Indholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2020 i The American Scholar

THE SURVEILLANCE STATE in which we live, as Thomas A. Bass writes in our cover story, aspires to a condition of “total information awareness,” where everything that is knowable about each of us is collected to be analyzed or sold. We have for the most part accepted this situation passively and benefited from it in ways ranging from how we shop to how we travel to how we communicate. Since 9/11, the surveillance state has kept us safe from terrorism, or so we’re told, and now holds out the possibility of keeping us safe from the current pandemic and those that follow. To contemplate the downside of total information awareness, begin with George Orwell. What it cannot bring us, apparently, is wisdom. Or even common sense. Who can resist blaming…

“MY LIFE IS A TANGO, my heart a Grand Guignol,” declared Max Jacob in his poem “Romantic Allusions to Mardi-Gras.” He could have listed many other such contradictions. Born in Brittany in 1876 to a secular Jewish shopkeeping family, Jacob was a convert to Roman Catholicism, a gay man who feared he would go to hell for his loves, a bohemian who spent 14 years as a lay associate of a Benedictine monastery, a provincial who hobnobbed with the Parisian elite. Picasso’s first French friend and guide to French life, Jacob helped to revolutionize the art of poetry as Picasso was reinventing painting. And although Jacob is known primarily as a writer—the author of Le Cornet à dés (The Dice Cup), a collection of radical prose poems from 1917, the…

Anjali Sachdeva’s debut work of fiction, All the Names They Used for God, was an NPR Best Book of 2018, won the 2019 Chautauqua Prize, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. In 2020, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. This excerpt comes from her novel-in-progress, which follows the effects of an infectious disease that alters only female behavior, leading to a gender-segregated society. Anna woke up at 3 a.m., ravenous. Cole was deep asleep, as were the kids when she padded quietly past their rooms. In the kitchen she opened the refrigerator and stared into its glowing innards. There was leftover salmon, mac and cheese, a teetering stack of yogurt cups. None of it was appealing. She gave up and moved to the window…

IN 1786, JEREMY BENTHAM was visiting his younger brother, Samuel, an engineer overseeing the laborers on one of Prince Potemkin’s Russian estates, when he learned about his brother’s invention of the panopticon. Samuel’s idea was to create a circular structure incorporating the “inspection principle.” This would allow a limited number of overseers to extract the maximum amount of labor from workers. Watched from a central vantage point, and not able to see into the tower looming over them, workers, fearfully exposed and constantly visible, would end up surveilling themselves. Bentham, the great utilitarian tinkerer, took his brother’s idea back to England and tried to interest the government in building panopticon prisons. Forced laborers outfitted with looms and controlled by the inspection principle could become a profit center for the state.…

THAT THERE IS A CRISIS in the humanities will be news to no one in American higher education. Diagnoses, defenses, and remedies have been so commonplace in writing about the subject, for so long, that this crisis, even to those in the midst of it, can feel like a steady state, just business as usual. Still, with the tenure-track job market drying up like a once life-giving river now parched by climate change, the tone has grown darker. In January, The New York Times ran an op-ed titled “The Apocalypse of the Academy.” And that was before Covid-19 turned everyone lucky enough to have a laptop and decent broadband into a headshot on Zoom. My computer keeps telling me: “Your connection is unstable.” The precarious condition of the humanities is…

This story, first printed in the Yiddish Forverts on September 22, 1968, appeared under the pseudonym Yitskhok Varshavski. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s use of pseudonyms in Yiddish has long been discussed and assumed to have a hierarchical structure—Yitskhok Bashevis for his most recognizable work, Yitskhok Varshavski for literary criticism and memoir, and D. Segal for subject matter that might be considered lowbrow. But Singer also published a few works of fiction under the Varshavski name when he felt that the story might be controversial or unusual for readers. This was the case with his most famous autobiographical collection, published in English as In My Father’s Court (1966), and his novel The Charlatan (1967–1968), a masterpiece of existential angst set in New York in the time of the Holocaust—it appeared in serial…

IN THE OLD DAYS OF VAUDEVILLE and burlesque, standup comics weren’t the only speakers to take to the stage. Another breed of noble performer also stood and delivered, sometimes presenting serious monologues, sometimes simply talking. A few of these artists crossed over to oral interpretation, reciting tried-and-true set pieces from oratory, drama, and poetry. A rare few others did something better : they wove characters and whole dramas out of their imaginations and offered them up for their audiences. This was performance,long before the advent of performance art. Henry James offered this legendary bit of encouragement: “My dear child, you have woven your own very beautiful little Persian carpet. Stand on it!” The greatest of these unclassifiables was Ruth Draper (1884–1956). In 1935, a Pittsburgh columnist, puzzling over how to…

RADICAL HAMILTON: Economic Lessons From a Misunderstood Founder BY CHRISTIAN PARENTI Verso, 304 pp., $26.95 SINCE LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA’S musical became a Broadway sensation and made the 1804 Burr-Hamilton duel “of the moment,” the field of Revolutionary and early republican American history has found itself caught in the crossfire. For those who prefer it that way, the men in powdered wigs are no longer dead white guys; they’re streetwise. It all sounds new, but it’s not. Every generation has refashioned the Founders in its own image, mixing patriotic lore with filiopietistic tales to enshrine America’s cherished ideals. After his death, George Washington was revered as a demigod and saint, with his Jesus-like apotheosis captured in art and eulogy. New England poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow turned Paul Revere into a democratic symbol…

