Literary Depictions of / Literature as "Archive"

Hi, everyone.

As promised, I offer further discussion questions for your Research Journal Log. Some of these were inspired by last week's role play on arrangement and dis/order, and some were inspired by today's discussion of Hoosier folklore and our quick analysis of Dillon's "category disorder" and of Sanborn's "Humorous Women." As we move steadily into the next unit and begin thinking about your individual archival research projects, it becomes more important for me to see what and how much you can do with text -- i.e., demonstrating how your ideas stem from the texts we read, demonstrating how you can eloquently put two or more complicated texts into conversation with each other, and demonstrating how much you can unpack a segment or passage by noting patterns, analogies, key terms, or useful paraphrases that in turn illuminate other parts of the text.

1) In the "Preface" to Hoosier School-Master, Eggleston lists some implicit hopes for the novel alongside some of his concerns about writing it (including, perhaps, that his novel could contribute to the formation of a Hoosier literature). One such concern was that readers would think he exaggerated his dialectical descriptions, rather than preserving their "true usus loquendi" (6). Do you notice any patterns in the dialectic, i.e., according to social standing, gender, political orientation, etc.? In other words, is Eggleston's Hoosier provincialism classifiable by any other means?

2) Look up "assemblage" in the OED and the SAA Glossary (both are linked to our Course Resources page). Craft a new definition, in which you synthesize these entries with Elizabeth Maddock Dillon's notion of "category disorder" and Deleuze and Guattari's "lines of articulation or segmentarity." Then, locate a segment or passage from Hoosier School-Master that has to do with leaving or not leaving historical evidences behind, and that you can justify as assemblage.

3) Compare two or more scenes or accounts of domesticity in Hoosier School-Master. What are the politics in such a comparison, i.e., what "forms of agency and power float across different relationships" that are only made visible in the act of comparing (Dillon)?

4) How are those politics similar to or different from Steedman's "memory" of Richard Hoggart's 1958 "rag rug" in Elizabeth Gaskell's 1848 novel (Steedman 113-115)?

5) According to Jarratt, in what ways should the Hoosier School-Master (or literary histories in general) be suspect? On what basis? Please draw heavily on both texts.

6) If you were editing Eggleston's manuscript in 1871 from serial to book form, would you prefer to leave the strikes in the text to show it is a revision in progress, to move the strikes to the endnotes, or to erase them altogether? Justify your response.

-Professor Graban

The Hoosier School-Master

Dear Seminar Members:

As promised, here are some questions in advance of Tuesday's "Literary Depictions of/Literature as Archive" discussion. Eggleston's novel is somewhat long and may seem tangential to the themes of our class thus far, so these questions are intended to help you focus (and not to spoil your unadulterated enjoyment of the book).

1) Select one scene from the novel that you think is the most "historically rich" or "critically insightful." Be prepared to unpack it for us in class on Tuesday, to justify your selection, and to bring it into conversation with something we have already read in class.

2) The Hoosier School-Master is fiction, not documentary, but Eggleston considered himself to be a competent historian of rural education. How does he (seem to) rely on history in his novel to document the Hoosier teacher? As you read, do you see evidence of what could be archival discoveries, or can you envision how he might have used archival information to craft the story?

3) Where should we be skeptical of the "history" he narrates? In other words, in what ways do you think "Hoosier education" represents a construct of specific social or institutional beliefs?

See you next week,

-Professor Graban