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Object of the search: Vladimir Nabokov's teaching philosophy.

Notable and quotable

Connolly, Julian W., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

See Alexander Dolinin in "Nabokov as a Russian Writer" for Nabokov's "transition" from Russian to English literary language. He contends that the two languages were two separate realities for V.N., and that Nabokov treated English "like a beautiful, desired other" but drew sustenance from Russian (55). "It is by maintaining the artistic inferiority of some [of his own] Russian texts that Nabokov justified his idiosyncratic method of rewriting them in English" (51).

See John Burt Foster, Jr.'s "Nabokov and Modernism" 85-100.

Diment, Galya. Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997.

Szeftel is considered to be a model for Nabokov's character Pnin in the novel of the same name. Interesting for Szeftel's parallel Russian, WW II, and immigrant experiences and for sidelights on Cornell, where both Szeftel and Nabokov taught. The biography sheds light on Cornell's lingering anti-semitism. Unlike V.N., Szeftel was not privileged or talented. He came out of the Pale of the Settlement in Russia, suffering the savage anti-Semitism that erupted into genocide during WW II. His mother was killed by the Nazis.

Szeftel was on the committee with Morris Bishop to find a Professor of Russian Literature, but his lomg-term relationship with V.N. was troubled. Morris wrote: "What I want is a man who will suck the students into his classroom by personality and by a creative attidtude toward literature. We have enough footnoters around; if lietrature is to compete with scince, it must be presented as a means to wisdom and as an upbuilder of life. The only person I have in mind is Vladimir Nabokov" (31).

Fink, Hillary L. Bergson and Russian Modernism: 1900-1930. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, c 1999.

Somewhat disappointing; Fink does not treat V.N., who wrote extensively about personal time like Bergson's duree, because he did not "clearly belong" to "Symbolism, Acmeism, Futurism,[or] Suprematism" (xiii).

Foster, John Burt. Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1993.

"Nabokov must have discovered Bergson in a Russian setting, perhaps from the Acmeist poets or the formalist critics, both of which were modernist groups with aims paralleing his own. Then, as his Europena side developed, Bergson offered a positive alternative to Freud among early twentieth-century speculative psychologists. If Nabokov vehemently rejects psychoanalytic conceptions of sexuality, the unconscious, the role of muyth, and the very desirability of theory, he strongly endorses Bergson's experience with the lived experience of time, the enriching effects of memory, and the imprtance of creativity. In these three areas he somewhat arbitrarily saw Bergson as nearly identical to Proust, as the philosophical prsychologist whose thought prepared for the Recherche [Proust's masterpiece].
Taken together,Bergson and Flaubert account for Nabokov's polemical neglect of Anglo-American modernism; his own modernism has a markedly Gallic slant (14).

I found despite V.N.'s Cambridge education, as a teacher he had little to do with English literature as such, and nothing to do with English Departments.

Gibian, George and Stephen Jan Parker, eds. The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov: Essays, Studies, Reminiscences, and Stories. Ithaca, NY: Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1984.

Contains the handy essay by Brian Boyd "Nabokov at Cornell," an overview from his biographer of his most important teaching post. "Assuming more difference between Wellesley and Cornell students than was to prove the case he calculated that his new classes could be expected to read three to four hundred pages per week, ten thousand pages in the course of a year"(131).

Also contains a reminiscence by Alison Bishop, widow of Morris Bishop, "Remembering Nabokov." "Just as quick as (Bishop] could, he got him here. Somehow or other, Russian literature joined the Romance Languages Department. I don't quite know why" (216).

Gibian, George and H.W. Tjalsma. Russian Modernism: Culture and the Avant-Garde, 1900-1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976.

Also does not mention Nabokov, but discusses some of the Russian poets VN. absorbed in his youth.

Nabokov, V. D. V.D. Nabokov and the Russian Provisional Government, 1917. Eds. Virgil D. Medlin and Steven L. Parsons. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976.

