Networked New York Q&A: Reed Gochberg

Originally posted at Patell and Waterman’s History of New York.

Our latest Networked NY Q&A is with Reed Gochberg, a doctoral student in English at Boston University. Reed studies late nineteenth-century American literature and culture and her research interests include American intellectual history and urban cultural history.

Your paper at Networked New York offered a re-reading of the tableaux vivant in The House of Mirth, which you place in the context of New York cultural institutions established in the final decades of the nineteenth century. What are the key elements of this historical moment and these cultural institutions that you see at work in Wharton’s novel?

I first began considering these ideas after visiting an exhibit at another New York institution this past November: the “Beauties of the Gilded Age” series at the New-York Historical Society, which showcases (on rotation) the miniature collection of Peter Marié. Marié was a bachelor who commissioned miniatures of beautiful New York women (including Edith Wharton) and amassed a collection of over three hundred such portraits. On visiting the exhibit, I was immediately reminded of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and its famous tableaux vivant scene, in which the protagonist, Lily Bart takes part in an “entertainment” staged by a wealthy New York family in their Fifth Avenue mansion. As one of twelve performers in tableaux vivant, she appears as Joshua Reynolds’ painting, Mrs. Lloyd, in a striking display that showcases both her beauty and her ability to become an art object (see image at left). I was struck by the seeming reversal of such a process: photographs of women transformed into miniatures, as opposed to women transforming themselves into paintings.

The cultural context of the novel definitely suggests its interest in cultural institutions, especially given the historical proximity of its publication (1905) to the founding of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1870) and other contemporaneous institutions. On further reading of the tableaux vivant scene, other inversions present themselves: rather than a museum where art objects are displayed, Wharton describes a ballroom transformed, temporarily, into a theater/gallery. And more importantly, rather than directing their money to philanthropic purpose—and particularly, supporting the public arts—her wealthy characters are throwing a private party. When read in light of these broader philanthropic networks, the scene suggests a powerful commentary on an important moment for cultural institutions in America—and an issue that’s continually relevant to today’s debates about the funding of the arts.

What relationships between and among authorship, institutions and philanthropy at the turn of the twentieth century do the art scenes in The House of Mirth establish?

I think that the tableaux vivant scene registers the importance of beauty in the novel, on a much deeper level than Jonathan Franzen’s purely cosmetic interpretation of Wharton in a recent New Yorker piece would imply. By examining this moment in the context of New York’s cultural institutions, I find that this idea of beauty takes on a much broader meaning, beyond the personal beauty of Lily Bart, which extends to interrogations of the city itself and the cultural opportunities that it provided at the turn of the century. In her memoir, A Backward Glance, Wharton laments the “intolerable ugliness of New York” as a creative environment; similarly, Lily famously hates “dinginess” and spends much of the novel trying to avoid it. In her book, The Decoration of Houses and all of her novels, Wharton emphasizes the importance of cultural spaces that encourage creative work, rather than stifle it. This concern was shared with many of her contemporaries, and this context opens up a range of comparisons to other novels that more explicitly consider visual art, connoisseurship, and philanthropy from this era, including Henry James’s The Golden Bowl or William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham.

What immediate questions or concerns did you take away from the conference?

At the conference, I presented with Kristen Highland and Joey McGarvey on the “Institutions and Enterprise” panel. While I was thinking about the museum as a public space in my paper, it was quite interesting to hear about their projects on more explicitly literary spaces, such as a bookstore or a fruit festival. By putting these different projects into conversation, it raised a number of questions for me about the relationship between the visual and literary arts at the turn of the century, especially for realist authors: an idea that was particularly well voiced by Tom Augst in his response to our panel. Additionally, our discussions suggested new ways of considering the role of institutions in creating a newly public, social space for cultural experiences, whether literary, visual, or musical.

The conference as a whole did an excellent job of bringing together a number of different perspectives on the spaces of New York. From our panel on institutions to the closing discussion between New York bloggers, it suggested a number of approaches to understanding how the evolving landscape of a city inspires different forms of written representations. Moreover, the conference demonstrated the variety of approaches to preserving the energy of New York, both within and beyond the traditional archive: architecturally, through preservation, registry, or even re-creation (as in the Vault at Pfaff’s); or interpersonally, through digital maps of nineteenth century networks.

