Hello Blog Group. I guess this is goodbye (tears).

Wow. So...I CAN'T BELIEVE this is my last blog. I mean seriously, it's been a wild and crazy ride. I have learned copious, abundant, bountiful, profuse amounts in this class over the course of the semester, and I'm totally more confident in myself as a writer and researcher. Really––that's not just a nice thing to say in parting. It's what I believe.

My conference presentation went well. It could have gone better. But I am at peace with whatever grade I receive for it, and for the class. Now, that is not to say I wouldn't have done a few things differently. It's pretty easy to pass around the lie of "no regrets," but everyone has stuff they would change in their life when they look back, even those people who get "No Regrets" tattooed on their bicep like my roommate :) So, I'm going to share a couple things I would have changed about my conference presentation and the research process leading up to it:

First and definitely foremost, I would have procrastinated less during the first half of the semester. Waiting till the last minute and nearly killing myself to squeeze and get things in on time has been (pardon the cliché...wow, I sound like Pam on The Office) the story of my life. But I really turned it around, for the most part, down the home stretch. And that is probably the first time I've really been on top of my sh...business going into finals. Yay me. Actually, yay you, too; I'm so glad the class had the layout it did, because the accountability and feedback from classmates and teacher was invaluable.

Second: in retrospect, I probably could have diversified my research methods a bit more. Looking at books and J-STOR, and coasting off of Jill Newby’s awesomeness were great. But I wanted to use more methods, including some kind of quantitative study, especially after seeing other people’s presentations. And yes, this is more difficult with my artifact and the project I undertook, but it was still a possibility. I would like to have interviewed some kind of Twain scholar here at the university, or at least someone who is as big a fan as I am. Also, I think I could have done some kind of survey of peers regarding celebrity and Mark Twain. I might have even been able to look at some old newspaper archives too or something to find what everyday people were saying about the autobiography when it came out, instead of just taking scholars‘ words for it that the work was not well-received when it came out.

Third, I would have timed out and better-prepared my presentation. I got a little too loosey-goosey with the first 3/4 of the talk, and the ending really suffered. I was so frazzled that I couldn’t even answer Kara’s question––a question which I totally had a better answer for. And I apologize.

Fourth, I would have paid more attention to all the class’s presentations via blogs, because they were so FREAKING cool and I didn’t pop my head out of my own little project-shell to realize this until they presented (Yes, Becca. You can say “I told you so”). I was blown away by how creative and thought-provoking they were. I kind of feel like mine sucked in comparison, at least on the level of coolness. That is why next time Crown Jewel Robusto cigars are definitely a go.

That’s all I can think of right now that I would have changed––or at least the extent I will choose to share with you, as the author of this blog and the ultimate authority of memories and truth within it. Thank you for a great semester and I hope to hang out with you again soon. God Bless.

Ben

Burkean Slacker

So, I didn’t really have a fruitful week in researching my artifact. I’ll be honest. I got really behind, and I worked like a dog to finish some other key assignments in a very panicked, unhealthily sleep-deprived manner. However, I DID read the Burke excerpt and take some notes, which I’m sure I will be able to use somehow in my research/presentation of my artifact.

- The perspctive within our methodology/theoretical framework is our "theory of drama."
- Parts of persuasive essays parallel the acts in a play.
- The model of human drama as means of explanation in the social sciences is the alternative to the scientific “mechanicistic” model (stimulus, response, and the conditioned reflex)
- The U.S. Constitution (and documents like it, for that matter) should not be looked at as an isolation or an end-all to law or reason in our country, but it should be seen for what it really is––a rejoinder to the issues/questions/philosophies of its day
- Dialectal terms require an opposite: "apple" is non-dialectal, but "freedom" is dialectal.
- This universal human drama arises from the unending conversation/exchange of ideas that is in turn caused by the genius of MAN...and of course WOMAN as well (I know both genders were implied when Burke wrote this but are no longer now and that is why I've corrected him)
- When I grow up, I want to be an Aristotelian trucker.

oops. I forgot to include how I could use postmodernism as a theoretical framework in my research...okay, SO

- Twain was the first to really move away from the traditional autobiography and write not from a linear, more "objective" view of his life. His autobiography was highly original in that it was fictionalized in many parts, it was not chronological, and it was representative of the FRAGMENTED self––which is very postmodern. Twain is never really looked at as a postmodern writer, BUT HE IS. Think about it––his life's work, fictional novels, were all essentially based on parts of his own life. So, one might ask, what was true and what wasn't? Well, in postmodern thought, the truth would depend on who you ask––and even then that would not be the definitive truth, because such a thing is unattainable by humans. Why was Twain's autobiography such a colossal failure, both among readers and critics? Because it was a POSTMODERN text that came out in the height of MODERNISM.

- So was Connecticut Yankee––I finally get it!––in the novel, the panacea of the world's ills could not be solved by technology, even when a man travels back in time and thinks he can "save the world" through technological advancements from the future. Human progress is really not progress at all, because we have the same problems in the dark ages that we do now, just in different forms. THIS is so postmodern. This is what Twain was getting at. Wow. cool.

- These are some thoughts. So, moving on to the celebrity area of ideas, Twain may have been the first celebrity because he was the first major figure to deliberately fragment himself, even posthumously. Parts of Twain were in his books, in his self- corporation, in his lectures, even in his trademarked pen-name.

Hello Blog group:)

I apologize for not blogging last week––it wasn't so much like time constraints or other commitments that kept me from writing; I just got in a weird funk and didn't feel like doing anything, let alone posting or commenting. I don't think the funk is a legitimate excuse, but I just thought you should know. It has been a hard last few days for my family and me. Anyways, for this blog I will write a bit more about postmodernism (now that I have a little better understanding of it), and then I will briefly write on some ideas about possibly using the postmodernist framework in researching my artifact.

So Pomo. Yeah, the angry stepchild of the disciplines or whatever I called it last time. It is still FREAKING HARD to define, but I have gotten my brain around some of its key characteristics thanks to a couple a handy articles my presentation group shared with me ("What is Postmodernism" by Christian Theologian Paul Copan, and "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" by literary critic and Marxist political theorist Fredric Jameson):

- Postmodernism is "anti-dualistic": Modernist philosophy in Western culture had the effect of creating dualisms (wrong/right, true/false, western/eastern and so on). Postmodernism stays away from these because they do exclude other options/less represented ideas or people. Pomo is about pluralism and diversity.

- Postmodernism questions texts: the historical accuracy/objectivity of a text, no matter who wrote it (individually or corporately) cannot be trusted as true or unbiased. Every writer has an agenda and is inevitably influenced by his or her culture and place in history

- Truth is a matter of perspective: At birth, we are thrown into an environment that we cannot get out of; we will never be able to see reality from an all-seeing, objective viewpoint. So what is true for one person may not be true for another.

- Language as truth: According to postmodernism, we cannot have truth without language. Language creates thought, and therefor creates truth

Where was this weekend when I needed it like three days ago?

Progress in hunt for Definition of Celebrity:

Cultural studies author David Marshall, in his book Celebrity and Power, calls much of modern popular celebrity discourse veiled individualist rhetoric. This is is going on top of my ever-growing stack of celebrity definitions.

More findings, including those from “Trademark Twain” chapter of Author’s Inc. by Loren Glass

The rise of consumer capitalism in the United States from 1880-1920 coincided with a notable increase in the publication of autobiographies by authors...they coincided, but were not a coincidence

Novels themselves became more autobiographical too––Little Women, Martin Eden etc. Eventually literary criticism took on more and more investigation into author’s lives as background for analysis of their work...again not a coincidence.

Twain was the one that most embodied this overlap of cultural performance of authorial personality and the generic reliance on authorial autobiography

As I said in my last blog, Twain never really distinguished between real-life and storied life. It could be said that his novels were actually just as autobiographical in one way or another than his actual autobiography.

An interesting quote from his preface to The Innocents Abroad reads: “I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-writing that may be charged against me––for I think I have seen with impartial eyes and (italics mine) I am sure I have at least written honestly, whether wisely or not."

Twain got in trouble a young man, writing for the Territorial Enterprise by making up fictional stories and then publishing them as actual credible news stories.

One of his many aphorisms on truth, Twain once wrote “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.”

Mark Twain corporatized himself. The Mark Twain Company, founded in 1908, which became the Mark Twain foundation in 1962, is now under control of the Manufacturers Hanover Trust, which is one of New York’s largest investment banks.


Theoretical Frameworks: Po-Mo

The more I study postmodernism, the harder it gets to define and the more I realize how counterintuitive and goofy it is. It just seems like the angry, left-out child among other theoretical frameworks that points out everyone’s shortcomings to make itself feel better. And that is my verdict for now. Maybe with more study I will find its true meaning...but that’s just it, isn’t it? It’s impossible to find meaning in a theoretical framework that is based on the impossibility of finding meaning. As Charlie Brown would say, "Oh drat!"

The Original Celebrity Death-Match? Hmmm...we'll see.

So, going back to week 5, a week which I failed to blog on, I am staying within the vein of sociology for this week’s blog...sociology in a more cultural-studies area...and cultural studies in the area of celebrity studies. And with that said, I would like to share that I am currently at the point in my research where it is looking like OTHER literary figures besides Mark Twain maybe were modern-style celebrities before him...namely the British poet Lord Byron, a.k.a George Gordon Byron a.k.a. the 6th baron of Rochdale, a.k.a the original British Heartthrob.

...this project may pan out to be the original celebrity death-match of Lord Byron v. Mark Twain. We’ll shall see.

So my main question right now is...What defines a modern celebrity? Of which I have checked out 6 books from the library on and intend to study over the weekend. But this week I looked at the...

Similarities between the careers of Twain and Byron! Here are some of my findings.

The poem “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” which was Based on Byron’s world travels, was what launched him into fame. This is much like how Mark Twain’s travelogue/novel The Innocents Abroad greatly broadened his fame.

Also the self portraiture in their work is similar. Twain and Byron basically wrote themselves into their stories and poems (not always completely non-fictionally)––and once readers fell in love with them as characters, they fell in love with them as authors and real people. Ghislane McDayter in his book (at I think it would be “his”––“Ghislane” is a male name, right? OR am I just a sexist for assuming so?) Byromania and the Birth of Celebrity Culture, he writes that “Byron “survives in the valley of his saying” precisely because of his reluctance to create a recognizable divide between his life in history and his life in art.” This is almost EXACTLY how Twain operated––so much so that his literary executioner, Albert Bigelow Paine, claimed that when Twain was nearing death, his dictation of his life for his autobiography was completely in anecdotal form, and Twain himself could not (or would not) discern between what actually happened and what made great stories.

The argument/goal of the book makes it seem like a very worthwhile resource for me: “What this book will argue is not that Byron created celebrity but rather that his fame provides an ideal test case for examining the complex matrix of forces of what lead to what we now think of as celebrity.”...which is kind of how I would like to phrase what I’m doing in the case of Twain.

Both Twain and Byron have been named the “literary lion” or just the “lion” of their day by fans.

Both Twain and Byron had work (well, in Twain’s case it was more like quotations) that was attributed to them, but was not actually made by them...which could constitute as the early makings of celebrity gossip, couldn’t it?

Their work came out during the 19th century, with Byron near the beginning and Twain near the end, when the world was undergoing colossal political and industrial changes––much of which was driven by the evolution/modernization of printing. They used the technology to their benefit. Books became a commodity of the masses.

More on Byron:

Byron’s readers and fans went too far in admiring him when they took to making false books and poems (essentially, the first documented case of fan-fiction) and then published and sold them under his name. Copyright law at the time (which first was established about a century before) by the Statute of Anne in 1710) . And this, as one could imagine, ruined Byron’s already questionable reputation.

My friend, Ghislaine, makes the point that the same republican tendency that started the French revolution was the same that created the democratization of readership, and hence the literary mob/cult following of Byron. In his forming of a never-before-seen huge democratic readership, Byron eventually was overthrown by his fans.


MORE TO COME THIS WEEKEND! YAY.

WOW I'm bad at keeping up with this blog thing: Possible Journals for article submission

Two Potential Academic Journals for Article Submission

1) The Mark Twain Annual

Mission Statement, according to website:

“Aim and Scope: The Mark Twain Annual publishes critical and pedagogical articles about Mark Twain.” And “The Mark Twain Annual is now part of the highly anticipated American Literature Collection, an online collection of exceptional journals devoted to the study of American authors. Other journals in the collection include The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Leviathan, Poe Studies, and Steinbeck Review.”

Author Guidlines:
“Critical articles may be 10-20 pages long; pedagogical articles are generally shorter (in fact, we welcome 'toolbox' teaching items). Book reviews are up to 4 pages and are assigned by the editor. Please send books for review or requests to review a book to the editor.”

Observations on Table of Contents:
The journal contains the editor’s “Re: Marks,” two pedagogical essays, six critical essays, and three book reviews.
The first pedagogical essay is titled: “Blind Apexes and Scholarly Vision: Mark Twain Studies and The Art of High Performance Driving Or The Road Fast Traveled,” which I think is profoundly interesting. It seems like something I would read. And it gives me confidence in my own project, since it makes a connection of Twain studies to something practical and relevant in modern society. Celebrity culture may not always be practical, I realize, but it is beyond pervasive in our culture.

2) Celebrity Studies

Mission Statement or Aims/Scope: “Celebrity Studies is a journal that focuses on the critical exploration of celebrity, stardom and fame. It seeks to make sense of celebrity by drawing upon a range of (inter)disciplinary approaches, media forms, historical periods and national contexts. Celebrity Studies aims to address key issues in the production, circulation and consumption of fame, and its manifestations in both contemporary and historical contexts, while functioning as a key site for academic debate about the enterprise of celebrity studies itself. Alongside the primary articles, the journal will include a ‘blog' section devoted to shorter observations, debates or issues in celebrity culture, in conjunction with book reviews and conference reports.”

Since this Journal is coming in 2010, I could not find the TOC for its first issue. However, I think a paper on my artifact would be suitable material for submission since it would describe a manifestation of celebrity in a historical and international context, and might also shed light on the enterprise of celebrity studies itself.

...but seriously. I need help formulating research questions. This Topic feels like a snipe-hunt. And it is SO broad right now. Yeah, I'm definitely going to office hours.

Yeah. I'm doing the celebrity one.

So,

I am now looking at the celebrity side of Mark Twain and using the man himself as my cultural artifact. I am super stoked to embark upon this quest...the only problem is that I decided this Yesterday. I am about 2/3 of the way done on my artifact review...which, honestly, is extremely challenging to make into more a movie review and not a biography. I'll most likely turn it in tomorrow in ML for 10% less. BUT I am hopeful. And it's going to rock. That's all for now.

My Creative Endeavors are in Twain...and currently in twain

Hi. I am finally posting what I want to use as my cultural artifact. To begin things, I’ll just say that I have long been a reader and fan of Mark Twain. His writing is simply unparalleled; it is not only edifying, but so ingeniously hilarious that I have wet myself while reading. No really, I have—like all down my left pant leg and into my shoe.

So I thought it would be a good idea to base this research project on something related to Twain, especially since I haven’t had the opportunity to study his work or literature surrounding his work in a classroom setting—at least at the university level. After a bit of research, actually a “bit” is an exaggeration so I’ll just say a crumb, yes after a crumb of research on local and global cultural artifacts and possible arguments, I have come to settle on TWO ideas.

I would either like to use the novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or Mark Twain himself as my local cultural artifact. If I ended up using the former, I would look at some dominant themes in the book, particularly how Twain addresses the American models of individualism and technology, and how they relate to the rest of the world. If I used the latter I would most likely do a study of Mark Twain as America’s “first” celebrity: what qualified him to be a celebrity, whether or not he was the first, and how celebrity culture has evolved into what it is today.

With all that said, my super-awesome blog group, I would appreciate any feedback on my current ideas for the project. And the sooner you can comment the better, seeing as how the current essay assignment is due soon. I’m just curious: which of the two ideas do you think I should choose? Which would be the one you’d be more interested in? Any other suggestions? Is this blog too ridiculous? Do you want me to leave this group?

Thank you.

- Ben

Yay. This is my first blog. Na na-na na-na na!