FOLLOWING DONALD TRUMP’S election, a poem by Langston Hughes started trending on social media and, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and others in police custody, the poem has found new urgency. Perhaps it was the word again that first drew people’s attention. Decades before Trump used the word in his 2016 campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again,” Hughes published a poem called “Let America Be America Again.” Lamenting the conditions of the Depression, with millions unemployed, the poem asks what happened to America, the purported “homeland of the free.” Sometimes referred to as the “poet laureate of Harlem,” Hughes was born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri, and raised in the Midwest. After living in Mexico for a year, he arrived in New York in 1921…

(Fall Term) XVIII Browsing the criticism section of the campus used bookshop, I unearth a copy of my scholarly monograph on postcolonial Graveyard Poets, already thick with dust, misplaced between Ramazani and Ransom. “Goodnight bears,” Mira says, knocking over a tower of unshelved philology. “Goodnight chairs.” Opening to the flyleaf, I turn up the inscription—penned, in my defense, under the influence of departmental reception chardonnay—as somebody breaks down a box in the next aisle. For Z—Friend to junior faculty Mon semblable Colleague and liberator— An elevator drops to a sub-basement level inside me. I consider burying the text under the foundation of some government building. I picture myself abusing Z’s remains in a manner that does not bear repeating here. Tucking the offending volume beneath an anniversary edition of Margaret…

THE THEORY OF GENERAL RELATIVITY burst into public awareness when observations made off the west coast of Africa during a 1919 solar eclipse confirmed one of Albert Einstein’s most astonishing assertions: that large masses, like the sun, warp space and thus bend the path of light. Legend has it that Arthur Stanley Eddington, the British astronomer who corroborated the theory when he measured the angle of starlight deflection, was asked whether it was true that only three people in the world understood relativity. After a moment, Eddington supposedly replied: “Who’s the third?” Announcing relativity’s vindication, The New York Times had to explain who Einstein was (“a Swiss citizen,” it laconically offered) and, in the lead paragraph of its account, bluntly acknowledged that “it is not possible to put Einstein’s theory…

Although best known for his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury was also a prolific writer of short stories, having published his first while still a teenager. This previously unpublished story likely dates to 1950, the year The Martian Chronicles appeared. Bradbury brought a fertile imagination to bear on his works of fantasy, horror, and science fiction—some of the most popular of the last century. As his close friend and bibliographer Donn Albright remembers, that imagination kept firing even while the writer was asleep. “Ray woke in middle of the night,” Albright recalls, “and would write dreams down, then later go back and ‘finish’ them. It’s the case here and in many of his stories.” Bradbury, however, never quite finished “The Joke.” According to the scholar Jonathan Eller, the writer…

HENRY DAVID THOREAU liked to compare himself to a rooster whose crowing wakes his neighbors, calling them back from sleep to an awareness of the present. “We cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past,” Thoreau wrote in his classic 1862 essay “Walking.” Robert D. Richardson, Thoreau’s biographer, embraced this sentiment and was himself such a rooster. Throughout his writing life, Richardson advocated for the sufficiency of the here and now over some imagined historical greatness lost in the mists of time—this even though, as one of the great literary biographers of his era, he was a connoisseur of the past. A strange rooster, indeed. Richardson, who died in June, was the…

WAGNERISM: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music BY ALEX ROSS Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 784 pp., $40 MUSICAL GENIUS AND bombastic bigot, Richard Wagner (1813–1883) is a cultural Rorschach test. Whereas Thomas Mann saw in him “the greatest talent in the entire history of art,” Friedrich Nietzsche, once a fawning disciple and family intimate, asked: “Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches. He has made music sick.” Leonard Bernstein addressed the spirit of the German composer with exquisite ambivalence: “Richard Wagner, I hate you; but I hate you on my knees.” When the Ring cycle—Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung—inaugurated the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876, it was a testament to Wagner’s grandiosity and a challenge to…

THE WEIRDEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous BY JOSEPH HENRICH Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 704 pp., $35 THERE IS A PUZZLE at the heart of my academic work. I am an anthropologist, and among other things, I study the voices (or auditory hallucinations) of people in different countries who have schizophrenia. Their voices are clearly shaped by local culture. In Shanghai, the hospital patients hear politicians, and in Chennai, they hear their kin. But the voices reported in the United States stand out from the rest—more violent, more alien, more mean. It’s weird. The puzzle of that weirdness is the point of this big book. Joseph Henrich, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, is the lead author (with coauthors Steve…

We should build parks that students from afar Would choose to starve in, rather than go home … We must have many Lincoln-hearted men. —Vachel Lindsay, “On the Building of Springfield,” 1912 When the researchers posed as pedestrians waiting to cross a street, all the drivers in cheap cars respected their right of way, while those in expensive cars drove right on by 46.2 percent of the time, even when they’d made eye contact with the pedestrian waiting to cross. … When [the Berkeley psychologists] left a jar of candy at the entrance to their lab with a sign saying whatever was left over would be given to kids at a nearby school, they found that wealthier people stole more candy from the babies. —Christopher Ryan, “Why Are Rich People…