 

 

Networked NY Q&A: Cecily Swanson

Originally posted at Patell & Waterman’s History of New York.

Next up in our Networked New York Q&A series, we have Cecily Swanson, a doctoral candidate in the English department at Cornell. Her dissertation, “‘A Circle is a Necessity’: American Women Modernists and the Aesthetics of Sociability,” considers the legacy of salon conversation for writers who conceived of literature as not just a text, but also a way of talking.

Your paper examines how social relationships structure literary experiences by focusing on two groups of writers from the 1920s and 1930s.  Can you elaborate on the contrast you identify between the reading group and the salon?

The modern salon has been characterized as both a location for transgressive sociability and a holdover of old world aristocratism. As Janet Lyon argues in “Sociability in the Metropole:  Modernism’s Bohemian Salons,” the modern salon sought above all else to give the appearance of anti-bourgeois spontaneity, refusing claims to institutionality and conventionality even as these gatherings accrued cultural and material capital. Indeed, it is very difficult to distinguish between the modernist salon’s institutional side – in other words the way the it enabled through patronage networks and marketing strategies the development of a self-conscious, autonomous “scene” – from its more experiential side, where art and life blur through casual banter, a shifting guest lists, and its emphasis on participation, rather than a museum-like separation of guest from the artwork. Natalie Barney, one of modernism’s most influential salon hostesses, claimed, “I never had a salon, I only had  têtes-à-têtes,” characteristically refusing to acknowledge her salon’s institutional stature even as it became a fixture of literary Paris.

But the modernist reading group, as my research of several Gurdjieff reading groups suggests, sought to institutionalize “spontaneous” conversation through the framework of documented philosophical analysis. These reading groups, in other words, attempted to formalize the salon experience into a codified literary practice, where authorship could be produced through carefully documented social exchanges but was not necessarily tied to a published text.  Jean Toomer’s Harlem Gurdjieff reading group minutely recorded not only their discussion, but also the affect of each participant, seeking to account for and legitimate these ephemeral moments. Toomer thus seems to have conceived of his reading groups as a “masculine” alternative to female salon sociability. But Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s Gurdjieff reading group, run in Paris and comprised of lesbian expatriates, found through this effort at Gurdjieffian self-documentation an opportunity to more freely express, record, and consecrate, their non-normative sexual choices and lifestyles.

What archival sources were most central to your project?  Can you say a bit about how archival materials shaped your understanding of the circles you examine, especially the relationship between Jean Toomer and George Gurdjieff?

My dissertation as a whole considers three principle archives: (1) The Natalie Barney papers at the Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet in Paris, (2) The Muriel Draper Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library and (3) The Jean Toomer Papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library.

My “Networked New York” paper explored the Toomer collection, arguing that question of racial passing that so vexed Toomer throughout his career finds a solution, or at very least a theorization, in Toomer’s proliferation of papers. Authorship, as professed in his archive’s myriad versions of himself, is always a form of passing, of articulating a variety of possible identities, which may or may not consolidate into a single “truth,” or, to use Gurdjieffian terminology, an “objective” being. I connected Toomer’s exploration of the non-identity of the author to the conversational aesthetic promulgated by the social experience of the literary salon. Toomer’s New York Gurdjieff reading group attempts to formulize the spontaneous chatter of the salon through a Gurdjieffian practice that entails keeping a detailed record of personal experience.  Through Gurdjieff, Toomer could confer authority on the conversational and social dimension of written production, demanding that the social performance of an authorial persona “count” as much as the published work when the question “what is an author?” is answered.

Critics have tended to read Toomer’s unpublished and published writings after Cane as either a failure, the consequence of an over-investment in Gurdjieffian mysticism, or as a the logical continuity of Cane’s success, arguing that the effort at “self-objectification” was already present in Cane, but then further exploited (and perhaps made ridiculous) through Gurdjieffian tenets. My paper tried instead to read Toomer’s post-Gurdjieff archival papers another way, as neither break nor continuity with the authorial identity established by Cane but instead as an exploration of the social context that enabled, but also delimited, such a persona.

