Reinvention and American Culture/Education

Last week to prepare for a year of studying American literature, my students and I discussed what made American culture different from other cultures.  My students came up with some great ideas which I discussed in Friday's post.  I thought I would post today about one of my own favorite ways in which American culture can be different from other cultures.

One of the characteristics of American literature that stands out to me is the focus placed on the ability of individuals to reinvent themselves.  I see this characteristics recur in many of the "great American novels" and many of the American stories that I enjoy.  I love the story of Hester Prynn in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter - a woman whose embroidered A first starts as a badge of shame but eventually becomes an emblem of the kindness, charity and humility that set her apart from the rest of the village.  I love the story of James Gatz - a boy from North Dakota who renames himself Jay Gatsby and becomes a New York millionaire in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.  I love both Twain's Huck Finn, a young boy who reinvents himself almost every day as he travels down the Mississippi, and the narrator of Ellison's Invisible Man, an African American who is writing to become visible in a world that either refuses to see him or refuses to see him in none but the most stereotypical of terms.

Reinvention doesn't just happen in American fiction though.  In fact, I meet people every day who have reinvented themselves - found new careers, new hobbies, and new ways of seeing themselves.  I always find these people invigorating and exciting.  The heart of American pragmatism beats inside of them and their ability to ask not who they think they are, but who they think they can become.   One of my recent favorite stories of this reinvention came from Anthony Pannone's blog The Agvocate where he discussed his journey from minor league baseball player to graduate student in Agricultural Communications at Texas A&M.  I met Anthony when we worked together in the Cal Poly Writing and Rhetoric Center and I always enjoyed talking with him about our shared passion for writing.

Unfortunately, too often we forget the power of American re-invention as educators and students.  We are all here at this school so we can meet new ideas and be transformed into new people - better thinkers or perhaps just different thinkers.  We too quickly see ourselves or others as English kids or sports kids or tech kids and don't notice the ways in which that closes off our experience and potential as Americans and human beings. The important thing is not to police who you and others are today, but instead to look outwards at what you can do and think tomorrow.  Remember Emerson's famous quotation from "Self Reliance":

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. " 

Also, here is the recently deceased contemporary American pragmatist Richard Rorty talking about Emerson's particular brand of American philosophy: