CMTS Announces Participants of the 2020 Park Church Summer Lecture Series
Please note: In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, CMTS has taken precautionary measures to move all lectures from the Barn at Quarry Farm to online at MarkTwainStudies.org. Presenters have agreed to record their lectures and make their talks available at the “Trouble Begins Archive.” Stay safe, everyone.
Wednesday, July 15
“Twains Meet”
Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania
What kinds of self-encounter get memorialized in Mark Twain’s vast and long-secreted Autobiography? Mark Twain has a lot of fun with the play of self-representation, while also wrestling seriously with the challenges of writing both from and against the point of view of his mediatized images. This lecture explores how Twain made and re-made himself into an object of regard—both in living his life and in writing about it—against the backdrop of a nascent culture of mass publicity increasingly defined by photography. Even as a youngster, Samuel Clemens seems to have understood that, against widely shared confidence in photography’s indexical relation to the “real,” it also had the potential to manipulate appearances in a culture that was increasingly riven by antithetical commitments to publicity (the transparency and knowability of the workings of an open society of equals) and to privacy (individual control over public access to one’s own identity and experience). As he grew to become one of the first modern celebrities, Twain continued to watch as America’s democratic culture became more and more dependent on the mechanical reproduction of photographic images, both to expand and to distort popular perception of things “as they really are.”
Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also an affiliated faculty member of the programs in Comparative Literature, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Psychoanalytic Studies. He is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007) and of numerous essays on American and African American Literature, Animal Studies, Cinema Studies, Poetry and Poetics, and Psychoanalytic Studies. His new edition of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days is forthcoming in the Oxford World’s Classics series. Presently, he is completing a comprehensive study of autobiographical writing, called Passing Resemblances.
Wednesday, July 22
““Why We Who Have Dedicated Our Lives to Mark Twain Studies Must Now Interleave His Life, His Works, and His Time with a 21st Century Lens for Teachers and Students”
Jocelyn A. Chadwick, Harvard University Graduate School of Education
As scholars we were and are still being trained and taught to focus our work and research inside of ourselves for dissemination among like-minded colleagues. Essentially, we are experts talking to experts, sharing ideas and discoveries. . . . We are also teachers. Why should we even consider rethinking “how we do business?” This lecture explores four key relevant areas that we who study Mark Twain Studies must rethink, reimagine, and, yes, learn anew how to teach and share the texts—primary/secondary and the personal narratives—if Mark Twain’s Studies are to survive within this century: Generation Z, DisruptTexts, Virtual Learning and Using Primary/Secondary Resources, and Relevance to Us. The very survival of Mark Twain Studies within the elementary-high school classrooms throughout this country—the United States of America—stands on a precarious and fracturing precipice. We no longer can afford to stand aloof, observing and commenting solely in articles. Our audience who must, must, read the articles are classrooms teachers. And we, too, must transitionally extend the conversation well-beyond the article-page to conversations where we listen to teachers and students, exploring, discovering, and learning with them.
Jocelyn A. Chadwick is a life-long English teacher and international scholar. Formerly, a full-time professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, she now lectures occasionally and conducts seminars there. She has published numerous articles and books with one in progress, Writing for Life: Using Literature to Teach Writing, She was invited to the White House as panel member for the series, Celebrating America’s Authors. Current projects include PBS American Masters, PBS The Great American Read, a new book series for the Folger Shakespeare Library, recurring blogs for Larry Ferlazzo in Education Week, consultant for Center for Mark Twain Studies, and Pearson/Savvas, Expert Advice Contributor for NBC TODAY Parenting Team.
Wednesday, July 29
“Between Spectacle and Structure: Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialism”
Stephen Pasqualina, University of Nevada, Reno
by Daniel Carter Beard, published in
Following the Equator (1897)
In a moment when systemic racism has recently gained heightened visibility in the US, this talk explores how Mark Twain grappled with the difficulties of thinking systemically, of comprehending political structures that exceed individual experience. In his anti-imperialist writings, Twain registers that the difficulty of grasping structures lies in the limitations of sight, the sense most often associated with knowledge in modern Europe and the US. From around 1880 until his death in 1910, Twain explored various technological strategies for enfolding deep temporal and spatial structures into visual experience. These uses of “spectacle,” rooted in visual technologies that produce a false but powerful sense of immediacy, included a history board game, a history roadway game, and photography. Twain’s experiments with seemingly anti-historical visual technologies provide important parallels and lessons for our own uses of digital technologies in coming to terms with the relations between police brutality against Black Americans today and the long transnational history of anti-Blackness.
Stephen Pasqualina is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno. His current book project, Mechanical Failure: Modernism, Technology, and the Mediation of History, examines the role of speed and visual media technologies in the US modernist historical imaginary. Work related to this project has recently appeared in Modernism/modernity, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Public Books, and MarkTwainStudies.org.
The Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies was founded in January 1983 with the gift of Quarry Farm to Elmira College by the Langdon family. The Center offers distinctive programs to foster and support Mark Twain scholarship and to strengthen the teaching of Mark Twain at all academic levels. The Center serves the Elmira community and regional, national, and international students and scholars of Mark Twain.
Founded in 1846 by a group of abolitionists, The Park Church has been a strong presence in Elmira’s history and some of its congregation were close friends and family members to Mark Twain. Known for its striking architectural features, The Park Church contained Elmira’s first public library and has a long history of charitable service to the Elmira community. Currently, it is a United Church of Christ open and affirming congregation, welcoming all people to worship and participate in its communal life, regardless of ethnic origin, race, class, age, ability, gender, or sexual orientation.