Your dissertation, “‘A Circle is a Necessity’: American Women Modernists and the Aesthetics of Sociability,” considers the legacy of salon conversation for writers who conceived of literature as not just a text, but also a way of talking.  What other writers and communities do you take up in your project?

My dissertation considers the aesthetic legacy of the literary salon for American women writers who are now remembered more for the bohemian gatherings they hosted, or the artistic connections they facilitated, than they are for their own literary contributions. These women, I argue, have been difficult to “read” as important figures of literary modernism because their contribution was less literature as we are accustomed to perceiving it than a new conception of the literary, which championed the aesthetic merits of salon conversation. I consider a range of materials: Natalie Barney’s unpublished memoirs written after the heyday of her literary salon in Paris; Muriel Draper’s music salon in London and her subsequent career as an NBC radio broadcaster; Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s notorious 1916 “blank issue” of their influential literary and art journal, The Little Review; and the way in which two reading groups devoted to the writings of mystic George Gurdjieff, one in Harlem and one in expatriate Paris, promulgated the myth of an artistic or literary temperament that is not dependent on actual aesthetic production.

Conversation and literary exchange exist as such heavily freighted, gendered concepts in cultural and historical analysis.  Can you elaborate on the tensions between conversation and writing in New York’s modernist literary salons?

“Autonomy” and autonomy’s preferred modernist synonym, “impersonality,” are words that were almost compulsively used by modernist writers and that have enjoyed an after-life in explanations of the period. Recent scholarship, of course, has begun to question these terms’ viability, the result of a critical climate that has offered productive readings of collaboration and social networks. But even the critiques of the modernist autonomy have tended to assume an a priori stable text, a modernist classic of Stein’s, William’s, or Eliot’s, which becomes relatively open or less open through interpretation. By exploring the conversational aesthetic that emerged through salons and social gatherings in a variety of media formats (such radio broadcasts, reader-response columns, and reading group discussion), it is it not the “openness” of interpretation that is at stake but the very text itself. Attention to social context, audience reception, and unpublished archival material helps make visible an alternative form of modernist textuality, where literary production occurs at the threshold of speech and writing and in the material form of fans’ written responses.

By turning attention to the social relationships structuring any literary experience and the literary potential of “conversational” forms, the women writers of my analysis challenged modernist claims for the autonomy of the literary object and offered new possibilities for female authorship, where even the most casual conversations can have literary power. In this way, my dissertation hopes to make visible an early, overlooked feminist critique of the text-as-object. The restitution of neglected women writers to the canon has been one of feminist studies’ great successes. But as I show through the evaluation of a range of archival materials, these writers’ significant contributions to modernism cannot be appreciated simply through the recovery of lost classics because their literary legacy lies in the interstices between oral and written forms. Only through the archived responses of countless female fans and communities of “writing” readers can we begin to see the literary importance of the conversational aesthetic my dissertation traces.

What immediate questions or concerns did you take away from the conference that relate to your work?

I was fascinated by my co-panelists presentations on digitizing social networks. Micki McGee’s work on the Yaddo Archive Project and Edward Whitley’s digital mapping of 19^th century bohemian circles offered me great insight into the possibilities, and the potential difficulties, of digitizing the raw data of my own archival research of modernist salons. When literary circles are made accessible online, scholars can more easily examine the social world of their research, interrogating the canonical position of major literary figures through their minor friendships and intellectual alliances. These maps allow scholars working from different fringes of the same period to turn partial knowledge into more “total” picture by collaboratively building these circles together. But I am also interested in the way the writers of my own work offered a critique avant la lettre of social mapping that makes the locus of each digital circle an autonomous individual, connected by spokes to other autonomous individuals. Toomer, for example, quarreled with the idea of a coherent self, preferring to see himself as productive example of dual identity, where authorship emerges less in product than in process.  It would be fascinating to cull together more information on the social maps writers drew before the internet age. Natalie Barney drew a map of her salon that looks a lot like the digital social maps of our era, with names of each guest tessellating outward, although she positioned herself “outside,” more a boundary point than the center [see image at left]. But Toomer’s “maps” are quite different. His archive contains index cards documenting social affect, making the fluctuating emotion and comportment of each participant more important than their “individual,” or stable, selves.  It would be hard to digitally present a social circle where valences of anger, discontent, or elation matter more than names, although it would certainly be useful to have this information more readily available to other researchers.

