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THE SPRING PROGRAM ISSUE
02 THE ART AND PRACTICE OF STREET PHOTOGRAPHY by W. Scott Olsen, MFA
06 THE GREAT GATSBY AT ONE HUNDRED by Adam H. Kitzes
12 A SLIM VOLUME OF KEATS' POETRY / ON SITTING IN JOHN KEATS' GARDEN by Sarah Faulkner, PhD
18 A HISTORY OF HORROR IN FIVE FILMS by Sean Burt, PhD
24 THE UKRAINE WAR AND THE SELECTIVE MEMORY OF STATIST RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY by Roby C. Barrett, PhD
32 LEARNING TO LOOK: THE ART OF DESCRIPTION by David Bjerklie
38 PUBLIC UNIVERSITY SPRING 2025 COURSES
ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST, TRYGVE OLSON
Trygve Olson has lived his entire life on either side of the Red River of the North. For more than 37 years he has been a freelance artist and editorial cartoonist (The Forum newspaper). Trygve lives in Moorhead, Minnesota with his wife Cheryl and their two cats, Gunnar and Marte.
THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
BRENNA GERHARDT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
There are a handful of stories I read in junior high and high school that have stayed with me, often resurfacing in moments of reflection over the past 25 to 30 years. One that particularly lingers is The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell, published in 1924.
The story begins with American hunter Sanger Rainsford aboard a yacht, heading toward a big-game hunting expedition in the Caribbean. In a conversation with his companion, Rainsford makes a bold statement: "The world is made up of two classes—the hunters and the huntees. Luckily, you and I are the hunters." Soon after, he accidentally falls overboard and washes up on an isolated island.
On this island, he finds the grand estate of General Zaroff, a fellow hunter, but their similarities end there. Rainsford, who fought in World War I, believes in the value of human life and finds no joy in death. Zaroff, however, is a man of the old world—he hunted men for sport during wartime, and now, exiled from Russia after the revolution, he continues to hunt men on his private island, claiming to "improve the human race" by doing so.
When Zaroff invites Rainsford to join him in the hunt, Rainsford refuses, saying, "Thank you, I’m a hunter, not a murderer." But refusal comes at a price. By declining the role of hunter, Rainsford becomes the hunted. The game begins, with only a three-hour head start and a knife in hand.
I won’t spoil the ending for you (though I hope you’ll pick up the story if you haven’t already). But I will say this: The Most Dangerous Game has stuck with me because it goes beyond a tale of survival. At its core, it’s about paradigm shifts—about how new ways of thinking must challenge old, entrenched worldviews.
Rainsford represents the evolving world, one that fights for justice and freedom, while Zaroff embodies a static, oppressive past. The story left me pondering how we, as a society, continue to evolve, striving for more just, peaceful, and free ways of being.
It wasn’t until years later that I fully grasped the lessons this story was trying to teach me. As it resurfaced during quiet moments in my life, I began to see how it offered a framework for understanding the rapid changes in our world. That slow unfolding of understanding is at the heart of what makes stories like this so powerful.
Leslie Valiant, in his book The Importance of Being Educable, talks about the value of this kind of slow learning. He argues that education isn’t just about collecting facts, but about letting knowledge mature over time. We often tuck away lessons that don’t feel relevant in the moment, only to find them essential later. It’s this slow-burning process that allows stories to truly transform us.
In a world that increasingly values quick solutions and fast thinking, it can feel like we’re losing sight of the slower, deeper work that the humanities encourage. But it’s through this slow transformation—through revisiting stories and ideas over time—that we really learn.
That’s the lasting power of stories in our lives. They change us, not in one swift motion, but gradually, persistently. In a disposable world, that kind of deep transformation is invaluable.
Executive Director & Fellow Lifelong Learner
THE ART AND PRACTICE OF STREET PHOTOGRAPHY
by W. Scott Olsen, MFA
Let’s
be clear at the very beginning—
This is tremendously exciting.
“If it’s not impossible, there must be a way to do it.”
You walk along, ready for anything, looking for something—you’re not quite sure what—that will open a window into an idea you know is ineffable and true. You hope you’ll be ready, fast enough with your eye and hands, to capture it, to take it away, then to offer it to others.
You have a camera in your hand. It could be a cell phone. It could be something larger. That part doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you’re paying attention to the moment, to the setting you’re in, to what the visual world can say.
