Harvard University Press Blog

Justice Stevens on David Garland's Peculiar Institution

Early in his tenure on the court, now-retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens co-authored the 1976 ruling that lifted a four-year federal moratorium on the death penalty. Three decades later, in a 2008 opinion issued in concurrence with the majority in Baze et al. v. Rees against the plaintiffs challenging the constitutionality of Kentucky’s method of lethal injection, Justice Stevens declared his belief that the constitutionality of the death penalty itself needed to be reconsidered:

“In Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153 (1976), we explained that unless a criminal sanction serves a legitimate penological function, it constitutes ‘gratuitous infliction of suffering’ in violation of the Eighth Amendment. We then identified three societal purposes for death as a sanction: incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution. See id., at 183, and n. 28 (joint opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.). In the past three decades, however, each of these rationales has been called into question.”

His opinion went on to detail his rejection of each of those rationales, and made clear that as he saw it the death penalty could no longer be judged constitutional.

The evolution of his thinking has been something of a curiosity for court-watchers since then. Justice Stevens, who stepped down from the court earlier this year, finally provided some answers this week. In a New York Review of Books article on David Garland’s Peculiar Institution, which we published earlier this fall, Justice Stevens lays out the case-by-case chronology of his shifting position on the death penalty. In what signals a refreshingly candid approach to life after the bench, the Justice was explicit in explaining how personnel changes on the court have led to the erosion of the various protections that had kept the death penalty in check.

In something of a coordinated coming-out on the topic, Justice Stevens was also profiled on this Sunday’s 60 Minutes. In an “extra” segment, which did not air live but is available online, the Justice addressed capital punishment, explaining his belief that “we would all be better off if we simply changed course and did away with the death penalty.” (You can see it here.)

The review of Garland’s Peculiar Institution was perhaps the perfect vehicle for Justice Stevens to voice his views on the death penalty precisely because of what Garland leaves unsaid. Indeed, as he explained in a piece for the HUP blog in September, his book is neither “for” nor “against” the death penalty. Rather, it is an analysis of the social functions being served by American capital punishment in an age when every other Western nation has abolished the practice.

As Justice Stevens states in his review, Garland’s book, though ostensibly “amoral,” offers a “powerful argument that will persuade many readers that the death penalty is unwise and unjustified.” Peculiar Institution is more analytically detached than polemic, and Justice Stevens even suggests a similarity to Alexis de Tocqueville’s objective writing about nineteenth-century America. Nonetheless, compelling individuals to actually consider their opinion on the death penalty was certainly one of Garland’s goals in writing the book. He explained that motivation in a podcast produced by the NYU Law School:

“The attempt to engage a larger audience seemed to me like an appropriate one given this particular topic. The death penalty is one of these issues about which everyone has an opinion. In fact, it’s more or less a requirement of every sentient citizen walking around the streets that they should know where they stand on the death penalty. However, very few people are really informed about it. And these opinions are, I think, reached rather superficially quite often on the basis of what cluster of cultural values does one adhere to or what’s one’s political identity, left or right, liberal or conservative. What I wanted to do was to engage the public, to the extent that I can, in thinking about this differently. Thinking about this in terms of the historical comparisons, how other nations do this, but also in our own history, how it is that the American nation came to have the death penalty it currently does.”

You can hear the rest of that interview here. Towards the end of the interview, Garland expresses his hope that Peculiar Institution can help to further the discussion of the death penalty in the United States. Given the book’s role in Justice Stevens’ comments this week, Garland certainly seems to have succeeded there.

The Uses and Abuses of The Classical Tradition

As we were finishing up work on The Classical Tradition, we knew that what we had on our hands was more coffee table conversation starter or rainy day companion than destined-for-dust reference work. Across its 563 articles by 339 contributors the book's purpose is to remind us of the myriad ways that the fascinating classical age, seemingly forgotten and now routinely left off curricula, actually continues to animate our modern world. The book aims to restore our sense of the deep history of disciplines and phenomena as commonplace and diverse as zoology, cartography, comic books, cupid, and nudity. Which is to say that the book has as much vigor as it has Latin.

