Greetings from Chicago!

Looking at my blog posts, it’s hard to believe that my last was in March.  A lot of grading has happened since then as well as prep work for what promises to be a great conference in Pittsburg for NeMLA 2018.  You can find a list of all the Calls for Papers here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/cfp.

Every year Area Directors have the opportunity to promote sessions and roundtables on topics of interest to them or that they believe are under-represented at the conference.  Among the sessions and roundtables I’ve proposed this year are:

What Counts As A War Story?  

This roundtable will examine narratives of war that don’t fit the traditional mold of male-oriented and combat-centered fiction.  After all, there are many ways to serve in the military and plenty of women in uniform.  You can submit an abstract for a presentation to this session here:  https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16693.

Material Culture Studies and American Literature

This panel examines the tension between objects and ideas in American fiction.  What do U.S. authors have to say about the physical environment around them?  How does it support or contradict their beliefs about the world?  Papers on book and periodical history are also welcome.  Especially when the author addresses their own concerns about the production and distribution of their work.  You can submit an abstract for a paper to this session here:  https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16694.

Teaching Disability in American Literature

This roundtable continues what was a fruitful discussion in Hartford, Connecticut on the topic of disability in American literature.  I’d like abstracts to consider not only new texts to teach as part of a disability studies curriculum but also new ways of teaching disability in the classroom using fiction.  You can submit an abstract for a presentation to this session here:  https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17059.

What Happened to the Reader?

This roundtable considers the experience of non-traditional and non-specialist readers of  fiction.  Presentations are especially welcome that examine teaching literary texts in not for credit courses and among non-traditional student populations.  You can submit an abstract for a presentation to this session here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17060.

I hope you’ll consider submitting a proposal for NeMLA 2018.  If you have any questions about the sessions I’ve proposed, please feel free to contact me about them.

Now on to the topic for this month’s blog post.  Almost immediately after finishing up my grading and the session vetting for NeMLA 18 I jumped to the stack of books and articles in my writing space to start working on several projects that had been sitting, waiting for my attention for some time.

The first was a draft of an article based on my roundtable presentation in Baltimore on Drone Fiction.  Plan to submit that article soon to a journal.  The second was the manuscript of my second book on American Agriculture and Immigration that is slowly working its way into shape.  Most of the writing I’ve done on this second project has been in the form of reading notes for the books I’ve finished and brainstorming sheets where I think my way through the concepts I’m reading about in the slowly reducing book pile next to my computer.  I’d like to share some of that writing with you today.

From my reading on Agriculture in the U.S. so far, I’ve discovered three main issues.  The first is that the concepts of Independence and Industry lead the debate over agrarianism and the agrarian ideal.  I’m particularly interested in how the ideology of the physiocrats fits into this debate.  Their view seems to be that the “best” immigrants are those who have an independent mindset while also being hard-working.  This leads them to thrive and “take root” in the new soil in which they have been “transplanted.” The problem then becomes over time that the Yeoman ideal merges with the capitalist image of the entrepreneur.  Can you truly say that you work for yourself when you employ a significant number of non-family workers?  How does the nation feel about immigrant entrepreneurs?  What counts as self-sufficiency?  Writers like Jefferson clearly imagined a balance between independence and industry that historical events tip in favor of industry imagined in capitalist terms.  Profit and efficiency become more important than the dream of a “competency” held by many early national writers (i.e. enough resources to support a comfortable life for one’s family without making them rich).  Yet the image of the independent worker remains.

Second, a facile understanding of nature has hidden the distinction between the pastoral and the georgic in literary history.  The pastoral is an urban and elitist view of the land that excludes the presence of workers and work.  It is definitely a non-farmer’s view of the land.  For better or worse, this mode of literary production in relation to nature has dominated discussions on non-urban life and shaped our view of nature as space “untouched” by humans (i.e. wilderness).  Such spaces, as William Cronon suggests, don’t exist and never really have.  Even the native people in the United States shaped their landscape to fit their needs.  Georgic, in contrast to pastoral, is a working and highly complex landscape. People are part of the ecosystem in the georgic mode rather than intruders.  The question is not, therefore, how to remove them from that space but to imagine a proper relationship to the land.  How do we fit within the ecosystem?  What do we do has humans to shape that system for better and for worse?

Third, like the “West” the Jeffersonian Agrarian Ideal of the Yeoman farmer was always already lost.  Perhaps Jefferson looked out his window at the slaves tending his fields and created his writings on Yeoman farmers to distract him from that unpleasant reality.  Whatever the case may be, the writings on farming in the United States are elegiac and mythic from the very beginning.  We only see this, however, when we focus on the workers and the labor they engage in on the land rather than emphasizes the “virgin” wilderness.

That’s all for this post.  I’m going to go back to that stack of books and keep reading.  As I learn more, I’ll share it with you.

Until Next Time…..

John Casey