Ari’s Killer Angels post reminds me, oncet upon a time I used to teach historical novels a lot more. Lots of ’em are very well known and appear on syllabi everywhere, but some I think are relatively underrated. For example, I think E. L. Doctorow’s Book of Daniel works pretty well for teaching the mid-century Cold War. When you teach a book like this, it lets you discuss the gaps between history and memory, and what the needs of narrative do to the nuances of analysis. Maybe now I would try teaching Roth’s American Pastoral, but I’m not sure it would work as well—it reads a bit too much like a polemic against the 1960s.
Then there’s fiction written or produced contemporaneously with great historical events that helps shed light on such events. For example, John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano works well along with The Third Man and Casablanca for the American mission overseas in the 1940s. When you teach a book like this, it lets you discuss the gap between contemporary and later uses of the same events (compare all of the above with, say, Saving Private Ryan).
I say I used to use such sources more frequently, but I don’t now. I think this is because the quarter system is so demanding: ten weeks to cover large chunks of material. Maybe I should teach a seminar. A long time ago, I taught one using only novels to cover the twentieth century. (O’Connor’s Last Hurrah is a good one, too.)
The Edge of the American West 
31 comments
May 6, 2008 at 8:41 am
jmsdonaldson
Where would Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” lay in this discussion? It’s used by many here at my institution as an assignment to discuss the industrialized world of Chicago in the early twentieth century, and I would assume that it’s used, or overused, at other institutions as well. We can lecture about how Sinclair snuck into the meat packing plants in order to get first hand information for his work, but ultimately it is socialist fiction.
May 6, 2008 at 8:51 am
eric
The Jungle is an exceptional case, because of its role in changing policy. Chris Phelps’s edition includes the official report on the meatpacking industry, which is an interesting juxtaposition.
May 6, 2008 at 9:13 am
The Modesto Kid
Book of Daniel
Thought for a head-scratching minute you were talking about this.
American Pastoral
How about The Plot Against America?
May 6, 2008 at 10:26 am
SEK
I taught The Plot Against America when it came out for a later version of this course, and it turned out well — despite revealing some astonishing gaps in the students’ general knowledge. (“No, that part’s not Roth’s invention” spilled from my mouth at least three times a class.) Granted, I teach literature, but since my focus is historicist, I can see what I work through in a course about history and memory as somewhat comparable.
I’ve taught historical works before, but to be honest, I didn’t know quite what to do with them. I’d be all, “so, um, you kids did the reading? I could quiz you on it?” They’d say yes, then we’d talk about Faulkner. So you could say I’m the absolute worst person to ask about this. Need more proof?
I audited a version of this course with Jon Weiner back when I was still a mid-century man, and I maybe opened my mouth twice, because I wasn’t sure what to say. There didn’t seem to be much interpretation necessary, and class discussion centered around conflicting accounts of what it was really like to, say, watch early television. Weiner tried to get us to understand what it was like back then, so we had a framework in which to understand what we were reading. To his credit, he was successful, but I was never quite sure what I could add to the discussion.
May 6, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Matt Lungerhausen
In response to Eric’s original post, I agree, you have to give at least some smidgen of fiction, if not a complete novel for every survey class. Not only do you get at the history and memory question, but for some students, its the only time they will read a Pulitzer or Nobel prize winning author.
I use Orhan Pamuk “My Name Is Red” in my early modern western civ class to talk about the relationship between Renaissance Europe and the Ottoman Empire. The book also gets students to think more broadly (I hope) about the relationship between art and society.
In my Soviet History class I have them read Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” when we talk about Stalinist culture in the 1930s. It provides a great contrast to other readings we do about the Purges. I think this gives the students a more nuanced understanding of what Stalinism was all about on a day-to-day basis. When I teach it again this fall I am hoping to return to “Master and Margarita” when we talk about Putin’s Russia.
May 6, 2008 at 12:26 pm
charlieford
I’m constantly confronted by students (and others–grown-ups and stuff) who will say things such as, “You really ought to use The Patriot, because it’s such an accurate depiction of the Revolution,” or “I love On the Road, because it so accurately portrays what it was like to live in the 1950s,” and similar things. I want to respond, “You were born in 1988, and barely recall most of the ’90s–what the heck do you know about the ’50s, much less the Revolution? What is your baseline for judging the accuracy of any of these things?” However, I realize this would come off as rude and elitist. And it’s not really what they’re saying: They’re really saying, maybe, “That fiction gripped me, and made me feel as if I was observing a real world, and I liked it.” But the whole issue is SO BIG I just don’t know how to deal with it. It’s more than just a question of history vs. fiction, or so it seems to me: it’s more like the basic Socratic insight, that wisdom begins with a recognition of one’s ignorance, of what one doesn’t know. That strikes me as involving deep issues, such as temperament, and I often feel my spirit sink when confronted by this kind of confidence, feeling rather hopeless really.