We wanted the actual presentation of the book to convey that spirit, and its beautifully campy cover certainly helps. There was some pause in planning the book’s back cover, until a few heads here came together and hit on a really inspired solution. On the left, they placed a rendering of the statue Laocoön and His Sons (a photograph of which is above), which depicts the strangling by serpents of the priest who warned against accepting the Trojan Horse. To the right, they set a New Yorker cartoon by the beloved Charles Addams. Titled Laocoön Sausage, the cartoon depicts a butcher and his sons struggling valiantly with a string of links, in clear echo of the serpentine struggle beside it. (You can see the image about halfway down this page). This diptych, at which one can’t help but chuckle, immediately communicates the ethos of this book, which Michael Dirda, writing in the Washington Post, called “one of the best bedside books you could ask for.”

The book’s editors are the classicists Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, along with art historian Salvatore Settis. In the book’s preface they explain that though so much of post-classical life is infused by ancient models, the interpretation of those models is often well off the mark. Far from an offense, they say, it’s often been these “creative misunderstandings that have preserved the ancient heritage and made it useful for later needs.” Against the scholarly score-settlers that pedantically correct modern mistakes and destroy the fascination in the process, the editors of The Classical Tradition embrace the entrepreneurial misuses to which history has been put:

“The history of the reception of classical antiquity, as of any work of the human spirit, must balance, delicately and not unproblematically, between an unwavering commitment to uncovering as far as possible the truth of both ancient and modern cultural formations on the one hand and an undogmatic appreciation of the endless resourcefulness and inventiveness of human error on the other.”

They’ve conceived The Classical Tradition as a guide pointing out the ways that “the post-classical tradition has drawn sustenance and inspiration from (revering, but also misunderstanding and opposing) classical antiquity.” They mean the book to fill an only recently opened void in our cultural memory. For a long time, any serious European or American education included a firm grounding in the classics—often followed, in the case of well-off young men, by a “grand tour” visiting the sites that gave rise to ancient glories. But as this practice has eroded (the pros and cons of which development have been debated elsewhere, and also here, elsetimes), so too has the average educated person’s understanding of the many ways in which the ideas, practices, and artistry of ancient Greeks and Romans have permeated almost every aspect of Western culture from antiquity to the present day.

The Classical Tradition is bringing it back, without stomping on the fun. So, if you ever wonder where Ajax cleaners got their name, or about the roots of astrology, or just what Picasso was on about, or the actual stories of Pandora, Spartacus, or Arachne, then spend some time with this great new book on Western cultural heritage.

A Peek Inside our Pride and Prejudice

There’s no two ways about it: gift book season is upon us. ‘Tis the time for lush stacks of beautifully illustrated almanacs, glossy art books, lush boxed sets, impenetrable cookbooks, and smart new editions of old favorites. Well, we’ve got one of those last, and if you’ve been paying attention it’s not news by now: we’re quite pleased with our annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, edited by Patricia Meyer Spacks.

We think it’s a book well-worth gifting, so we’ve put together a little something to try to simulate that feeling of flipping through a beautiful book and realizing who it’d be perfect for. And we have the book’s designer and acquiring editor to talk us through it. For Graciela Galup, the designer, part of the challenge in working on the cover for this book was in figuring out how a Harvard University Press edition of Pride and Prejudice would be different from all of the other editions already out there. Our books manage to stand out, she says, without straying from a classic, subtle style.  Which is why this image to the right may work fine for Android Karenina, but didn’t quite cut it for us (just a little too racy, even without the robotics).

So, take a look at the video for a peek inside our Pride and Prejudice. It may just be the perfect gift for your favorite romantic, history buff, Austenite, Victorianist, or plain old book-lover. Or maybe it’s a little something for yourself? You deserve it.

 

  

(Image above right: The Kiss by G. Baldry (19th century) Simon Carter Gallery, Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

Bourdieu, Mailer, n+1, and Us

What Was the Hipster?: A Sociological Investigation is the title of the latest entry in the small book series from the journal n+1. The book presents the journal’s attempt to understand and even define the phenomenon of the modern hipster, that skinny-jeans-wearing, indie-rock-loving emblem of our time. Or, as n+1 editor Mark Greif contends, of a time just past. Greif and others hosted a symposium at the New School in April 2009 to kick off the inquiry, and transcripts of the papers and discussion from that afternoon are presented in the book. Also included are some journalistic reactions to the symposium, as well as responses and commentary solicited by n+1. Harvard University Press is listed only in the bibliography of What Was the Hipster?, but, like good people of the crimson, we see ourselves everywhere.

Greif says in the book and in a recent essay for the NYT Book Review that the whole investigation would’ve raised far fewer hackles and elicited much less defensive flailing if everyone would have simply read one particular book. That book? Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.

Distinction was first published in French in 1979, but didn’t appear in English until we commissioned a translation with Routledge a few years later. As Greif explains, the book is an analysis of taste during a particular moment in France, but is really a broadly applicable study of where taste comes from. We may think that our own interest in the finer things shows our personal cultivation of a superior sensibility, but, according to Bourdieu, we’re really just following the dictates of our station. From Distinction’s introduction:

Whereas the ideology of charisma regards taste in legitimate culture as a gift of nature, scientific observation shows that cultural needs are the product of upbringing and education: surveys establish that all cultural practices (museum visits, concert-going, reading etc.), and preferences in literature, painting or music, are closely linked to educational level (measured by qualifications or length of schooling) and secondarily to social origin… To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers.

Bourdieu’s position as something of a patron saint to n+1’s analytic assault on the irony-clad hipster lends the story of HUP’s history with Distinction an irony of its own. That’s because, according to Lindsay Waters, our Executive Editor for the Humanities, the book was actually acquired in an effort to make the press more hip. As Lindsay recalls, former HUP Director Arthur J. Rosenthal would stalk the stalls of the Frankfurt Book Fair, looking for projects to import. He found Distinction there right around when he hired Lindsay away from the University of Minnesota Press. As Lindsay recalls, Rosenthal had been after books like Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, which Lindsay brought to Minnesota after Viking’s initial publication. Rosenthal handed Distinction off to Lindsay, and the new editor presented it at his very first HUP sales conference. The book has had a long life for us, and, perhaps thanks to the nod from n+1, has seen a nice little bump this month.

The Beautiful Infidel

Today marks the official publication date for the first three volumes of the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, our new facing-page translation series, which Harold Bloom calls “a project of extraordinary intellectual and cultural value.”  Earlier this fall, Harvard University Press General Editor for the Humanities Sharmila Sen wrote the following essay on translation to commemorate the launch of the series. The piece was originally produced for the blog of the great Seminary Co-op, as part of their “Editors Speak” series, which offers readers insight into the publishing process. You can view the original post and the rest of that series here.

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What do they know who only know English? Ask this question in certain circles in North America and Europe today and the answer will be: very little. What do they know who know no English? About 175 years ago, when that question was asked in certain public halls and private rooms in Britain and India, the answer was the same: very little. In fact, if the British historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay did not make that point quite successfully in the British parliament in 1835, I probably would not be writing this in English today. In “The Minute on Indian Education,” Macaulay made the case for English-medium instruction for the natives of India, the select few who would become the famous interpreter class—English in outlook and Indian in blood. When I was taught Macaulay’s famous speech at university, all students were expected to have the same reaction. What a terrible colonial villain! That utilitarian brute forcing his European language on the natives of India! A racist who said all the learning of India and Arabia were inferior to one good shelf of European books! We made the right noises in class and wrote long, passionate essays on language and colonialism. The papers were written in English.

Some years went by. I was hired to teach at an elite American university and repeated more or less what I had learned in school myself. My students were impassioned by Macaulay’s dastardly deeds. Then, almost 10 years ago, I received an invitation to give a series of lectures in Dhaka, Bangladesh. I eagerly accepted because it would be my first opportunity to teach university students in my native tongue, Bangla. When discussing Macaulay with some academics in Dhaka, someone asked me if I had read the Bangla responses to Macaulay? Imagine my embarrassment at being caught off-guard like that. I had never even heard of these responses. But, of course, they existed. Nineteenth-century Bengalis (and I assume other Indians) had spent significant amount of time debating the same questions about language and education. What was happening in the British parliament in London was not entirely unknown to the natives of Calcutta. Yet, translations of their responses were not easily available and so my American university professors did not include them on our syllabi.

