"We are a plain people, that have nothing to do with the mere pleasures and luxuries of life: and hence there has sprung up within us a quick-sightedness to the failings of literary men, and an aversion to everything that is not practical, operative, and thorough-going"--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Leverenz's chapter focuses on an interesting subject: American "manliness" and the idea that masculine tensions were crucial in understanding American print culture. But I don't want to focus on that because the quote above got me thinking about something else.
I took a philosophy course once where the professor asked on the first day of class "Why are all of you here? You should be taking business classes, or construction management classes, or doing SOMETHING practical. Why are you here?" He was serious, and he truly wanted to know why we were all sitting in a classroom at 8 am wanting to learn about epistemology.
In giving this example, I guess I'm grouping philosophy with literature--as a member of the "humanities" or "liberal arts." And it's a truly interesting question, and I think Longfellow is getting at the same idea in the quote above. To a certain extent, there is a belief amongst people that studies in these fields aren't practical in any way. How is studying poetry going to earn you any money or benefit society? It's a misguided question, because of course there are practical ways in which literature studies and the like benefit ourselves and the societies we belong to.
But I won't get into that, because I'm guessing that most of you are on the same page as me. But what I am interested in, and what I think Leverenz is interested in, is the origins of this type of question. Why has there always been, it seems, that the arts and humanities are viewed as non-practical? As Leverenz notes, if you were a writer, you were probably an anonymous one because of the negative connotations related to authorship.
I've never thought about this question in the way Leverenz does. Writing, and the profession of writing was "unmanly", and who in their right mind what ever want to be unmanly. Leverenz points out that American manlihood has always been associated with "the gentlemen, the artisan, and the entrepenuer," and the writer, I guess, just doesn't fall into those categories?
As definitions of "success" began to change in the 19th century, so did the connotations of being a writer. But I'm not so sure that those same definitions apply today. "Success" is often measured in terms of monetary gain or societal impact, and I believe that those things are hard to measure in our field.
Hi Klay, great blog, and great Longfellow quote. The question of Humanities and utility is, of course, still being debated. Philosophy and literature constantly have to be defended against charges of impracticality. But to this debate Leverenz adds some fascinating twists concerning questions of manhood. Men had to provide for their families, and yet these early antebellum writers were rarely successful in competing in the literary marketplace. No one they overcompensated by celebrating manly qualities. dw
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