May 6, 2008 at 12:34 pm
eric
made me feel as if I was observing a real world
Yes, one of our colleagues, Mike Saler, gave a rather good talk last year about the seductiveness of fully imagined worlds. Two of the examples he gave: The Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien, and The Mediterranean, by Braudel.
May 6, 2008 at 12:43 pm
andrew
I read The Last Hurrah recently – upon Eric’s recommendation (back on Altercation, I think) – and thought O’Connor had lots of smart things to say about politics, and that it was too bad he wasn’t a better novelist.
May 6, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Alison
As has been documented in some of my other comments on this blog, I went to hippie college, so all of my classes (or programs, as we say) included fiction, historical fiction, etc.
One of the best programs I took was called The American City Since 1945, and we read quite a few novels and some memoirs. I think, though, that teaching on the American city post-WWII really lends itself to incorporating fiction as a means to exploring the social and historical power of segregation, civil rights, white flight, etc.
May 6, 2008 at 3:33 pm
The Modesto Kid
I use Orhan Pamuk “My Name Is Red” in my early modern western civ class to talk about the relationship between Renaissance Europe and the Ottoman Empire
This is a class I would enjoy taking. I read My Name is Red and loved it as a novel (notes here), but felt like I was missing some important amount of information by not being literate in the history of that period.
A RL friend was talking to me the other day about looking for literature to use in his (high school) Italian Renaissance history class; maybe I’ll mention that to him.
May 6, 2008 at 3:36 pm
drip
Matt Lungerhausen’s students are lucky if his taste in fiction reflects his ability in the classroom. I’m sort of enamored with the truthiness of fiction these days and it was Pamuk’s Snow that put me on that track. The Russians are full of such fiction (try Babel as well as Bulgakov). In America some really smart teacher will get awards, accolades and free gas for teaching August Wilson’s 10 play cycle in a history course.
May 6, 2008 at 3:55 pm
bw
my first thought when i read this quickly was: wow, i teach a lot more novels than these guys. d’oh! that would be because i teach literature. at the same time, i’m mostly 18/19c, so i’ve enjoyed reading others’ suggestions for what would work well and why.
i do, though, get occasional complaints on evals for teaching too historically. which leads me to wonder what works of history other lit professors teach most often (or would if they could). i’ve used Masur’s _1831_, moore’s _selling god_, johnson and wilentz’s _kingdom of matthias_, and a handful of others in grad and undergrad seminars, mostly to good effect.
May 6, 2008 at 5:01 pm
SEK
I’m constantly confronted by students (and others–grown-ups and stuff) who will say things such as, “You really ought to use The Patriot, because it’s such an accurate depiction of the Revolution,” or “I love On the Road, because it so accurately portrays what it was like to live in the 1950s,” and similar things.
I think there’s a reason for the latter: novels aren’t written about an historical mindset, they’re written from within one. On the Road accurately portrays Kerouac’s interaction with the ideas of his time. It might not be accurate — people can be misguided — but even the form of its misguidedness will belong to a moment not our own. Note that I’m not talking about what’s represented in the novels, i.e. I’m not talking about realism-as-mimesis. Ulysses and other modernist works unwittingly communicate the attitude of their authors even when they’re defiantly anti-mimetic.
That said, this conversation leads to me insist on a conceptual distinction between 1) works written during a period (A Bell for Adano) and 2) works written about a period (The Killer Angels, American Pastoral). The latter would lend themselves more to discussions of historical methodology — the transformation of archival fact into compelling narrative — whereas the former would foreground the difficulties of working with source material.
May 6, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Vance Maverick
SEK, I basically agree with your formulation that novels are written “from within” a mindset, historical or other. (I tried to make the same point on Ari’s post.) Is it a law, though? Akutagawa’s “In a Grove”, for a familiar example, subverts the reliability of the characters’ accounts of what happened, and doesn’t replace them with a higher one. But that’s about the facts of a murder, not the historical mindset. There must be a novel out there that likewise de-privileges the characters’ historical frame of reference.
May 6, 2008 at 6:24 pm
bw
SEK’s “from within” rather than “about” a “historical mindset” (though that concept’s shaky enough in itself) is spot on.
The distinction between “during” and “about” is also useful — though it’s important (and not simply for late-20c works like Armies of the Night) to note that some books are written both during and about the same moment and still profit from this distinction (especially, I would think, in the context of a history class).
Books like Sister Carrie, which insists so fiercely on the significance of the fact that it’s set a decade or so after the action (because so much has supposedly changed in the intervening years) make things fun in this regard, the same way The Big Lebowski or Three Kings are fun in part because they’re (satirical) period pieces set in the very recent past — sort of like historical fiction crossed with comedies of manners.