And I, too, never included any such responses in the classes I taught.

Macaulay, I realized, always won the day in parliament. From 1835 until today, he keeps winning. As much as we denounced his outlandish rhetoric about the superiority of the English language, his speech remained a monologue, unchecked by differing views offered in any other language. Even as we smugly wrote off the Anglicists, we were on their team.

Ebook Sales - What's in a Number?

The New York Times made a mini-headline of its own this week, when it announced that it would begin to track and report ebook best sellers in 2011. This, says the Times, will also entail a redesign of the section of its Sunday Book Review that currently includes 14 other lists.

The variety of lists currently available gives a nice, sweeping picture of what’s selling (which is different than what’s being read), but it’s important to consider all of the factors involved. Distribution, for one, plays an enormous role in these statistics. A book by an independent press is not going to be available in anywhere near as many outlets as one published by Random House, and if it isn’t available, it can’t sell. The movie business has a way of accounting for this sort of disparity, with the reporting of per-screen or per-theatre revenues, so that one can compare the success of a film on hundreds of screens to that of a film that’s playing on thousands. This could just be my ignorance, but I don’t believe the book business has a similar metric.

The best seller lists also provide a sort of sociological window into American purchasing patterns. The hardcover fiction list, for example, presents us with the 15 best sellers in cloth. But what it means, really, is that these are the 15 books most popular right now with a cross-section of the population that either has the disposable income to drop $25-$30 on whatever they want to read this week, or has a relationship to literature that compels them to get it while it’s hot, regardless of the expense. Bless their hearts, in either case.

The paperback numbers are even more flush with insight, mostly because of the way that the trade fiction and mass-market fiction lists are presented side by side. Ever walk into a bookstore and see two versions of a single paperback book, right next to each other? One has a bigger trim size, but a slimmer profile, and nicer paper, and sells for $13-$16. The other has a smaller trim, meant for spinner racks, but is much thicker, on rougher stock, and probably priced around $6.99. The former is the trade, the latter the mass-market. If you bought both, and set them on your shelf for even just a year, you’d see that one’s meant to last, and one’s basically disposable. They represent different attitudes towards the value of books as objects, each perfectly valid. They also represent different supply channels – mass-market fiction is available at grocery stores and gas stations; trade paperbacks usually are not.

The paperback fiction lists in the NYT Sunday Book Review let us see how different books appeal differently to these different markets. On the list dated November 14th, 2010, for instance, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is #1 on the trade fiction list, but Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol is #1 on the mass-market list. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, along with Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire, make the only two titles that appear in the top 20 for both trade fiction and mass-market fiction. What’s not clear from the list, though, is that only a very small selection of books is ever actually available in both formats. Number three on this trade fiction list, for instance, is Howard Jacobson’s Man Book prize-winning The Finkler Question, which is not available as a mass-market paperback.  Publishers decide which books to make available in which formats, and these lists both highlight and inform their decisions.  

"Ever heard of a man named Homer?" - Peter H. Wood on the Contingencies of Art History

This month we’ll publish Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War, in which Peter H. Wood uses one long-lost painting as a way into Homer’s sense of the conflict. Last week we posted Wood’s commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of Winslow Homer’s death, and in that piece Wood lamented the fact that, even today, critical analysis of Homer’s work often ignores the painter’s frequent focus on race. As one corrective, several of Homer’s paintings, including Near Andersonville, are scheduled to be included in the fourth volume of our newly revived series The Image of the Black in Western Art. Wood himself played a role in bringing the archive behind that series to Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute, and he describes his new book as something of a case study of just one of the thousands of objects that the series will highlight.

Today, Wood shares the story of how Homer’s Near Andersonville was discovered nearly a century after its painting.

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Artistic tastes have changed dramatically in the century since Winslow Homer died in 1910, at age seventy-four. But even today, his works are widely admired and frequently reproduced. The artist, born in Boston in 1836, remains an American original, a national treasure.

