Should this blog be called theaviary.org or some such? (theaviary.com's already been spoken for.) That's a question I had while reading George Fletcher's new novel, The Bond. Because Fletcher's main character -- surprise, surprise, a law professor at an upper-west side law school in New York -- refers to the faculty lounge as "the aviary."
It's a pretty interesting novel and worth some more discussion at some point. The main character, Adam Gross, is an embattled, somewhat past middle-aged law professor. Now, I might think that the professor's brought a lot of the conflict on himself -- with a final exam that's (I would think needlessly) controversial, and with an affair with the dean's wife (always a bad idea, I'd imagine). But it's interesting to think about how generational shifts take place within a faculty and the like. It's worth some time this spring and I hope to talk some more about it, because buried in the novel is some talk about pedagogy and scholarship, too.
You know what the best part of the book for me is? It's the walk the professor takes through Riverside Park, where he visits a statue to Franz Sigel, a German hero of the Civil War. An image of the Sigel statue is below, to the right. It's from our friends at wikipedia.
But he notes that there's no statue to Francis Lieber! "[N]o community had felt the need to organize, raise money and negotiate with the city for a statue in his honor. His monuments were his books, and there were plenty of them. Adam walked over to the shelf and ran his hand across the chipped bindings. Great writers never die, he thought, but with time their bond with us begins to decay." (I might mention that Lieber is somewhat misleadingly identified as a "forty-eighter," a person who fought in the revolutions of 1848--many of whom later emigrated to the United States. Lieber was here well before then, but I take it that Fletcher's thinking of Lieber as someone who supported the revolutions.) Lieber was a professor at South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) before the Civil War. I have a picture of Lieber's house on the USC campus at the upper right. (I took the picture the same time I got the pictures of the South Carolina Confederate Monument around the statehouse and the Mexican War Monument and the Strom Thurmond monument, too.) Afterwards, Lieber was a professor at Columbia University. Lieber, a German emigree to the United States, also edited the Encyclopedia Americanae, as well as a treatise on hermeneutics. But that's a story for another time.
For more on this, see the interview with George Flecther over at balkanization last October.
Later this semester I hope to talk some more about The Bond -- there's a lot in there that's worth talking about in terms of pedagogy and theory (especially Fletcher's talk of romanticism -- a topic on which my antebellum southerners had some thoughts).
On Fletcher's affair with dean's wife, please state which dean.
Thanks
Posted by: Curious | January 25, 2010 at 06:46 PM
Very amusing, Curious.
The Bond is a novel. It's Adam Gross (the main character) who's having an affair, not Professor Fletcher. The dean in the novel is Peter Levenger; his wife's name is Aschkin.
When I have some more time later in the spring, I'm going to get back to talking about the book.
Posted by: Alfred | January 26, 2010 at 01:35 PM