CMTS Announces the 2024 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series Line-Up
The 2024 Trouble Begins Lecture Series and Park Church Summer Lecture Series are made possible by the generous support of The Mark Twain Foundation.
Wednesday, October 2 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Authority and Corruption: Editing the California Pudd’nhead Wilson“
Benjamin Griffin, The Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
In this illustrated talk I discuss the preparation of the new edition of Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, published this year by the University of California Press. The outstanding feature of the edition is that it contains three texts: the text of the Morgan Manuscript, which is the first-completed version, which has never before been published in full. Then follows an edited text of the published (1894) version, thoroughly reconstructed to eliminate the depredations of the Century Magazine; and Those Extraordinary Twins, Clemens’s exhibition of bits of the original version, reworked to form a not very satisfactory magazine article. Editorial work can be daunting but this talk shows it is far from pointless. Examination of the original materials has worked very dramatic changes in the text, and opened many new avenues of interpretation. New light, that is to say, on the central problem of Clemens’s shifting intentions as he overhauled his tale — and on the practices of the editors and printers who labored to tame the text.
Benjamin Griffin is Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, where since 1967 a team of editors has been creating a scholarly edition of Mark Twain’s works. Ben’s editorial credits in that series include the three volumes of Mark Twain’s Autobiography; A Family Sketch and Other Private Writings; Mark Twain’s Civil War; and the three-text edition of Pudd’nhead Wilson. During his twenty years at the Project he has published in many scholarly journals, and taught an undergraduate seminar in Mark Twain and textual criticism.
The 2024 edition of Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson, edited by Benjamin Griffin, will be on sale at a reduced price at the lecture.
Wednesday, October 9 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Mining Gilt”
Kathryn Dolan, Missouri University of Science and Technology
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, is a satirical novel involving greed, corruption, and social issues of the post-Civil Era United States. Both primary family stories in the novel involve the questionable use of natural resources, specifically in terms of speculation and mining. The Hawkins family, with the help of Colonel Sellers, spends the novel overvaluing a piece of Tennessee land, the “Knobs of East Tennessee,” in the hopes of commercializing on its imagined variety of natural resources. Meanwhile, Philip Sterling almost destroys himself searching for coal in a Pennsylvania mine, looking for wealth in a manner that costs his friends and sponsors, the Bolton family, their country home that had been replete with “rare trees and flowers” as well as “garden and lawn and conservatories” (449). In both cases, Twain and Warner shine a light on the blind greed that runs throughout the novel, what they term the “beautiful demon of Money” (447). Mark Twain has been connected to the most controversial issues of his time and beyond, such as racism, women’s rights, imperialism, and even animal welfare. His writing partner, Charles Dudley Warner, was an editor best known for his nonfiction, such as My Summer in a Garden (1870). Together, Twain and Warner are effective at ironically describing and criticizing the exploitation of land witnessed during their time, specifically through mining in much the same way as they do with corrupt politicians. In so doing, they predict the significance of coal that lasts into modern times in much the same way that they predicted the era now referred to as the Gilded Age.
Kathryn Dolan is Associate Professor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on sustainability, food studies, and globalization. She teaches courses on American Romanticism, American Gothic literature, and U.S. short story. In 2015, she taught on Mark Twain in London for a Missouri exchange program. She has published on nineteenth-century expansion and culture in Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850-1905 (2014) and Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination (2021). Her most recent book, Breakfast Cereal: A Global History (2023), examines the cultural history of breakfast cereal, and has been translated into Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese. Her current project, Imagining Tomorrow’s Bread, studies sustainability in descriptions of food in futuristic texts.
Wednesday, October 16 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Mark Twain, the Novel, and 1492”
Timothy Donahue, Oakland University
What if we considered Mark Twain not just as a novelist but also as a novel theorist—that is, as an intellectual aiming to account for the novel-genre’s historical origins and its aesthetic and political prospects? My talk pursues this line of inquiry through a reading of Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (c. 1908).
Critics have paid relatively little attention to the near-simultaneity of that novel’s 1490 setting and Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic. Yet No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger is quite interested in the world-historical transformations that followed from the European arrival in the Americas. In fact, through the miraculous travels of No. 44 across oceans and centuries, the novel traces the spatiotemporal contours of Americanity, Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein’s term for the global colonial modernity that took shape following 1492. Twain suggests that the emergence of this colonial modernity prompts the appearance of the novel-genre. He thus offers a heterodox account of the novel-genre’s history.