Reminder: Networked New York Conference Tomorrow

We are thrilled to be co-sponsoring this amazing event with the Project on New York Writing and the Colloquium on American Literature and Culture at NYU – two groups I cannot say enough good things about. Please join us at 19 University Place in the Great Room for a day filled with discussion of literary, material, and digital connections in the city!

To get a taste of all this day has to offer, read more about the conference themes from eloquent organizers Annie Abrams and Blevin Shelnutt. For annotated information about our keynote speaker and panelists, visit Patell and Waterman’s History of New York. We hope to see you there tomorrow!

Networked New York, March 9: More Details Here!

Networked New York

A conference on material, literary, and digital connections in the city

Friday, March 9 / 19 University Place, Great Room

Free and open to the public

10:00 – 11:15 Panel 1: Institution and Enterprise

Moderator: Thomas Augst

Joey McGarvey (New York University – English), “‘The Good, the Great, and the Gifted’: An Introduction to the New York Fruit Festival”

Reed Gochberg (Boston University – English), “Miniatures and Museums: Philanthropy, Cultural Institutions, and Edith Wharton’s Tableau Vivant”

Kristen Doyle Highland (New York University – English), “Finding New York City in the Bookstore”

11:15 –12:30  Panel 2: Community, Production, and Place

Moderator: Lisa Gitelman

Cecily Swanson (Cornell University – English), “‘Personal-Experiences-Personally-Experienced’: Gurdjieff and the Harlem Renaissance”

Micki McGee (Fordham University – Sociology), “The Yaddo Archive Project”

Edward Whitley (Lehigh University – English), “Digital Social Networks and New York’s First Bohemians”

1:30 – 2:45  Panel 3: Authors and Neighborhoods

Moderator: Lenora Warren

Karen Karbiener (New York University – Global Liberal Studies), “The Living Archive of Walt Whitman’s New York”

Mark Sussman (City University of New York – English), “Tenement Aesthetics: Howells, the Poor, and the Picturesque”

Josh Glick (Yale University – Film Studies and American Studies), “Memory at the Margins: Jewish American Fiction and the Lived Landscape of Coney Island”

3:00 – 4:00           Keynote

Marvin Taylor (Director, Fales Library & Special Collections), “Playing the Field: Thoughts about Social Networks and the New York Downtown Arts Scene”

4:00 – 5:30  Panel 4: Blogscapes and Digital Interaction

Moderator: Bryan Waterman

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

You Rach You Lose

Maud Newton

Walking Off the Big Apple 

5:30 – 6:30  Reception

Sponsored by the Project on New York Writing,the Colloquium in American Literature and Culture, and the Workshop in Archival Practice at New York University

 

Join Us: Networked New York Conference March 9 at NYU

The Project on New York Writing, the Colloquium in American Literature and Culture, and the Workshop in Archival Practice at New York University present

Networked New York: a conference on material, literary and digital connections in the city

Friday, March 9, 2012, 10:00 am – 5:30 pm

19 University Place, the Great Room

all sessions are free and open to the public

Keynote: “Playing the Field, Thoughts about Social Networks and the New York Downtown Arts Scene”

 Marvin Taylor, Director, Fales Library & Special Collections

Schedule (click for annotated program) 

10:00 – 11:15, Panel 1 – Institution and Enterprise

11:15 – 12:30, Panel 2 – Community, Production, and Place

1:30 – 2:45, Panel 3 – Authors and Neighborhoods

3:00 – 4:00, Keynote – “Playing the Field, Thoughts about Social Networks and the New York Downtown Arts Scene”

4:00 – 5:30, Panel 4 – Blogscapes and Digital Interaction

For more information, visit networkednewyork.wordpress.com, e-mail us at  nyucalc@gmail.com, or find us on Twitter @NYUCALC and @NYUArchiveWork.