What is history?

Professor Bailyn claims that history has two definitions. “One is simply what happened, the events, developments, circumstances, and thoughts of the past as they actually occurred and history as knowledge of what happened, the record or expression of what occurred” (pg.7). These two definitions of history reveal a very good point: we don’t really know exactly what happened. Sure, “things happened” and sometimes, someone, either reliably or unreliably wrote down (in their own words, with their own prejudices and bias) what had happened. Can we ever really trust these sources, can we trust what “happened”? This being said, I think the past is constructed and reconstructed constantly and introduces the very intriguing question of “Whose history is it?”

I think History, as it is recorded, or the second definition of Bailyn’s, belongs to whomever wrote it because it is their personal experience and reaction to what happened. We can take all of the recorded history of the United States and call it “ours” because we are Americans, and in turn this is partly true, but can we really belong to that history since we did not experience it first hand? Saying this just makes me think of what our actual history will be, what our recorded experiences (in our minds, blogs, etc.) will be. How will we feel about our “history?” Are we all historians in this age of perpetual picture posting and sharing of every thought and feeling?

Which brings me to what a historian is, as defined by Professor Bailyn. He claims that a historian is “someone who develops, in one way or another,  “artificial extension of social memory” by recovering through the evidences of the past, aspects of what happened”(pg. 8). He  goes on to say that historians are not just one type of person. A historian could be a professor like himself teaching in college or universities, or a lover of history hired by a corporation to write histories or arrange archives and what he calls “non-academic historians” working in museums and local historical societies. With his definition of what a historian is and can be, can we accept the history they give us as our own? Can we take their interpretations of history and absorb them as our own?

When thinking about history, what it is, who it belongs to, who historians are, it has made me realize that the history that we know and have come to learn and in some cases memorize, were all at one point someone’s reaction to a significant event in their life. So maybe our constant online sharing is our way of sharing our “history” – or what will be our history (in the future).

 

 

Zappa and Bloom: Disagreed.

What is Frank Zappa’s critique of Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind?” Accurate. Truthful. More in touch with Americans than Bloom. People assume Zappa is an uneducated man because of his lifestyle and the music that he creates. I believe that Bloom would be one of these people, assuming that Zappa is “primitive and primary” because Rock’n Roll music has a “barbaric appeal.” And yet, this is so far from the truth as evidenced in “Junk Food for the Soul.” Zappa is articulate, knowledgable and relevant (even 27 years later, after the interview took place). That doesn’t sound like the “dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul” that Bloom mentioned but rather someone in touch with his humanity.

In “Junk Food for the Soul” Zappa said, “…the content of what they wrote was to a degree determined by the musical predilections of the guy who was paying the bill.” Although he was specifically talking about Classical and Rock’n’Roll music, Zappa felt similarly about American culture in general. He recognized that what we as a society place in high value is what big business wants us as consumers to buy. He called it “unrefined commerce” or, putting our value where our wallet is.

One of Bloom’s opinions in his book, “The Closing of the American Mind” is that “survival itself depended on a better education for the best people” (pg.49). Is he choosing the “best people” or is, as Zappa might suggest, a wealthy person in the college systems choose in the best?

These two excerpts differ greatly. Zappa knows there are beautiful art pieces (literature, music, etc) that exist that aren’t necessarily mainstream. Bloom thinks all great books are essentially those of highly educated people, books that have been in wide circulation spanning the past few hundred years from philosophers such as Nietzsche.

I think also Zappa’s critique gets somewhat annoyed at Bloom, who keeps a very limited and narrow view on the American people, its art and music and its education. “Again, Bloom is not looking at what is really going on here.  The ugliness in this society is not a product of unrefined art, but of unrefined commerce, wild superstition and religious fanaticism.” However, they did seem to agree on the irrelevancy of classical music with younger students, something Zappa suggest be put back into schools. “On this point, Bloom and I can agree, but how can a child be blamed for consuming only that which is presented to him?  Most kids have never been in contact with anything other than this highly merchandised stuff…I argued (in court) that the money for music appreciation courses, in terms of social good and other benefits such as improved behavior or uplifting the spirit..” 

Personally, I feel like Zappa wants what’s best for children as well as everyone else because he wants us all to be exposed to a variety of things not a narrow path that Bloom followed. 

Literature’s Legacy

Literary criticism is “the art or practice of judging and commenting on the qualities and character of literary works” (according to Google.com), but who is in charge of literary criticism? Who gets to say what we read and what we shouldn’t read? Our parents, family and friends? Our teachers? Worldly scholars of past and present? Personally, I think it’s a mixture of all of the above plus celebrities and social media (i.e Oprah’s Book Club). Okay, now that we know who is telling us what to read, we need to ask ourselves why we are reading what we are reading. How has value been assigned to literature? This is where the literary canon comes into play. 

The “they” that have assigned any type of value to texts and literature were either willingly or unwillingly adding these titles to the literary canon. Shakespeare, for instance, is undoubtedly part of this grouping of literature that everyone must read in their (educational) lives. Allan Bloom, author of “The Closing of the American Mind” agrees but insists that Shakespeare has remained a constant in the canon because “as he [Shakespeare] has been read for most of this century, does not constitute a threat to egalitarian right thinking”(pg 65). Bloom is claiming that certain literature holds value over others because it is not threatening to the way of life of that culture. With this sentiment, texts cannot be universal because every society has a completely different set of morals and values regarding people’s lives and art and nothing would be agreed upon as “something everyone should read.” Also, does everyone read? Can everyone read? 

Why do we read the things we do? Bloom says of cultures long passed that they valued literature because it “belonged to them, that told their story, and embodied so to speak, their instinct” (pg. 54), suggesting that Greek cultures for instance valued their literature more than any other because it described them and their livelihoods and their legacy. They could relate to their literature just like we can relate to ours. 

Why does every English major need to read Shakespeare? As Bloom said, Shakespeare wasn’t threatening in his work and that alone is what helped it to endure and survive. But is it still surviving? Bloom suggests that although it’s required reading (because of the canon and collegiate syllabi) teachers aren’t teaching the Bard’s great works anymore: “The old teachers who loved Shakespeare or Austen or Donne, and whose only reward for teaching was the perpetuation of their taste, have all but disappeared(pg. 65).” This cannot be helping the English majors of the world. If there aren’t any professors out their teaching Shakespeare, it means that somewhere along the line, students stopped caring about it. So how do we get students to care about Shakespeare and other great literature again? How do we keep literature alive, our legacy, our instinct?