Welcome to the Promised Land!

From Mt. Nebo, from Biblical Study Tour

From Erzsebet Korb, The Promised Land, c. 1922

"Reality...can only be changed by conversion in the spirit because it is the spirit alone that is finally real." (Jane Tompkins, Reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, in her essay on "Sentimental Power")

"I must be thar, Miss Feely; for when that ar blessed child goes into the kingdom, they'll open the door so wide, we'll all get a look in at the glory" (Uncle Tom, p. 255).

"I looks like gwine to heaven...an't thar where white folks is gwine? Suppose they'd have me thar? I'd rather go to torment, and get away from maw'r and missis" (the old rusk-woman, p. 189).

"'Don't call me poor fellow!...I'm right in the door, going into glory!..I've got the victory....He an't done me no real harm,--only opened the gate of the kingdom for me; that's all!'" (Uncle Tom, 362-363)

Today's topic: what is the meaning of the kingdom of heaven?
Where and how is it found?

W, Mar. 26: 4 pp. of blogging about thinking "generically,"
or about the generic qualities of Uncle Tom's Cabin in particular:
or whatever you have been thinking about over the past month
happy to do conferences ahead of time; not required

II. mid-term evaluations generally positive,
(mostly!) appreciative of on-line and in-class dimensions

regarding our interactions:
--I think a lot of what I like about the class has to do with the people in it. Having a mix of science and humanities majors adds a lot to the conversation.
--I would really like to see more involved discussion. I want to know what everyone is thinking....
--I would prefer more dialog b/t and among students IN THE BLOG.
(easy enough to fix? a redress for the feeling that
--"sometimes I have nothing new/else to say"....?)

perhaps harder to "fix": our resistence to theory--
--Probably what I'm missing is how the theory related to our other readings--I'd like to take a closer look @ that.
--I still feel like we're sort of floating in a sea of genre--choosing willy-nilly what to study...I can't draw immense conclusions or extrapolate about genre too much...mabye I just want a "foundational" story instead of the emerging one.
--I hate theory. It seems over my head and is always written seemingly for an audience with more intense knowledge about the subject.

Marina's posting about how useless I feel theory is to learning about literature

Cf. Jonathan Culler, "What Is Theory?" Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997):

• Theory as genre:
  --speculation
  ---a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions
  --the unsettling of anything that might have been taken for granted
  
• Derrida on writing
  instead of thinking of life as something to which signs and texts are added to represent it, we should conceive of life itself as suffused with signs, made what it is by processes of signification....There is no outside-of-text': when you think you are getting...to 'reality itself', what you find is more text, more signs, chains or supplements.
  
• So what is theory?
  
  • Theory is interdisciplinary - discourse with effects outside an original discipline.
  • Theory is analytical and speculative - an attempt to work out what is involved in what we call sex or language or writing or meaning or the subject.
  • Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural.
  • Theory is reflexive, thinking about thinking, enquiry into the categories we use in making sense of things, in literature and in other discursive practices.
  As a result, theory is intimidating. One of the most dismaying features of theory today is that it is endless....an unbounded corpus of writings...thus a source of intimidation, a resource for constant upstagings...a diabolical sentence condemning you to hard reading in unfamiliar fields, where even the completion of one task will bring not respite but further difficult assignments....
• The unmasterability of theory is a major cause of resistance to it....A good deal of the hostility to theory no doubt comes from the fact that to admit the importance of theory is to make an open-ended commitment, to leave yourself in a position where there are always important things you don't know. But this is the condition of life itself.
• Theory makes you desire mastery: you hope that theoretical reading will give you the concepts to organize and understand the phenomena that concern you. But theory makes mastery impossible...because theory is itself the questioning of presumed results and the assumptions on which they are based. The nature of theory is to undo, through a contesting of premisses and postulates, what you thought you knew, so the effects of theory are not predictable.

IV. Trying to theorize today by using another artistic text:

Bill T. Jones, Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land (1990)

Reactions? What have you just seen? Experienced? Felt? Thought?
Had "The Promised Land" come to Cincinnati (or your hometown)--
would you have danced? Why/why not?

Murphy, Jacqueline Shea. "Unrest and Uncle Tom: Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land." Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance. Ed.Ellen W. Goellner and Jacqueline Shea Murphy. New Brunwick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. 81-106: ...performance whose meaning is largely embodied in its relation with an audience and its dependence on bodies, rather than in the plot climax or story it tells....

"'Now, Jim, show this gentleman how you can dance and sing.' The boy commenced once of those wild, grotesque songs common among the negroes, ...accompanying his singing with many comic evolutions of the hands, feet, and whole body....'here, Topsy...give us a song, now, and show us some of your dancing'....the thing struck up, in a clear shrill voice, an odd negro melody, to which she kept time with her hands and feet, spinning round...in a wild, fantastic sort of time...." Little Harry, like Topsy, dramatizes ways that race is an act. Harry...is clearly not the slave he is depicting....

...one of Stowe's envisionings seems to be for the slaves in the book to be able to dance differently...like refined Europeans....[cf. Adolph and Jane]....Stowe reinforces this idea...by describing her novel...as a ballet....["Topsy...is fairly introduced into our corps de ballet, and will figure, from time to time, with other performers" ]....Stowe's book has...been long and fiercely criticized....conforming readily and submissively to European American culture is a large part of what it meant to be an Uncle Tom in twentieth-century America...Last Supper at Uncle Tom's Cabin/The Promised Land...performs live, vulnerable, naked bodies. The non-narrative form of this performance resonantes with non-Eurocentric dance forms...takes Stowe's "ballet" and turns it into the best kind of postmodern critique....

Let's return to Stowe's work, and see how much critique is built into the novel itself.

Remember my using Tina Zwarg's explanation of the blackface "signifyin" of the novel (Black Sam's humorous manipulation of the chase of Eliza...) to unsettle both Baldwin's and Tompkins's types of types (both stereotypes and archetypes), to say that however we are "scripted," we can go "off script," re-write the script, "signify" the script, "interpollate" the script...?

More from Zwarg: the most surprising aspect of the text is the way that Tom moves from an interesting and cunning subversion of the patriarchal system imposed upon the slave community to a complicity with the overarching patriarchy of Christianity....Tom is a Christ in blackface....the resurrection of a "black" Christ can no more displace the dangerous hierarchy of Christian rhetoric than Eliza's escape in men's clothing can displace the hierarchy between men and women....Tom's death reveals too suddenly the sacrifice at the center of the social contract.

"'Don't call me poor fellow!...I'm right in the door, going into glory!..I've got the victory....He an't done me no real harm,--only opened the gate of the kingdom for me; that's all!'" (Uncle Tom, 362-363)

Beverly Wildung Harrison, "The Power of Anger in the Work of Love," Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, ed. Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ (1989): Sacrifice, I submit, is not a central moral goal or virtue in the Christian life....the aim of love is not to perpetuate crucifixions, but to bring an end to them in a world where they go on and on and and on!...Mark the point well: We are not called to practice the virtue of sacrifice.

Let's look a little more closely @ this matter of sacrifice: