Fiona Paton
The 35th English Graduate Symposium embodied all the intellectual energy and professionalism that we have come to expect in its long and venerable history, but with the added poignancy of memorializing Dr. Harry Stoneback, who inaugurated the event in 1989 and created the Shawangunk Review as a showcase for student scholarship. “Stoney” passed away in December 2021, and in the following months it was decided to dedicate the 2023 Graduate Symposium to his legacy. For me, directing the Symposium was both an honor and a weighty mantle to bear. Having studied with Stoneback myself as a master’s student and presented at the second Graduate Symposium in 1990, I felt rather like the substitute called onto the baseball field when the star pitcher has withdrawn. This feeling only intensified when I opted to teach Stoneback’s own long-standing course, American Fiction 1900-1945, as the graduate class from which the symposium papers would be drawn. I had taken Stoneback’s course as a callow youth, and now I was teaching it. It was necessary, I felt, to preserve the original foundations while also establishing my own version of the modernist canon. Hence, while we read Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Roberts, we also read Wharton, Cather, Hurston, and Wright. We were particularly interested in using the heuristics of race, class, and gender to reveal new and unexplored elements in the texts. The papers presented on May 4, 2023, do that in different ways but all with laudable confidence and sophistication.
Before the formal student presentations began, we had the pleasure of hearing tributes to Stoneback from former students. Present at the event were Goretti Vianney-Benca and Dennis Doherty, with prerecorded video tributes from Mickey D’Addario, Even Hulick, Dan Pizappi, and Nathan Lindsay Lee. These tributes put into words what we already knew—that Stoney had connected deeply with his students as a mentor who inspired, encouraged, comforted, and guided through the pathways of academia, and along the way imparted wisdom about topics as diverse as growing garlic, playing the French game of boules, choosing wine, knowing when to fish for shad, and the correct technique for tobogganing down an icy slope. Hearing these personal tributes at the start of the symposium seemed to bring H. R. Stoneback into the room with us.
It was then time to sharpen our wits and prepare for the intellectual entertainment provided by our four graduate student presenters. Liam Kiggins began with “Nothing Ever Happens Once and Is Finished: Absalom, Absalom! and the Politics of Historical Memory,” engaging with the familiar issues of narrative complexity and uncertain history. But Kiggins deftly weaves together the novel’s convoluted recounting of Thomas Sutpen and the Civil War with Faulkner’s odd distortion of the 1791 Haitian Revolution. Kiggins asks why Faulkner would distort this internationally known event when Haiti plays such an important role in the evolution of Sutpen’s dynastic “grand design.” Indeed, Sutpen himself is the heroic figure who singlehandedly suppressed the slave rebellion, allowing slavery to continue. The answer points towards a deeply contradictory center in the novel, one that desires both remembering and forgetting and that exposes Faulkner’s struggle “to reconcile the horrific violence of the society which produced him with his personal attachment to that society.” Kiggins rather brilliantly suggests that, for all the valorization of Faulkner’s stylistic complexity, ultimately his high modernism seeks to obscure the author’s own unresolved conflicts about the South.
Dylan Perles gave the next paper, “The Young Girl in White”: The Infantilization of May Welland in The Age of Innocence.” Wharton has traditionally been placed in the earlier school of realism, and Perles begins by noting Wharton’s own skepticism toward modernism’s experimental impulses. However, in the spirit of revisioning, Perles argues that Wharton’s vigorous critique of patriarchal norms connects the novel with the social transformations that accompanied modernism, and, indeed, contributed to those transformations. Scholarship has tended to emphasize the charismatic and rebellious Ellen Olenska, but Perles directs our attention toward the conventional May Welland, wife of the protagonist Newland Archer. Using Wharton’s much earlier parable “The Valley of Childish Things” as a context, Perles eloquently argues that “Wharton created May to critique high society’s obsession with infantilizing young women.” In the process, Perles brings into focus the subtle artistry with which Wharton creates May as a multi-faceted character who is worthy of much more critical attention than she has received.
