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Chapter 9 America in the Modern World 1913-1945

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Chapter 9 America in the Modern World 1913-1945 CHAPTER 9 SUGGESTED APPROACHES CHAPTER 9 AMERICA IN THE MODERN WORLD 1913-1945 SUGGESTED APPROACHES FOR THE CLASSROOM SUGGESTED APPROACH Theodore Dreiser, A Certain Oil Refinery (pp. 1095-99) Introductory material for this selection emphasizes Theodore Dreiser’s experience as a journalist and his position as a premiere American naturalist writer. In the Exploring the Text questions that follow the excerpt, question 6 identifies Dreiser as a social Darwinist who applied Darwin’s ideas about evolution to his views on human behavior and interaction, emphasizing survival of the fittest. Given this information, the piece can be viewed as both an illustration of his beliefs and an exposé, but Dreiser refrains from editorializing. He describes the oil refinery and occasionally identifies an issue related to its working conditions; then he simply states that doing anything more for workers than paying them wages “is not thought of” or “has never occurred to any one.” The last paragraph states that “that vast problem, the ethics of employment, is not up for discussion in this instance: only the picture which this industry presents.” Here, it appears that Dreiser wants the “picture” to speak for itself and make an argument. The piece is rich with imagery, emphasizing primarily the visual (darkness and shadow) and the olfactory (rancid, vile odors). There are several possibilities to help guide students in approaching the text. You may wish, for example, to direct students to first examine the works of James McNeil Whistler (lithographs and etchings), Everett Shinn (paintings), and Daniel Vierge (illustrations) before introducing them to the Dreiser text. Ask students to observe these artists’ various styles and to consider their individual approaches to the subject matter. The rhetorical questions at the end of the piece implicitly invite the reader to wrestle with the contrast between the quality of life of the haves and the have-nots by asking whether such conditions are “the foreordained order of life” and if anything can be done to change it. The question that ends the excerpt—“Who is to say?”—challenges the reader to respond. He or she must say something, one way or another. The implications of Dreiser’s claims call for special focus. During a first and second reading, students should examine and consider the author’s choice of words when he states, in reference to workers’ home and saloons in paragraph 4, that “Artists ought to make pictures of them” and “Writers ought to write of them.” What pictures is Dreiser “making” with his language here? What does he mean by “ought to”? From there, students can proceed to explore the effect of such texts on the viewing and reading audiences of both Dreiser’s period and our own. Of course, students can be asked to identify, explore, discuss, and write about labor and employment issues (including issues such as fair pay, unionization, and working conditions) as they apply in contemporary circumstances. Encourage them to draw from their own employment experiences as well as from online resources, a few of which are included here: • McDonald’s financial planning site for its minimum-wage workforce (practicalmoneyskills.com) and Jordan Weissmann’s July 16, 2013, article in The Atlantic titled “McDonald’s Can’t Figure Out How Its Workers Survive on Minimum Wage,” which explores the limits of the site’s practical applications (theatlantic.com) 542 CHAPTER 9 SUGGESTED APPROACHES • MIT’s living wage calculator (livingwage.mit.edu) • SPENT, a game that simulates life choices below the poverty line (playspent.org) • Jeremy Ashkenas’s February 8, 2014, interactive opinion piece, “Can You Live on the Minimum Wage?” published in the New York Times (nytimes.com) You might also ask students to focus on the nature of work and labor. In paragraph 5, Dreiser first describes the mind-numbing routine of manufacturing work as well as workers’ living conditions, and then says, “But the interesting thing to me is that men work and toil here in a sickening atmosphere of blackness and shadow, of vile odors, of vile substances, of vile surroundings.” Ask students how they would respond to Dreiser’s questions regarding why people work and toil under such conditions. Various Web sites can help students explore the rise of labor unions in the twentieth century and thus gain familiarity with contemporary labor issues around the world. In order to give students a sense of the continuing issues in either the American or global workplace, it would be worthwhile to spend some time with these topics during a class discussion: • Though only available through HBOGo, Vice magazine’s partnership with the network has yielded some short (30-minute) documentaries that pack a powerful punch. Pertinent episodes include Winners and Losers (Season 1, Episode 5) and Greenland Is Melting (Season 2, Episode 3). A 4- minute clip from the latter episode titled “Debrief: Bonded Labor” is available for viewing without a subscription. • The International Labor Rights Forum (laborrights.org and change.org/organizations/laborrights). • The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre (business-humanrights.org). • The International Labour Organization (ilo.org). As students discuss how their findings have influenced their perspective on the Dreiser piece, you may wish to have them revisit the question about why workers accept dangerous, subpar conditions and/or the rhetorical questions Dreiser asks at the end of the reading. SUGGESTED APPROACH William Carlos Williams, The Great Figure (pp. 1106-07) and Charles Demuth, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (pp. 1107-09) Ekphrasis for all! One of the more efficacious ways to approach “The Great Figure” and “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold” relates to question 5 in Exploring the Text (p. 1107) and question 3 of the Making Connections section following Demuth’s painting (p. 1109). Before introducing William Carlos Williams’s poem or Charles Demuth’s painting in class, ask students to identify, from their personal experience, a brief scene. It should be a moment that was, while not necessarily weighty or significant, worth remarking upon and remembering. From that memory they should then write an expressive, imagistic account that conveys the remembered experience to a peer in a written form of their choice (whether it be poetry or a short sketch). Ask students to give their texts titles. Next, have students share and exchange and their work with a partner. The partner’s assignment is to represent, visually, something of their experience upon encountering the written work. Finally, have students join larger groups to share their work or, if the class is small enough, have each pair present their efforts before the entire class. Through these assigned activities, students will not only gain experience writing creative non- fiction but also stretch into working with and generating image-based texts that purposefully and personally represent a moment initially experienced and depicted by another author. In effect, they are encountering some of the same dynamic that Williams and Demuth experienced decades ago. Following this opening assignment, students will most certainly empathize with the diverse artistic processes involved in ekphrasis. 543 CHAPTER 9 SUGGESTED APPROACHES You may want to let students know that both Williams and Demuth were drawn to the photography of Alfred Stieglitz, and that thanks to Stieglitz’s support, a vibrant and important community developed around modernist painters and photographers in New York City. Information on this artistic circle is available online in the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Web site (metmuseum.org). The site also contains a particularly illuminating Thematic Essay, “Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) and His Circle.” You may wish to have students take a look at the works included in the essay and have them compare and contrast the paintings’ features with the devices evident in written modernist works. William Carlos Williams continued to focus on the visual elements (particularly color and form) in his poetry. He made the relationship between poetry and painting the source of an entire series of poems that pivoted off prominent paintings by sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The poems can be found in Williams’s final book, Pictures from Brueghel, published posthumously in1962. Images of Brueghel’s paintings that were the subjects of the poetry can easily be found on the Web. Sharing these poems with students will further sharpen their appreciation for the relationship between words and images. As an activity to close out this reading, you may wish to have students distill what they believe is the argument that one of the poems from Pictures from Brueghel makes by defending, challenging, or qualifying that argument with visual evidence from Brueghel’s work. SUGGESTED APPROACH Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me (pp. 1117-20) Although irony and sarcasm are Zora Neale Hurston’s sharpest tools in this essay, it is not full satire, and students are likely to find her attitude toward racism somewhat puzzling. Is she really so breezily sure of herself, so astonished that anyone would not enjoy the pleasure of her company, so able to embrace her difference? Or is some of this posturing and false bravado? The essay is controversial, as was Hurston’s attitude toward race and racism; at the same time it is appealing because of its clever construction of a spirited self. We suggest opening the class with a reading of the first five paragraphs of Hurston’s essay. The irony in the first sentence, the assumptions Hurston is arguing against, the celebration of a folk culture, and Hurston’s disarming openness are all clearly manifested. This essay offers an opening for a discussion of the debate within Hurston’s contemporary African American community (and, to a certain extent, within today’s as well) of whether assimilating mainstream values requires the loss of a historical legacy.
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