As Twain offers this alternative origin story, he also endeavors to create a democratic novelistic form, as a counterpoint to colonial modernity’s hierarchies of race and geography. To do so, he uncouples novelistic form from the secularism critics have associated with the genre at least since the publication of Georg Lukács’ Theory of the Novel (1916). The novel is the “epic of the world abandoned by God,” as Lukács famously put it, because it aims “to uncover and construct the totality of life.” Recent work in post-secular studies has brought into focus how such a secularist urge to uncover, debunk, and demystify amounts to an often-aggressive aspiration to intellectual mastery, and on that basis scholars in post-secular studies have framed secularism as a Eurocentric cultural formation buttressing the uneven development of the post-1492 world. As Ashley Squires has lately noted, Twain offers a comparably critical assessment of secularism in his book Christian Science (1907). Twain’s skepticism regarding secularism is likewise visible in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, especially in its scenes of what I term incomplete secularization—moments when characters’ efforts at enlightenment and demystification falter. Through such scenes, Twain’s novel challenges a key cultural pattern of colonial modernity.If the novel-genre is not to be an engine of secularist demystification, what might then be its office? Twain offers an intriguing answer on the pages of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger and another late speculative fiction, 3,000 Years among the Microbes (c. 1905), both which are framed as translations. Twain’s translational framing suggests that the novel-genre might be thought of as a vehicle for carrying meaning across differences in space, time, culture, and language. This notion of the novel-genre-as-translation, I suggest, is Twain’s effort to imagine how novelistic form could be democratic within our colonial modernity.
Timothy Donahue is Associate Professor of English at Oakland University, where he teaches and researches the literatures of the U.S. and the Americas, with a focus on the nineteenth century. His writing has appeared in American Literary History, Novel, and J19, as well as in the collections The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture. He is currently finishing a book on aesthetics, translation, and political sovereignty in North America’s nineteenth-century borderlands, and beginning a second project on Reconstruction’s hemispheric dimensions.
Wednesday, October 23 at The Quarry Farm Barn
“Before There Was Twain There Was Whitcher”
Linda A. Morris, University of California, Davis
When Frances Miriam Whitcher came to live in Elmira in 1847 as the wife of the newly appointed minister of Trinity Episcopal Church, she was already publishing her “Widow Bedott” satiric sketches under a pseudonym. She continued to publish articles anonymously while living in Elmira, stimulated anew by activities in the town, and creating a new first-person literary persona to report on intimate details of the local sewing society associated with their church. Her Elmira-based satires were widely popular at that time in Godey’s Lady’s Book, and they hit home in towns all over the region. In this talk I will examine the targets of her humor both in terms of the people who appeared in her sketches and also in terms of the changing social circumstances behind them. In particular Whitcher targeted what she saw as pretensions to gentility in the community, although Elmira was never mentioned in the sketches. I’ll look at selections from the published sketches themselves as well as passages from letters Whitcher wrote about the actual events that inspired them.
Although Miriam Whitcher lived in Elmira several decades before Samuel Clemens began his long affiliation with the town and Quarry Farm, he was clearly familiar with her work. I will review briefly what he admired about her humor and how it might be seen as influencing his own. Mostly, however, I will explore details of her writing during her Elmira period and the uproar it created when people began to recognize each other in her sketches, ultimately causing her husband to resign as the pastor of his church. I will end the talk by briefly recapping the remarkable success of her humor well into the late nineteenth century, long after her untimely death at the age of 40.
Linda A. Morris is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of English, University of California, Davis. Her book-length studies include Women’s Humor in The Age of Gentility: The Life and Works of Frances Miriam Whitcher; American Women Humorists: Critical Essays (Ed.); and Gender Play in Mark Twain: Cross-Dressing and Transgression. She has published a number of essays about Mark Twain, including “What is Personal about Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc;?” “The Sources of Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc” (with Ronald Jenn); “Gender Bending as Child’s Play;” “Identity Switching in Huckleberry Finn;” “Twice Told Tales: Aunt Sally Phelps and the “Evasion” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;” “The Eloquent Silence in ‘Hellfire Hotchkiss;’” “Becky Thatcher and Aunt Polly in Three Dimensions;” and “Susy Clemens: The Final Years.” Her essays on American women’s humor include “Good Food, Great Friends, Cold Beer: The Domestic Humor of Mary Lasswell;” “Domestic Manners of the Americans: A Transatlantic Phenomenon;” and “Roz Chast: From Whimsey to Transgression.” She was the recipient of “The Charlie Award” by the American Humor Studies Association, and “The Olivia Langdon Clemens Award” by the Mark Twain Circle of America.