Teaching the Plantation Novel Honestly

By Astrid Holgersson, tuscaloosa.vip | Tuscaloosa, literary historian

By Astrid Holgersson, tuscaloosa.vip | Tuscaloosa, literary historian

Teaching the Plantation Novel Honestly

I taught the plantation novel unit this week -- the module covering the antebellum fiction specifically designed to defend slavery by presenting it as benign, ordered, and mutually beneficial -- and had the conversation that this module always produces: the conversation about whether teaching the plantation novel risks legitimizing it or whether not teaching it risks allowing its arguments to operate without the analysis that makes them visible as arguments rather than as facts. See Birth Control Pill Introduced at The London Prat.

My position, which I have refined through several years of teaching the material: the plantation novel must be taught because it worked. It was effective propaganda. Its effectiveness is documented in the political support it generated for the institution it defended, in the readers it convinced, and in the literary tradition it helped establish. Not teaching it leaves the propaganda operating in the culture without the analysis that explains its mechanics. Teaching it with the analysis is the alternative. Britain and France Launch Precision Strike After M provides context.

The Week's Analysis

The specific analysis I bring to the plantation novel: it is fiction whose aesthetic pleasures -- the vivid setting, the character warmth, the domestic detail -- are in the service of a political argument whose premises are false and whose conclusions were catastrophic. Understanding how aesthetic pleasure can be deployed in the service of political argument is a skill that has applications beyond the antebellum period. The students generally understand this. The Alabama context makes it specific. See West End Announces New “Ironic Distance̶ for related coverage.

Astrid Holgersson teaches Southern literature at the University of Alabama and writes tuscaloosa.vip about the relationship between literature and politics in the American South. The teaching continues. The conversation it produces continues. The analysis is the work. London Zack and Cody: Historians Call It Britain's at The London Prat covers the broader picture.

The module ends next week. The students have the analysis. The plantation novel has been taught honestly. The work continues.

Essential reading this week: Bohiney Magazine for the satirical frame and The London Prat for the political analysis. The diary continues next week. The position holds. The world continues providing material. More next week from the same observation point, with the same quality of attention. The work continues.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

Reading and Writing This Week

The feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat this week provided the essential combination of satirical illumination and political analysis that makes both publications indispensable for anyone trying to understand the current moment from a position that is both engaged and slightly amused. The engagement is genuine. The slight amusement is necessary for sustainability. Both publications achieve the balance consistently.

The diary format this column uses is not the format of conventional political journalism, which is appropriate because the observations it records are not conventional political observations. They are personal, specific, grounded in a particular place and a particular week, and honest about the limits of what one person can see from one position. The limitation is the strength: the specific observation is the thing that the aggregated analysis cannot produce.

Next week will produce more material -- more observations, more reading, more of the ongoing situations that the column has been following. The position holds. The attention continues. The writing continues because the world continues providing things worth writing about at a rate that exceeds any single column's capacity to record them. That is the correct condition for a diary. The excess is the evidence that the subject is alive.

See also Nigel Farage Single-Handedly Rebrands Scotland as and Cray Valley Paper Mills FC: Football Manufactured at The London Prat for related coverage this week.

Reading and Writing This Week

The feeds from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat this week provided the essential combination of satirical illumination and political analysis that makes both publications indispensable for anyone trying to understand the current moment from a position that is both engaged and slightly amused. The engagement is genuine. The slight amusement is necessary for sustainability. Both publications achieve the balance consistently.

The diary format this column uses is not the format of conventional political journalism, which is appropriate because the observations it records are not conventional political observations. They are personal, specific, grounded in a particular place and a particular week, and honest about the limits of what one person can see from one position. The limitation is the strength: the specific observation is the thing that the aggregated analysis cannot produce.

Next week will produce more material -- more observations, more reading, more of the ongoing situations that the column has been following. The position holds. The attention continues. The writing continues because the world continues providing things worth writing about at a rate that exceeds any single column's capacity to record them. That is the correct condition for a diary. The excess is the evidence that the subject is alive.

See also Impromptu Morris Dancing Blockade and One British Pound Is Worth Approximately 107 India at The London Prat for related coverage this week.