas such as Hesiod's Theogony, in which the genealogy of the gods is also a story about the evolution of the universe. Hence when certain Greeks began to think about the physical world in a philosophical way, they were concerning themselves with matters which it was still quite natural to term “divine, ” even in the context of their new scientific approach. Because of this, it is not entirely obvious where one should draw the line between the theology of the early Greek philosophers and their other achievements. But clarity is not served by classifying as “theological” every statement or view of theirs that features concepts of divinity. To theologize is not simply to theorize using such concepts in a non-incidental way. Rather, it is, for instance, to reflect upon the divine nature, or to rest an argument or explanation on the idea of divinity as such, or to discuss the question of the existence of gods, and to speculate on the grounds or causes of theistic belief.

Despite the emergence of writers who were moving in new directions, the late 1940s was hardly a stellar period in American fiction. Very few major novels were produced. Most of the important books, as we have already seen, either dealt with the war or reflected its aftermath, since very few events altered American life as much as this global conflict. Many novels that were much acclaimed at the time, such as The Naked and the Dead, All the King’s Men, The Young Lions, Guard of Honor, and Other Voices, Other Rooms, seem flawed or dated today; in some cases their authors (Mailer, Capote) went on to make their mark in strikingly different styles. The plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and the hard-boiled films noirs of the era seem stronger today than the fiction of the period. The work of some novelists who were just beginning to write then, including Mailer, James Jones, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, still feels vital and impressive today, yet their work belongs primarily to the literary scene of the next decade.

Nevertheless, the forties were the testing ground for everything that happened in American writing for the next twenty years. As the American economy moved from Depression and war production to affluence, consumerism, and worldwide geopolitical dominance, writers turned away from economic and social concerns to engage more with spiritual and personal issues. The radical politics and progressive social views that were so important between the wars lost favor, despite Harry S. Truman’s unexpected victory over Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.

This multivolume history marks a new beginning in the study of American literature. The first Cambridge History of American Literature (1917) helped introduce a new branch of English writing. The Literary History of the United States, assembled thirty years later under the aegis of Robert E. Spiller, helped establish a new field of academic study. This History embodies the work of a generation of Americanists who have redrawn the boundaries of the field. Trained mainly in the 1960s and early 1970s, representing the broad spectrum of both new and established directions in all branches of American writing, these scholars and critics have shaped, and continue to shape, what has become a major area of modern literary scholarship.

Over the past three decades, Americanist literary criticism has expanded from a border province into a center of humanist studies. The vitality of the field is reflected in the rising interest in American literature nationally and globally, in the scope of scholarly activity, and in the polemical intensity of debate. Significantly, American texts have come to provide a major focus for inter- and cross-disciplinary investigation. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and popular-culture studies, among others, have penetrated to all corners of the profession, but perhaps their single largest base is American literature. The same is true with regard to controversies over multiculturalism and canon formation: the issues are transhistorical and transcultural, but the debates themselves have often turned on American books.

Walker Percy’s novels are the artistic play of a disciplined intellectual with wide spread scientific and philosophical knowlege. A friend from youth of the novelist and historian Shelby Foote, Percy was raised largely in the family of his uncle, William Alexander Percy, whose Lanterns on the Levee: Memoirs of a Planter’s Son (1941) captures the intellectual life of a genteel, romantic, public-minded, scholarly, culturally conservative white Southerner, an outspoken opponent of the Ku Klux Klan and of racist violence (but not of racial segregation) such as Faulkner had portrayed in Gavin Stevens. Percy remembered his “Uncle Will” with affection, but he was also acutely aware of the limitations of the cast of mind his uncle represented and could not bring himself to rely on the mixture of secular traditionalism and fatalism (held in check by noblesse oblige) his uncle lived by.

Percy’s original interests were scientific and medical, leading him to study chemistry at the University of North Carolina and to earn his medical degree from Columbia University in 1941. He also had, during this period, a deep intellectual investment in psychoanalysis, undergoing three years of analysis while in medical school. All of this changed when, during his residency as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital, he contracted tuberculosis from an autopsy patient, and, quarantined for an extended period, began a serious course of philosophical and religious study. The ultimate fruits of this study were his return to the South (he lived in Covington, Louisiana, for most of his life), and his conversion to Roman Cathlicism.