There is a type of photography that is, by definition, accidental although on purpose, invasive although public, both deeply loving and deeply critical. Some of the artists who work with this style chose to remain invisible. Others make their presence a part of their art. You don’t need permission. You do need a heart.
This work is called Street Photography. And in every case, the best of this work reveals something true about our lives.
In New York, a food truck vendor dances with pedestrians. In Paris, a couple plays chess outside a bookstore. In Fargo, children play in front of angel wings. The location is less important than the moment. Street photography can happen in very small towns as well as large cities. Sometimes you know the location intimately
This work is called Street Photography. And in every case, the best of this work reveals something true about our lives.
from your own history there. Sometimes you’re a tourist, turning every corner for the first time.
Street Photography is part documentary, part photojournalism, part anthropology, and is a deeply personal way of examining our everyday lives. Including portraits, images of architecture, current events, and the ordinary ways we move about our towns, these pictures are spontaneous captures of our public lives. However, the genre has a complicated set of issues that go with it—everything from aesthetics, privacy, exploitation, exposition, and bias. The voice and intent of the photographer is especially important.
There are names you may know from this work. Vivian Maier. Joel Meyerowitz. Saul Leiter. Diane Arbus. Dorothea Lange. Robert Frank. Henri Cartier-Bresson. Their work has been essential to our self-understanding as a society. And there are a thousand new names to learn.
Historical and contemporary street photography images are a way to prompt a discussion of the issues. It is a way to capture and examine the serendipitous public moments that reveal something true about humanity. l
W. SCOTT OLSEN is a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. The author of 12 books of narrative nonfiction, mostly about travel and adventure, he is also a photographer whose work has appeared in magazines and galleries internationally. “Fargo Street,” a photobook of 100 street photography images from Fargo, North Dakota, appears this fall.
Did you find this article interesting?
W. Scott Olsen will be teaching The Art and Practice of Street Photography on Sundays, March 16, 23, 30, April 6 - 1-2:30 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events
THE GREAT GATSBY AT ONE HUNDRED
by Adam H. Kitzes
“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”
– Nick Carraway to Jordan Baker
This April 10, 2025, marks one hundred years since Scribner’s published The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Depending on who we ask, this date either does or does not hold significance. Since the novel now belongs to the public domain, several publishers will mark the occasion with centennial editions. Each will come with a new critical introduction, along with extensive notes and illustrations that address a range of topics. We can read about the life of the author, the discarded drafts and revisions, all the allusions to contemporary affairs, and the “spirit of the age” that is embodied by Gatsby’s mansion, his parties, his business associates— “gonnegtions,” as they’re referred to. All this will be a far cry from the way the novel originally appeared, since Fitzgerald insisted that his publishers did not include any of the customary promotional materials. No praise from Wilson or Mencken, the professional critics who made it their business to make sense of arts and letters for their readers. Not even a list of titles by the same author (this was his third novel), lest familiar readers come into it with preconceptions about what they might find.
Other plans to mark the occasion are not so clear. At least two stage adaptations will be running. There is a hit Broadway musical. Also, a new adaptation with a fascinating title: Gatsby, American Myth, made its debut this past June at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, MA. But Gatsby frequently
appears on stage, while the ART production suggests that, if anything, our hero lives beyond the scope of ordinary time. Besides, audiences do not go to the theater to learn about “this date in history.” They go for the song, original lyrics and music by Florence Welch (Florence & the Machine) and Thomas Bartlett (Doveman). Meanwhile, the walking tour of Fitzgerald’s St. Paul has come and gone. And in the academic world, even an organization like the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society has yet to announce plans to mark the occasion.
Literary anniversaries often are framed as occasions for “reflection and revaluation,” though what we reevaluate depends on what we decide to reflect on.
We should ask ourselves why, among all the ways we could celebrate the Gatsby centennial, the preferred mode is the one that reaffirms the book’s status as a commodity. And while one of the pleasures of commodity entertainment is that each one tastes about as good as the next, things become more unsettling when these cookie-cutter experiences extend into the realm of critical analysis and appreciation. Now that ChatGPT can answer the question about as well as any high school sophomore, it is well past time to ask whether there is more to the story than explaining the significance of the green light. Fitzgerald insisted that his first readers approach his novel with fresh eyes. We honor these wishes whenever we seek out new things to notice.