The introduction by Robert Browder gives a biographical sketch of V.N.'s father, the leading candidate for head of a reform government or government in exile of Russia. As a journalist and former parliamentarian, he indignantly denounced the anti-Semitic Beilis case in Kiev from 1911-1913. Memory of this stance gained his his son V.N., wife Vera, and their child Dimitri a place on one of the last Jewish relief ships sailing before the Fall of France to the Germans in WW II. A believer in Constitutional Monarchy, he was killed during an assasination attempt against the Left leader Miliukov by two "former tsarist army officers," who "ended their infamous careers as assistants to the notorious Alfred Rosenberg under the Nazi regime" (8).

Nabokov, V. D. The Provisional Government. Ed. Andrew Field. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1970.

As Richard Pipes says in the introduction, "The Constitutional Democratic Party of which Vladimir Nabokov pere was one of the founders and leaders was the most influential political party in pre-revolutionary Russia" (ix). It was also a tragic failure due to the success of Lenin and an ideologically driven police state in Russia.

Many of V.N. opinions, at least his political ones, seem to have been fixed by the trauma of this event, just as his literary and pedagogical approaches seem to be fixed by his loss of Russia at a particularly brilliant period of its development in thought and art. It took decades for Europe to catch up with Russian innovators like Bahktin, for example. Nabokov was loyal to a body of culture he felt obliged as a writer and a teacher to preserve in exile, even across languages.

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Bibliographic additions of note to the Vladimir Nabokov project:

Page, Norman. Nabokov: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.

An interesting compendium of critical articles on V.N.

Parker, Stephen Jan. Understanding Vladimir Nabokov. Columbia, South Carolina, Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1987.

Subtle, Vera and Dmitri-approved critical study.

Schuman, Samuel. Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K.Hall & Co., 1979.

Good model of a literature review.

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"The Pedagogy of Vladimir Nabokov"
Notes for a Literature Review

First, why look at the teaching of Vladimir Nabokov?
What can we find out from it?

Nabokov was not a born teacher; he taught because he had to. He had two obsessions 1) writing and 2) catching and classifying butterflies. As a famous Russian novelist who came to the U.S., he quickly learned to readjust his academic requirements to what he perceived as poorly prepared American students. At his pedagogically most successful, he performed pre-written lectures on literature at Cornell. Rumor claimed his wife Vera was the teacher behind the teacher, and she took over his courses when he became seriously ill at Wellesley in 1948.

We want to know about Nabokov's pedagogy because he was a literary genius. He also came to this country as a stateless immigrant, a trilinguist and a poor man who obtained insecure and badly paid positions in the growing American educational establishment. Despite academic success he was never what he regarded as well-paid for teaching; he had to supplement his salary with income from writing.

He had seen the rise of two police states in Russia and Germany. His response as a writer was to reify individual perception, creativity and memory, the intricacy of "reality" and the freedom of Bergson's "creative evolution in his work.

How did his pedagogy reflect this preoccupation?

For Vladimir Nabokov the brilliant, avante-garde culture of Russia's Silver Age was destroyed in Russia by Lenin's Revolution and the Russian Civil War. His father, a statesman and constitutionalist was murdered in Berlin in 1921. These shocks impelled Nabokov to recreate the Russia of his youth though exacting and artistic nostalgia and to raise Russian literature to new heights of novelistic technique and expression for the exiled Russian intelligensia.

In 1940, he lost that audience when he finally escaped with his wife and son from Nazi-occupied Europe. His wife Vera was Jewish. His brother Sergei died in a concentration camp.

What was his preparation for teaching in America?

Brian Boyd in "Nabokov at Cornell" cites the famous remark by Roman Jakobson at Nabokov's review for a special chair at Harvard in 1956 "Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?"

Nevertheless, Nabokov knew the difference between literary lions and humble instructors. He had written desperately to friends to get a job, any job, to escape from Nazi Germany. England was unwelcoming. In 1939 Mark Aldanov offered V.N. a job at Stanford he could't take, and V.N. "began preparing lectures on Russian literature" (Boyd 121). He and his family arrived in NYC with 100 dollars.

He had been retraining himself to write novels in English. He even wrote the biography of a great Russian writer Nikoloi Gogol in English (He later criticized his handling of the subject.) Unlike the hero of his novel Pnin,he had no difficulty with the language per se, but felt profoundly the loss of his Russian literary language. He also lost his literary reputation in the new country. (Jakobson's remark indicates that he regained a literary reputation in English by 1956.)

