[200 years ago Wednesday, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans was published. That’s one of many Cooper novels with a lot to tell us about his and our America, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Cooper novels. Leading up to this special weekend post on my favorite CooperStudying book!]
Three inspiring moments from the prefatory materials to my Dad Stephen Railton’s first book (a revision of his PhD dissertation), Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination (1978).
As its Preface lays out in detail, Fenimore Cooper is a psychoanalytic reading of Cooper’s writing and career. I will admit that that theoretical lens is not one that has generally appealed to my own critical sensibilities; while I hope that’s due to the scholarly emphases I do want to focus on (AmericanStudies ones, natch), I’m sure my Dad would have said that there’s something psychological—or at least personal—in there too. And I would respond that even if I disagree with aspects of his book, I find it—like everything he wrote and worked on—profoundly inspiring for my own voice, scholarly and otherwise. Which leads me to the first inspiring quote that I want to highlight, from that aforementioned Preface: “It is clear to me that I was attracted to Cooper in the first place because trying to understand him helped me to understand myself.” I love the first-person voice and the thoughtful self-reflection alike there, and I hope that I consistently use and model those things in my own work, inspired by Dad to be sure.
Moreover, re-reading Dad’s Preface for the first time in decades has added something significant to my perspective on psychoanalytic criticism. He begins that Preface by engaging with a quote from the 17th century philosopher Thomas Wright, which I will adapt into 21st century English: “What is Art? What the Idea in the Artificer’s mind, by whose direction he frames his works, what … the internal speech and words of the mind?” I’m writing this post just a couple days after talking at length in my American Literature II class about why I love Charles Chesnutt so much, a discussion in which I referenced this post from almost exactly 13 years ago on the Chesnutt we find in his journals. I connected that discussion to Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901), our class text at the time and my favorite American novel, making the case for how the author’s perspective and identity have to be part of what we engage when we read a work like that. Which, reading this inspiring moment in Dad’s book reminds me, means that I am indeed including psychoanalytic approaches in my own teaching and work.
Those are the more scholarly (if still deeply personal) points I wanted to make in this weekend tribute post. But I have to end with an even more personal point, one inspired by the most personal moment in Dad’s Prefatory materials. He titles his acknowledgments section “Debts” (which I love), and after highlighting various scholarly ones, he turns to his wife, my Mom Ilene. And he concludes that beautiful section with this line: “She consistently (for this I need the present tense) encourages, inspires, and matures me, and—but for that I need the future. . . .” I believe he would have been writing that sometime in 1977 (since his book was published in early 1978), which happens to be the year of my birth, in August. It’s been a long time since I was the future, of course; but I love thinking about being part of his and their future in this foundational scholarly moment, one of many reasons why I love and wanted to pay tribute here to Dad’s first book.
Valentine’s series on other scholarly books I love starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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