Review by Martha Quillen
History – July 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
The New Western History – The Territory Ahead
Edited by Forrest G. Robinson
Published in 1998
by the University of Arizona Press
ISBN 0-8165-1916-1
SOMEHOW, in the last couple of years, I’ve managed to accumulate a small mountain of history books that I haven’t quite gotten around to reading. I’ve got books by White, Cronin, Ambrose, Zinn, Worster, Etulain, Malone, and others; I’ve got New West histories and Old West histories, histories of the century, and histories of the whole United States, all waiting for a rainy day.
But it just never seems to rain enough around here to get me caught up on my histories.
Thus, when I saw The New Western History listed in a catalog, it sounded auspicious. I thought maybe it could jump-start me into getting on with my historical explorations. After all, the cover copy promised, “This collection of essays advances the lively and important discussion that the New Western Historians have set in motion and makes that debate accessible to anyone with an interest in the history of the West.”
But nothing could be further from the truth.
The New Western History is presumably a collection of essays, but the first entry, by Jerome Frisk, is not an essay at all. It’s a chapter from his dissertation on the western origins of American environmentalism. And it’s also a clear and compelling argument for why American children can’t read anymore.
When the professors teaching in our colleges haven’t a clue about how to communicate, how are our kids ever going to learn anything?
For example, take this paragraph from Frisk’s entry:
Many would contest the view (which Limerick shares with Nash) that the ’60s generation was forged by some common experience, and warped and woofed into a programmatic consensus of evaluative priorities and analytical strategies. Contemporary scholars generally agree that intertextual practices should be culturally critical and sociopolitically relevant, but it seems evident that there are at least two contending versions of how this professional activity should properly and most effectively engage the discursive past. Whereas most contemporary ways of reading, to be sure, appropriate strategies from both basic perspectives, we seldom have to wait until the second foot falls to see which one of the two is the regulating mode of interpretation. Some approaches, foregrounding post-structuralist procedures, stress the destabilizing and subversive elements within texts and, more generally, the contesting voices within what others have called “the tradition.” Different interpretations, deploying the st
Well…. All I can say to that is: In hermeneutically analyzing the paradigmatic and ideological focus in Dr. Frisk’s critical deconstruction of the New Western hege monic modality, my only conclusion is that his paragraph goes on and on — as does Frisk’s so-called essay — without communicating much of anything.
Most of the other essays in this book aren’t quite as obtuse. But they aren’t exactly masterpieces of clarity either — or even worth reading, for that matter. Contrary to the cover copy, I didn’t find this book lively, important, or accessible.
As a copy editor, I’ve occasionally had to translate such dense academese into readable English, and sometimes I’ve found that there’s some original and thought-provoking ideas hidden in all those run-on sentences. But just as often, it seems like academics are allowed to go on and on, misusing words and filling pages with preposterous locutions, when they really don’t have much to say at all.
IN THIS COLLECTION, there were some interesting themes worth pursuing. An essay by Krista Comer contended that instead of looking at the West as a man’s land in need of a revisionist historian, we should note that the west, itself, has actually been primarily feminine in gender all along. The scenery, the mountains, the deserts, nature — they’ve all been generally portrayed as shes (like hurricanes were before feminist revisionists came along, I guess).
Or at least I think that was what Comer was trying to say, but any intriguing ideas she may have presented were quickly lost in unbridled wordiness, as when she said:
To have a discussion about the relationship between literature and history which does not privilege the above assumptions, or that in fact is able to consider some of the questions about “stories” that preoccupy many scholars, requires, I hope it is clear, a reformulation of the discussion. The first re-frame is to undo this line between “realist” narrative and “mythic” or “fictive” narratives; and to undo, too, the implicit assumption that “realist” politics are inherently progressive. That undoing would undo further the conflation of myth with literature (and indeed undo their status as opposites), and would also re-position the New Western History so it is not in opposition to both…
Ah… But I did read this book, which is more than I can say for a good many other, better-written volumes about history. Why?
Well as a proofreader and copy editor, I saw it as a challenge — something like doing the equivalent of several thousand sit-ups. Besides, I’ve seldom found so many examples of lousy writing in one place. So in it’s way, this book was truly a marvel. But if you’re not a copy editor, I figure you’ll enjoy yourself more by reading almost anything else — including the instruction manual for your VCR.
Curiously, though, the final essay, by Sally Fairfax and Lynn Huntsinger, is actually both humorous and interesting. And it’s written in standard English. It’s sad that it got buried at the end of this pretentiously overwritten collection.
–Martha Quillen