Educated by tutors, at a Russian progressive secondary school and Cambridge, Nabokov was prepared to teach French and Russian languages and French, Russian, and European literature.

What did he teach?

He was forced to teach language instruction just as he had tutored private students in Berlin. He considered his speciality to be Russian literature, but his most popular course was Masterpieces of European Fiction.

What did he hope to impart to his students?

At Cornell: "Nabokov would have liked a better paid job in an autonomous Russian Department [...] where he would have no obligation to prepare quite new material in which he was no specialist. All this, though, changed very quickly when he started rereading Bleak House and Madame Bovary and Ulysses with an eye to teaching. He soon surrendered to their enchantment and the idea of putting students under their spell" (Boyd 134). He taught the "Masterpiece" course starting in 1950.

Where did he stand in relation to American scholarship? What kind of research did he do as a lecturer?

Nabokov was not in an English Department; he was part of Cornell's Division of Literature. He had read French and Russian at Cambridge, and felt unprepared in English literature. Critically, he was not out of harmony with historicism or New Criticism, the two dominant theories of the English Departments of the period. He felt obliged to extensively translate the Russian literature he taught in English himself, and became increasingly literal. He published his translation with notes of the ancient Song of Igor's Campaign, of Lermontov's Hero of Our Time (with son Dmitri Nabokov), and most stunningly, the four-volume translation and commentary to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

He did not oppose the notion of a canon of great works; however,many works then accepted as masterpieces were not on his list. Edmund Wilson persuaded him to read Jane Austin for his course; he taught Mansfield Park. Most of his Masterpiece course authors were dead white males.

What were his classroom techniques?

In a CBC interview quoted by Dmitri Nabokov the author said of his lectures: "I was on my own, founding my own tradition, following my own taste, creating my own artistic values and trying to impress my approach to art upon the minds of my students--or at least some of my students. I am responsible for having taught these best children of my time a method of appreciation based on the artistic and scholarly impact of literature" (160)

Are Nabokov's artistic values really transferable? What is meant by literature's "scholarly impact"? Does it still exist, and if so, what is it?

And there are many more questions....

Boyd, Brian. "Nabokov at Cornell." The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov. Eds George Gibian and Stephen Jan ParkerIthaca, NY:Center for International Studies, 1984. 119-144.

Nabokov, Dmitri. "Translating With Nabokov." em>The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov. Eds George Gibian and Stephen Jan ParkerIthaca, NY:Center for International Studies, 1984. 145-177.

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Origins and early history of College English:

To recap James Berlin in Rhetoric and Reality, the formation of the National Council of Teachers of English in 1911 was a reaction to the MLA's lack of concern with teaching, and in protest against "college domination of the high school curriculum" through "Uniform Reading Lists" (33)

"Its attention to college teaching [...] led to a college edition of English Journal in 1928, a publication that became College English in 1939. The committment of English Journal to the undergraduate curriculum makes it the most reliable source on information on the thought guiding the teaching of English--both literature and composition--in American colleges in the early years of the century" (33).

It is reasonable to see chapters 3 and 4 (32-91)in Berlin as reflecting both the history of the discipline and the history of College English, one of his important sources.

First Issue: The "advisors' of the first issue are either from prestigious (Yale, Princeton) or teaching and land grant colleges. It was printed, fitting, by the University of Chicago press.

Of the issues's articles, two are on Thomas Wolfe--his posthumous novel had just come out--one is on freshman English (which see), one is on reading literature, several articles are on points of grammar, and two are on pedagogical practices. An English forum, news & notes, and long and short reviews are also included.

Note: College English is one of many NCTE publications including the current English Journal. College English has appeared without uninterruptedly since 1939.

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A brief, partial history of College English 1960-95 through Paul Wadden's "Reading the texts that read the profession: ads for literature texts in College English, 1960-1995." College Literature (West Chester Univ., PA) (26:3) [Fall 1999], p. 59-81. Literature Online.

College English constitutes "a historically prominent record of literary studies in North America over most of the present century [...] in the three-and-a-half-decade period that I cover here, College English was probably the most widely thumbed journal in the profession. In 1960, as its circulation appraoched 10,000, the new editor, James Miller, observed that the journal was 'undoubtedly read by more college English teachers than any other professional publication' (front matter). One of its appeals to the rank-and-file literature teacher--and to textbook publishers who invested large sums of money in ads--was that it had not abandoned pedagogy, as had the MLA earlier in the century [...] College English sought to reach the teacher-scholars and the literature instructors who throughout the nation's four-year colleges and land-grant universities significantly outnumbered their more elite MLA colleagues" (2 of 25).

Wadden correlates the change in ads for textbook offerings with changes in critical and pedagogical approaches. For example, he finds 1959-60 ads offer "the instructor a choice of New Critical Methods, [...] historicism [...] and traditional genre study" (4 of 25)[...] chronicl[ing after Gerald Graff] the clash of the same literary ideologies from 1940 to 1969 [...] the historicist stance [...] and the New Critical view 95 of 25).

By the mid 1960's, a "symptom of the New Critical-historicis imbroglio--and the fact that both were interpretively running low on gas--was the increasing viability of myth criticism and the appearance of the first textbooks with openly billed structuralist assumptions" from "anthropology, sociology and psychology" (8 of 25-6).

Despite social change in the 60's "Anything resembling politics" was excluded."minorities were all but invisible. The canon "of a stable, determinate set of masterworks" was organized around "largely white male writers" (10 of 25).

"College English's first issue of 1970" confronted "the issue of race" in a "newfound emphasis on social relevance" (11 of 25). Feminism emerged in 1975 (12 of 25) but in an emergence that "coincided with the near disappearance of race" (14 of 25).

"The 1980's were the great bourgeois sleepwalk" (16 of 25). Ads suggested that "competing theoretical or canonical claims could be adjudicated and reconciled" (17 of 25).

Ads for gay studies appeared only in 1995. In addition, "the lack of widely advertised and clearly identifiable deconstructionist texts--in contrast to the influential New Critical texts [/...] may have signalled the movement's demise as early as the late 80's" (20 of 25). However, "textbook appeals of the 90's" "play on the watchwords 'literary theory' and 'teextuality' to signal their non-traditional assumptions about text," and invoke the "ideological issues of race, class, and gender;" anthologies include "women, minority writers and writers from other cultures" in more than token percentages (20 of 25).
My comment: the pace of these advertising shifts, even granted the lead time of publishing houses, seems to paint the College English readership/textbook buyers as relatively mainstream in timeline and taste.

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A brief, partial look at College English, the last ten years ("Literature Online" has CE up to 2006 and includes many articles in full text).

July 2006: issue theme of "Language"
July 2005: on death penalty debate; comp & visual culture; on film
September 2004: Chicana feminism; Native American identity; Pidgin; "Hawaiianness;" Funk
September 2003: issue theme of writing the personal; creative non-fiction
September 2002: issue theme of queer pedagogy
September 2000: "whitenesss;" globalization; psychoanalysis; Foucault; colonialism
September 1999: cluster of 4 pieces on Chaucer; first female rhetor; Martin Luther King; The Music Man
September 1998: ethics of teaching lit by Wayne Booth; Cather & Woolf; 4 original poems; reenvisioning the English dissertation
September 1997: Invisible Man; Conrad; narrative theory; original poems; media, culture & identity
September 1996: Sahkespeare studies; Truth & Methods; humanism; "scholardom;" 3 original poems; teaching across cultures

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In chapter ten of Writing Soace: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print(2001) by Jay David Bolter, Bolter looks at the construction of the social self, or "affiliation and community" through electronic technologies (203). He points out correctly that Americans are prone to joining groups, but that those affiliations are "horizontal instead of vertical" (204). The electronic network enhances this capacity for "multiplicity, heterogenity, and immediate, if temporary, connections" (204). Bolton points out, however, that the new capacity "for leverage" though "networking" is exclusive, middle class, and "limited to North America, Europe, Israel, and [parts] of the Far East. Our economic sphere, in other words. He might also add, it is dominated at the moment by usage of the English language and some French.

Because on the Internet popular and commodity culture are equally situated in non-linear hyperspace with elite culture, "the ideal of high culture" has been abandoned, as well as typographical standards in language use. The fixedness and stability of print has been replaced by a "writing sytem that changes to suit its audience of readers," no the other way around (206). Likewise, authoritative canons have been replaced by "special interest groups" in "almost all humanistic fields" (206-7). The benefit of total access is accompanied by almost no familiar "indications of quality" (208).

Bolter claims "by the time the Web had become a cultural phenomenon and attracted the attention pf the government bureaucracies it was too late" to change the non-authoritarian, non-centralized architecture of the Web (210). However, it seems clear at this point that in fact there are many interferences, from viruses, to pop-ups, to delivery systems, not to mention "economically dominent groups" that severely compromise democratic access--or the information-collecting role of government.

Nevertheless, as Bolter says, "the reforming or remediating potential potential of the new writing space has probably not been exhausted" (212). But he ends on a dubious note: given that "it is becoming easier to generate as well as receive multimedia" "it is fair to wonder whether the late age of print may also become the late age of prose itself" (213).

In chapter eleven, "The Web Site" Bolter explains how, as he says elsewhere, the present text is supported and extended by "an associated Web site" which replaces a previous "hypertext version on a diskette" (214). The printed text and the electronic Web site thus thus act in concert. The Web site remediates the print version by adding interactivity among other things, but remains dependent on the text.

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Thanks to Tanya for the conference call for proposals. Gwendolyn Pough's "Personal Narratives and Rhetorics of Black Womanhood" fits the proposal call, and it was informative to have it.

The "neglected persuasive discourses" are four 1990's "autobiographies of Black women who have come of age in an era of hip-hop" (112), stories which fashion knowledge (vide the proposals) about forced roles, including not only "slave, concubine, mammy, second-class citizen, bitch, ho" as Queen Latifah says in Ladies First, but "strong Black woman and domineering Black mother" (113). Some of the former images "have reached new heights of popularity due to contemporary rap music" (113) but Pough does not take on rap per se as popular culture, male or female. Rather in her look at the autobiographies she focuses on the supposedly less invidious image of "strong women." The "domineering mother" Pough finds arising from "the pathological bent of the Moynihan report" in the 60's, "a government-funded study of the state of the Black family" (115).

Pough does not take on the report, possibly because of its subtext of divisiveness between "the African man and woman in America and our ability to relate to and love one another in healthy lifegiving relationships" as Sister Soul writes in No Disrespect (112-113. The report had the effect of implicitly sanctioning the kind of hypermasculinity that resubjugates Black women on a McFreudian oedipal warrant. Instead Pough wisely crtiques the notion of "strong Black" superwoman by focusing on mother-daughter relationships. "Black women, motherhood, and Black sons have been analyzed ad infinitum; whereas, until recently, the interaction between Black mothers and daughters has been largely ignored" she says (115).

"The mother's strength or lack of strength shapes each writer. Each weaves her mother's story through her own Where Queen Latifah becomes a strong woman because her motherwas a strong woman, Sister Souljah became a strong African woman because her mother was not. Whereas Quenn Latifah, Chambers, and Morgan grew up wanting to emulate the strong Black women that they believed their mothers to be, Sister Soulja creates an image of Black womanhood that was denied her beacuse of poverty and racism" (115).

In one disturbing image, in Veronica Chamber's Mama's Girl, the mother "remains calm after being hit in the head with a hammar by an abusive husband (116), She picks up her purse and takes herself to the hospital. This facade, however crumbles, and "unlike Souljah, CXhambers does not write her mother off [..] at the first sign that she is just a 'reglar' Black woman (116). Chambers, for one, "realizes that the superwoman is a magic trick" (116.

The paper finds the four autobiographies, "read in conversation with one another" highlight how to grapple with all the baggage that that comes with coming of age in an era of hip-hop (117).

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Alan Bloom,The Closing of the American Mind (1987. Stanley Fish "Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses," Nov. 5, 2006 NYTimes

The two are almost exactly the same. If you had a museum with a particular kind of academic, Bloom who taught through the 60's and Fish, one of the highest paid university employees in the nation, would be subspecies of each other. The tone is exactly what I am looking for for my Nabokov project. V.N. may have actually agreed with these two white males's opinions, but the cranky, bland, highly intelligent reactionaries--to the ghost of revolution (Rousseau! Nietzsche!) and "evil" ideas--with such a skilled sense of audience, are probably the kind of tenured old boys who put V.N.'s teeth on edge. Their self-assurance about general cultural trends would have annoyed him.