May 6, 2008 at 6:25 pm
bw
“set” s/b “narrated”
May 6, 2008 at 6:30 pm
SEK
So, first, a MANUAL TRACKBACK. (Turn on the real ones, you two! I know you have them! You track your own damn selves back all the time!)
Second, I should point out that I’m making a fairly common distinction among us historicist folk. We have
I’m not bright enough to come up with this on my own.
May 6, 2008 at 6:43 pm
bw
I’m not bright enough to come up with this on my own.
maybe, maybe not — but it is true that these distinctions aren’t always present for students or many of their teachers, esp. when we’re asked to think across disciplines.
I sometimes wonder how much better a really genius book like William Cooper’s Town would be, for example, if it had treated The Pioneers more like a novel than as a window onto JFCooper’s attitudes toward his dad or as memories about his childhood. (And before the historians bristle I should add that I wish more historicist lit types put in the kind of grunt work needed to produce other kinds of conclusions Taylor makes in that book — based, for instance, on the type of reading Wm Cooper appears to have done or the kinds of books he tended to buy.)
May 6, 2008 at 6:46 pm
bw
er, to cite an example close to home for some of you on out there on the edge.
May 6, 2008 at 11:13 pm
d
Ulysses and other modernist works unwittingly communicate the attitude of their authors even when they’re defiantly anti-mimetic.
I think any communication that takes place via Ulysses is by definition “unwittingly” accomplished.
Sorry, I just can’t stand Joyce.
But speaking of long novels that my students wouldn’t read if assigned, I’d love to teach Underworld sometime. It’s a troublesome book in all sorts of ways (not least of which is its total erasure of native peoples from the landscape of the nuclear west), but I think it gets quite a bit “right” about the culture of the cold war.
May 6, 2008 at 11:22 pm
ari
I love Underworld. But then again, I also love Joyce. I’m a lover, you see.
May 7, 2008 at 7:45 am
Galvinji
Is there a meaningful distinction between teaching works of fiction written in the period under study vs. historical novels?
I always tried to include a few works of literature on the syllabus, usually something short and fun that was designed to point out some aspect of cultural history (e.g., one of the lais of Marie de France to discuss “courtliness”). But it never occurred to me to include a historical novel on the syllabus — perhaps due to my undergraduate indoctrination as a “History and Literature” major I always assumed that, to take an undoubtedly bad example, Ivanhoe had more to say about the late 18th-early 19th century than the 12th.
May 7, 2008 at 7:58 am
eric
this conversation leads to me insist on a conceptual distinction between 1) works written during a period (A Bell for Adano) and 2) works written about a period (The Killer Angels, American Pastoral)
Why, it’s almost as if such distinctions weren’t made in the post.
May 7, 2008 at 8:01 am
eric
Turn on the real ones, you two! I know you have them! You track your own damn selves back all the time!
The box is ticked. I don’t know why it’s not working. We’re using the abbreviated—but free!—version of WordPress; maybe that explains it.
May 7, 2008 at 8:05 am
andrew
I think wordpress only tracks back to wordpress, at least in the free version.
May 7, 2008 at 8:29 am
The Modesto Kid
Is tracking back a standardized protocol? I was trying to figure out how to add trackbacks to my own (hand-rolled) blog, mainly so I could track back to other people’s blogs; but when I tried to find documentation for it everything seemed proprietary to the various blog proprietors, and like I would have to write separate code for tracking back to each one of them.
May 7, 2008 at 10:05 am
SEK
Why, it’s almost as if such distinctions weren’t made in the post.
Um, I thought I was commenting on Ari’s?
May 7, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Galvinji
Why, it’s almost as if such distinctions weren’t made in the post.
You expect an audience of professors, graduate students, and fellow travelers to read carefully? (I say this having asked the same redundant question.)
May 7, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Chris
Longtime lurker, first time commenter…
Nobody mentions Dos Passos? I read the USA books in a philosophy course touching on history. Great stuff.
May 7, 2008 at 6:23 pm
The Modesto Kid
See now, if I could do trackbacks, I would attach this post of mine to this here post, if you accepted non-wordpress trackbacks. (A-and: the essay I discuss in the linked post mentions Dos Passos, a name that had not crossed my mind in a while until I read Chris’s comment this afternoon.)
May 8, 2008 at 1:23 am
Hemlock
A Bell for Adano is a great book. What about Hemingway and Steinbeck? Their work captivated me in high school. I also like E.L. Doctorow’s other stuff (Ragtime and the more recent Waterworks come to mind…Gilded Age and early twentieth century).