Aylie Rudge was drawn toward myth as a key element in modernism. Her paper, “Nostalgia For What Never Was: Exploring Myth in The Great Gatsby,” acknowledges the many mythic allusions in this iconic text and notes the importance of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland for Fitzgerald, with the symbolism of the Fisher King legend finding its way into his 1925 novel. But is analyzing Gatsby as a tragic hero on a mythic quest, Rudge deftly goes beyond well-established scholarly parameters to explicate the role of Daisy as both embodying the “new woman” of the modernist era and remaining an empty cipher with no real identity beyond the constructions of her husband Tom Buchanan and her lover Jay Gatsby. In a bold revisionist more, Rudge places Daisy not in the position of the grail sought by Gatsby but as The Fisher King, “waiting for Gatsby to come and heal her wounds of the past.” But Gatsby cannot do this, as his grail is the unattainable American Dream. Ultimately, Rudge argues, Fitzgerald utilizes mythic structures to portray the tragic hollowness of both the characters and the jazz age that defined them.
The final paper concluded the student presentations on a more affirmative note. Kimberly Sanford’s “Frontier Women: Regional Modernism in Willa Cather and Elizabeth Madox Roberts,” forthrightly challenges the narrow scope of a traditionally male modernist canon. Embracing the definitional category of regional modernism, Sanford challenges, through careful scholarship, the seemingly naturalized association between modernism, high culture, and internationalism. Instead, she presents Antonia and Ellen, both farm women, as challenging the gender binaries of androcentric modernism in their emergence from childhood into assertive womanhood despite the confines of, in the case of Antonia, a male first-person narrator, and, in the case of Ellen, a third person narrator. Antonia’s extended speech towards the end of the novel affirms her agency despite the complex frame narrative employed by Cather. Meanwhile, Ellen’s process of self-actualization is manifest through the evocation of her inner consciousness, one of the key devices of modernism. In Sanford’s words, “My Ántonia and The Time of Man are epic testaments to the rich interiority of women who have long been forgotten in historical and literary narratives about the plight of the human condition.”
Although these four papers are very different from each other, they all in their way work against the grain of received notions about modernism. In doing so, they provide a fitting tribute to H. R. Stoneback, who made his (considerable) name in Hemingway studies by refuting the then-commonplace view of Hemingway as an atheistic, even nihilistic, Social Darwinist. The next part of our program paid tribute to another side of Stoneback through an interlude of live music and song. Stoney was a well-established presence in folk communities north and south, east and west, to the extent that Jerry Jeff Walker had written a song about him, called simply “Stoney.” This was performed by Alex Pennisi as the last number, bringing both tears and chuckles to the audience. The opening song was “You Are My Sunshine,” a perennial favorite at Stoneback gatherings, with Joseph Curra on guitar and Joann Deiudicibus on vocals, while the middle number was the very special “I’ll Fly Away,” the signature song of Stoney’s wife Sparrow. Joann sang lead vocals beautifully, with back-up vocals by Joseph Curra, Autumn Holladay, and Alex Pennisi, while Bri Castagnozzi provided outstanding accompaniment on the fiddle. The crowd joined in joyfully in celebration of the warmth and community that Stoney and Sparrow had bestowed over the years. Since Stoneback had directed the 2017 Graduate Symposium around the theme of “Poems, Ballads, Songs,” with a program that included live music, the presence of these gifted performers was beautifully apt.
The culminating event on our program was the keynote address by Dr. Marc Dudley of North Carolina State University, whose talk on “The Importance of being Ernest in a Post-Everything Moment: Hemingway for the New Millennium” offered a wonderful combination of erudition and entertainment. While acknowledging the problematic aspects of Hemingway’s work in terms of race and gender, Dudley vigorously asserted the ways that Hemingway was also surprisingly inclusive in his cast of characters, and he emphasized how Hemingway grew as an individual, so that in the late work The Garden of Eden, which “complicated both notions of womanhood and gendered identity and called for us to re-assess that boorish character we thought we knew.” Dudley also shared a nice point of intersection between himself and Stoneback through their respective scholarship on the neglected short story “The Porter,” and used this example to encourage our students that “our job as scholars is simply to find that untrodden ground.” One of the most important and interesting voices currently active in Hemingway scholarship, Dr. Dudley provided a thought-provoking commentary on the pros and cons of one of the true giants of twentieth century American fiction. We were honored to welcome him to our campus, and I feel sure that H. R. Stoneback would have greatly appreciated his witty and insightful defense of Hemingway’s continuing importance in the twenty-first century.