Somehow, the university is failing. And somehow, the failure is sited in the material university, but in the lofty arena of ideas.

An interesting glimpse into the culture-bound who do not know they are bound.

Also, Bloom apparently taught at Cornell, where V.N. taught until Lolita, through the student demonstrations. (He's particularly bitter about them.)

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Eileen has already done a good job talking about "Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption," by Joy Ritchie and Kathleen Boardman.

"Feminism seemed absent from composition but present among compositionists" (588). You've already see 1) inclusion 2) the congruity of feminism and composition 3) and disruption of hegemonic narratives. Example of the latter:I just saw in the paper a feminist critique of war as a killer of chiefly kids and women otherwise known as colateral damage.

It does seem to me that there are a lot of inclusion/revisionist narratives, and that they are wide ranging, only they are not in this particular field. So import them into the field. In one area I happen to know a little about, Dickinson, Sharon Wolosky looks at Dickinson as A Voice of War.Needless to say, Dickinson told the truth about the suffering of war, and that means about the pandemic mourning of women. She never rolled a bandage.

If we go back to Dickinson's Academy, there are a number of woment interesting enough to discuss both as teachers and students.

French feminists surely belong in the question of women's "different style" (594).

I'm not perfectly happy with the idea that composition per se runs parallel to feminism; any more than say, early female nursing. It would seem to be the job women are stuck in, and nothing more intrinsic. If women took over composition because they taught the youngest children their letters after we got the idea for general literacy, after, in other words, privilege was no longer attached to literacy, that follows similar patterns for other jobs. Or am I missing something here? Is it a profession that cultures compliance because it offers such intangible perks? Are we out there improving the lot of everyman (so to speak)?

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Chapter 2, "Literacy and Illiteracy in Documentary America" in Literacy in American Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), by Deborah Brandt looks at literacy in what Brandt calls "documentary America," an increasingly legalistic, bureacratic corporate and technological culture. She says "the pace of change and the place of literacy in economic competition have both intensified in the recent past. It is as if the the history of literacy is in fast-forward." This leads to the "lag or gap" in literacy "we call the rising standard of literacy [italics mine]"(57).

She looks at two men from two socio-economic groups perhaps the hardest hit by such a gap in literacy, one man a blue-collar union worker, Dwayne Lowery, and the other an African American who entered the prison system, Johnny Ames. Lowery was overtaken by and lost what may be called the literacy race. Ames moved painfully but successfully "from illiteracy to literacy" and freed himself from prison (57).

Brandt establishes the terms of "a budgeoning documentary society" (50), what Dorothy Smith calls the "documentary reality" of work and life "highly processed through print and other symbolic media" (48). Growing competition over "written instruments" and "access to information" characterize "the explosion of information workers over the course of the twentieth century and the rising norms in literacy skills" (50).

Brandt looks at the two men as exemplars of the reality of information as an intensifying site of competition. Dwayne Lowery was an auto worker who became a union representative as the economy moved from "a thing-making, thing-swapping society to an information-making, service-swapping society" (52).

When Lowery became a full-time representative in the 70's, his political and verbal skills helped the union grow "in strength and influence" (53). However, soon, Lowery said, "ninety percent of the people I was dealing with across the table were attorneys" (54). "'It used to be we got our way through muscle or through political connections," he said, 'Now we had to get it through legalistic stuff'" (54). The writing of briefs, and "the college graduates [...] increasingly assigned to his district from union headquarters" gradually pushed Lowery out of his union position.

Johnny Ames similarly faced an unequal battle with legalism. He did not understand the documents at his own trial because he was functionally illiterate. As "an inmate for more than 16 years in maximum- and medium-security prisons in the Midwest" (57), he learned to deal with an arbitrary and complex legal system from within prison and successfully appealed his conviction, which was overturned in 1981. but he "would remain in the prison system on technicalities for another 11 years" (63). In freeing himself by "reading books by ex-slaves with dictionary in hand" Brandt says "Ames was reenacting a scene by which many African Americans learned to read in the decades before and after Emanicpation" (68).

These two lives illustrate rapid and profound changes in American literacy from the late 1970's to the early 1990's.