Forget XMas...

...or any other ways you have of abbreviating "Christmas." Onechan just invented the best one ever. It happened this evening when she was trying to write a card to one of her day care providers. What she was trying to write was "Have a nice Christmas." What she actually wrote was four hearts in a row, followed by "QSMS." Not bad, eh? Reads just like she says it: kwissmiss. Her 5th birthday is 24 days away....

On Hawthorne and Douglass: A Research Note

I haven't done too much with Hawthorne's "Egotism; or, the Bosom-Serpent" (1843) since I mentioned it here and here, but this passage from Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (5 July 1852) got me thinking about it again:

Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venemous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destory it forever!

I don't think Douglass was intentionally reallegorizing "Egotism," but his switching of the gender of the afflicted victim and the location/actions of the serpent sure puts Hawthorne's short story in a different light, doesn't it?

On the Double Positive

Onechan (five in late December) and imoto (two-and-a-half today!) were building a room for their dolls in the play room in our house this past weekend, complete with bunk bed (a kids' bench, turned upside down), pillows, blankets, and all the necessary accessories: a plate filled with small change for snacks, a bucket of golf balls (some real) for entertainment, a shovel, and an assortment of other doll-appropriate toys. I was grading in another room, while the Full Metal Archivist was doing homework in still another one. Because mine was closer to the play room, onechan kept coming in to update me on their progress. The first time I saw their room, I was impressed. I think I even called it "awesome." Perhaps that's why, in an effort to get my attention a few minutes later, onechan deployed the double positive: "Dad, it's more awesomer! Come on!" She may even have reached for the triple positive still later: "It's even more awesomer now!" And indeed it was.

Hawthorne/Izumi Update

Ah, the wonders of teh internets! Not to mention the kindness of strangers and the generosity of friends! Since I last wrote on a possible Hawthorne/Izumi connection--Izumi perhaps using the crisis of faith and epistemology in "Young Goodman Brown" to add some interesting resonances to his meditation on dreams and reality, life and death in "One Day in Spring"--I've heard back from Charles Shiro Inouye and Susan Napier at Tufts and my friend Koichi Fujino at Seinan Gakuin University in Fukuoka. The bottom line: there's no definitive evidence either way on whether Izumi could have read "Young Goodman Brown" before 1906. In fact, they know of no work in English or Japanese that takes on the question directly.

The Full Metal Archivist approached the question from an oblique angle that may well prove to be helpful. She noted that Izumi's mentor--おざき こうよう Kouyou Ozaki--read a good deal of literature in English and was a huge influence on Izumi in his literary and wider life. So it's possible that Izumi heard about "Young Goodman Brown" from his mentor. Another line of research to pursue.

What makes this very specific empirical question of perhaps wider interest is that it points to a more general problem: when an intertextual reading isolates structural homologies, what ought we to do with them? I speculated with my students in class Friday on any number of directions we might go in to pursue everything from the meaning and significance to the implications and stakes of the structural homologies, should they actually turn out to be intentional allusions on Izumi's part. Clarifying the conditions of possibility for an actual case of translinguistic/transcultural influence/revision can do more than establish a factual base for an interpretive reading; it can also help reveal pathways for transnational communication at the turn into the 20th century.

Brother, Can You Spare 15 Minutes?

To help out some NYU researchers by filling out their survey? And post the link (with comments closed) on your blog? Please don't do anything to bias the survey results...thanks!

Fredonia State Protests Intolerance

Jessica Kalny (words) and Mike Wayman (photos), two students from my Intro to Grad Studies in English seminar this semester, collaborated on the following report.

***

On October 7, 2008, a man named “Jim” obtained permission to enter campus for the day. He has been visiting several SUNY campuses to spread his message. However, it is not the kind of message that one would want to pass on to the next generation. His message was one of intolerance, particularly against the “typical college lifestyle” and homosexuals.



Rather than responding with violence or cruelty, over 2,000 students and faculty members of Fredonia State gathered together to protest his bigoted message. When you consider the fact that there about 6,000 students and faculty members total, you can imagine how big this event truly was.



Having been there, I can tell you that it was an extremely powerful scene. To see so many peers coming together to prove that intolerance is not acceptable. We did not show any disrespect towards Jim, and I’m sure that he expected us to. As a campus, we wanted to show him that it is not right under any circumstance to discriminate against any group of individuals.

After a number of students spoke their minds about this topic, the percussion guild showed their support by playing several songs which many of the students danced along to. I can honestly say that this protest made me proud to be a part of such a tolerant campus community.

***

For more on the spontaneous protests, check out coverage in the local newspaper. Here's one of the many youtube clips that went up soon after the protests:



[Update 1 (10/30/08, 8:11 pm): My old sparring partner The Objectivist sees the protestors as the agents of intolerance here. And there's a vigorous debate on the faculty listserv I may comment on later.]

Using Hawthorne in Meiji Japan

Waiting for the day when I can research the following topic in the middle of the night from the comforts of home to my satisfaction: could Kyoka Izumi have been consciously alluding to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" at the end of the first part of "One Day in Spring" (1906)? The answer is most likely "no." Not only does the standard list of conscious Japanese Hawthorne-alluders start in 1908 (with the exception of one 1887 novel by Kososhi Miyazaki), but Izumi would also most likely had to have read Hawthorne's tale in English, as it wasn't a favorite of his early Japanese translators. Still, there are enough textual (journey into woods, bizarre encounters, possible dream, chilling effects) and generic (gothic, fantastic, romanticism) parallels to warrant further investigation. Charles Shiro Inouye mentions in his critical biography The Similitude of Blossoms that Izumi read Hawthorne's Peter Parley's Universal History, so it's at least possible he could have read Hawthorne's short stories before 1906. Looks like I'll also be interlibrary-loaning Susan Napier's The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature.

When I get onto campus in a few hours, it'll be a nice break from grading to check out the MLA Bibliography and email Inouye and Napier. I'll let you all know what I dig up.