The New Englander’s numerous pictures of sailors and Civil War soldiers, school children and rural adolescents, Adirondack hunters and women playing croquet remain recognizable, engaging, and marvelously accessible. Suitably, the U.S. Post Office has printed another Homer stamp to mark the 100th anniversary of his passing. Still, we’re only beginning to understand that, along with all his other gifts, Homer was an early and sympathetic white commentator of black life in nineteenth-century America.

The story I recount for the first time in Near Andersonville: Winslow Homer’s Civil War illustrates the slowness of this recovery process. It also highlights the maddening “what ifs” of art history, even in regard to the works of famous artists. Only by rare good fortune can this tale be told at all, for the picture in question, though completed early in 1866, was utterly unknown to Homer scholars for nearly a century.

It is a tale that follows General Sherman’s attack on Atlanta, that hinges on conditions at Andersonville Prison, that confronts the dangerous situation of many enslaved southerners after the incomplete Emancipation Proclamation, and that deals with the gut-wrenching run-up to President Lincoln’s re-election in 1864—what some historians have rightly called “the most important electoral event in American history.”

There would be no such story to tell, however, if a Mr. Blauvelt from the Lincoln Storage Company had had his way. Sometime in the early 1960s, not long after the death of one Horace Kellogg Corbin in West Orange, New Jersey, Blauvelt was summoned to the prominent banker’s spacious mansion. One of Mr. Corbin’s five grown children, Clementine, asked him to examine the leftover bric-a-brac and remove it, now that family members had selected all the fine objects they wanted to keep.

Freedom to Hide: eReaders and the Bashful Academic?

A book on a train can be a powerful shibboleth. I see What You’re Reading, I know Who You Are. Right? Well, maybe not so definitively, but if you’re persnickety about books and the same about people, the books in the hands of the people provide a useful if cynical filter. Maybe on your commute you see somebody reading one of your favorites and it spurs you to strike up a chat. Or maybe you’re thinking of saying hello, then a book you’d never touch is brandished and you decide not to bother. We can wish that they didn’t, or even pretend that they don’t, but the books that we read say things about us, and, as the hilariously blunt Better Book Titles often points out, we might not always love what they’re saying.

This, of course, is old news. Books-as-signifiers came up again and again in those oh-so-recent yet clearly bygone early days of the Kindle, when every style section and book review back page bemoaned the eReader’s crippling attack on judgmental voyeurism. No longer could you so easily size people up by their reading material – no telling what they were working through on that maddeningly vacant device. The flip side of this loss for the watchers was the new privacy for readers, and it was assumed that traditionally stigmatized material would thrive in the new format. Those predictions proved accurate, of course – erotica and romance titles are thriving as eBooks.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about eReaders as possibly enabling the enjoyment of genres beyond those typically degraded. Or, rather, I’ve had occasion to consider the possibility of a broader spectrum of books about which one might be bashful. The spark initially, like that of much book chatter this fall, was Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. It’s not lowbrow in any of the ways for which eReaders are said to provide cover. It is, in fact, the most celebrated piece of literary fiction in years. The annoyance for me is that it’s gone so far past celebration. There was the media fuss this summer over President Obama trying to buy the book ahead of release at a Martha’s Vineyard shop. The coverage of Franzen’s détente with Oprah. His private chat at the White House late last month. The kerfuffle over his European publisher printing and distributing the wrong version of the book, with Franzen himself making headlines and startling the supply chain by publicly announcing that all copies would be replaced. Cripes, the man’s eyeglasses were abducted and held for ransom. Seriously, they were.  

It’s more than a book, is the thing. It’s a spectacle. And, yeah, I should probably read Freedom, but I'd rather not be part of the spectacle for the month or two of commutes it’d take me to slog through. So, Freedom is the very first thing to make me sort of want an eReader maybe a little. Quick download, and then I could work my way through it on the train for as long as it took, and nobody would be the wiser. I’m almost ashamed to say that the very thought was liberating.

Now, believe me, I’m prepared to just chalk this urge up to my own grandiose, paranoid secrecy. But I can't help noting that the only time I’ve been tempted by the idea of an eReader has been to facilitate my reading of the type of book that even the general literati are usually proud to tote.

And now I’m wondering if maybe publishing as an industry has underestimated the variety of stigmatized literature for which eReaders could be a boon.  More specifically, could university presses be due a shot in the arm from ashamed fans of political philosophy, shy classicists, sheepish social scientists, reticent history buffs, and self-conscious literary theorists? Could eBooks do for nerdy nonfiction what they’ve done for Harlequin and the like? Are there closet academics who’ll find freedom (or Freedom) in the anonymity of eReaders?

I figured I should do some research, so I asked a friend if she’d ever had occasion to regret reading something scholarly in public. She scoffed at first, but then told me a story about having once ended up seated next to a favorite artist on a long flight, and wishing her nose was buried in something a bit more catchy than Hans Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law.

That poll scientific enough for you?  The results are clear: very soon university press eBook sales will skyrocket, and smarties of the world will find privacy through eReaders. You heard it here first.

But, oh, wait. Privacy? On an eReader? Whoops...

Peter H. Wood on Revisiting Winslow Homer

This month we’ll publish a new book from Peter H. Wood, Duke University Professor of History, Emeritus. The book, titled “Near Andersonville:” Winslow Homer’s Civil War, is an in-depth analysis of a single Homer painting, one that spent nearly a century lost. Next week in this space he’ll share the story of its recovery. Today, Wood details his commemoration earlier this fall of the hundredth anniversary of Homer’s death.

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One hundred years ago—on September 29, 1910, in the early afternoon—the great painter Winslow Homer died at his studio in Prout’s Neck, Maine. I observed this recent centennial anniversary by traveling from my home in Hillsborough, NC, to the nearby North Carolina Museum of Art. After all, I had just finished a book, called Near Andersonville, about one of Homer’s most exciting and least known works.

On that rainy afternoon, I was eager to pay my respects to Homer by revisiting one of his Reconstruction-era oils, Weaning the Calf. It has been a favorite of mine ever since Karen Dalton and I curated a Homer exhibition in 1988. We featured Weaning the Calf in that show, and we wrote about this subtle image in our accompanying volume, Winslow Homer’s Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years.

It has never been easy to find new things to say about Winslow Homer. When an admiring book about Homer appeared way back in 1914, the author noted that almost everything that could be written about the artist had already been said! Similar comments appeared after Lloyd Goodrich published his “definitive” biography of Homer in 1944.

So, as a lifetime Homer admirer and a historian interested in African America, I was surprised in the 1980s by how little attention had been given to Homer’s impressive paintings of black subjects. Working with Karen Dalton (now at Harvard’s DuBois Institute), I felt we had made a fresh contribution through our exhibition, and I was pleased when the art history community took our arguments seriously.

As I walked into the new building of the NC Museum of Art, I was eager to revisit a favorite painting and commune with its creator. Standing before Weaning the Calf with my rain-soaked cap in hand, I found the picture much as I remembered it. In the central foreground, a black youth (wrapped in shade and his back to the viewer) leads a reluctant calf away from its mother, while two skeptical white boys look on.

At one level, it is a simple rural scene. But at another level, as Karen and I tried to make clear more than twenty years ago, it is a rich commentary on Reconstruction-era race relations, part of an array of images created by the former Harper’s illustrator. Abruptly, I was reminded that the wheels of cultural reinterpretation grind slowly here in North Carolina. To my amazement, the wall copy (and the museum website) did not offer any relevant commentary or even mention that the key figure was African American.

HUP Jackets: How Many Friends Does One Person Need?

Last month we introduced our new series of audio slideshows spotlighting jacket design. We’ve just finished up the latest installment, again featuring HUP Art Director Tim Jones. This time, he explains his design for Robin Dunbar’s How Many Friends Does One Person Need?  

The book consists of short articles intended to convey the various ways in which we humans are as much the product of our evolutionary history as is any other species.  New Scientist called it an "eclectic collection of essays on humanity and evolution with something for everyone."

And the slideshow has even more!  There are bunnies, there are sheep, there's the world's loneliest cow, and there's a gang of roosters that we just couldn't quit.  Take a look.