For instance, we often regard it as a critique of the American Dream with all its illusions and corrupting effects on what many still like to think of
as American “innocence.” It also makes sense to read Gatsby as a story about survival. Several details told in passing remind us that Nick’s story is very much shaped by the experience of living through the horrors of war. There would be no Gatsby to talk about were it not for his incredible fortune in the Argonne forests. Nor, for that matter, would there be a Nick Carraway, whose family lineage is a story of escape from war. Indeed, among all the incidental characters who breathe life into the story, one of the most compelling is the substitute that his great uncle hired to serve in the Civil War. We know next to nothing about this substitute, not even whether he lived or died. (A good piece of fan fiction might tell of his hardships, including a steady diet of hardtack, poor dwelling quarters, chronic fatigue, and the constant threat of dysentery.) We can imagine, he was one of the many Union soldiers who caught on to the idea that it was a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight.
Of course, readers don’t usually think of it as a war story, not with all the drinking parties and golf tournaments that take center stage. If anything, it is a story of people who put thoughts of war so far out of their minds that they wouldn’t recognize one if it landed right on their doorsteps. During one passage which shows perhaps the clearest signs of the novel’s age, the narrator goes looking for Meyer Wolfsheim and locates this visibly Jewish gangster at a hideout that happens to be called the “Swastika Holding Company.” While we cannot be certain what Fitzgerald knew about the symbol in 1925, regardless of all the ink that has been spilled on the subject, the point is that today it evokes atrocities
that the author simply could not have anticipated. So too, when the narrator describes Gatsby’s murder as a “holocaust.” Given the chance to revise today, would he have found a more suitable word?
Keeping these unintended gaffes in mind, we might read Gatsby as a story about storytellers and what they have to offer their audiences. As somebody who wrote for a mostly anonymous reading public, Fitzgerald was known to revisit this subject many times. It comes across in stories like “The Rich Boy,” which he wrote about the same time, and which reads like a trial run for his novel. Much like the novel, the title seems to name the main character. But we begin with an unnamed narrator, who all but confronts us with his invitation: “Let me tell you about the very rich.” Along similar lines, we only have the story of Gatsby because we have the memories of one Nick Carraway, a character who is just as mysterious as the one he recollects. As he tells it, Nick had moved to New York to make it big in the bonds business, and in time he found himself caught up in a tangle of affairs, shady liaisons, and criminal schemes. These all lead back to his nextdoor neighbor, one James Gatz from North Dakota, who now presents himself as Jay Gatsby, socialite extraordinaire.
While Gatsby’s life clearly has been a series of improvisations, it is only because he comes under such close observation that he appears to us so deeply shrouded in mystery. It is Nick who first notices his neighbor as a figure who emerges from the shadows—not even Gatsby, but someone who merely “suggested Mr. Gatsby himself.” Later, Nick finds himself deep in conversation before he realizes that the guest he’s been chatting with is in fact the mysterious Gatsby. The episode is striking, mainly because for all the other guests who simply turn up at the mansion for one of Gatsby’s famous weekend parties, it makes no difference to them whether they meet their host or not. Tom Buchanan certainly makes his point when he calls Gatsby “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” but we need the narrator’s continuously ironic commentary to help us understand why that impropriety should offend as
much as Gatsby’s secret affair with Daisy, Tom’s wife. (As for what Nick thinks of the former footballer from New Haven, consider that such accomplishment establishes him, in the narrator’s esteem, as “a national figure in a way.”) And when Gatsby finally is killed—not over any indiscretions of his own, but in a case of mistaken identity—Nick is the last to figure out that for all this time, the illusion was all that ever really mattered. Readers can decide for themselves whether this lesson helps them make sense of the questions that come up from the very moment we start reading: Who is this Nick fellow? What does he hope to accomplish by recounting these events he once lived through? Where do we come in?
Literary anniversaries often are framed as occasions for “reflection and revaluation,” though what we reevaluate depends on what we decide to reflect on. It depends, for instance, on whether we want to know why, among all the books that do stand the test of time, only a select few receive the sort of attention that we associate with an anniversary. On the other hand, we may want to know more about the unit of time we’re using, and whether it measures distance or proximity. And assuming we’re all on board with this whole idea of anniversaries for a book, we still face the challenge of figuring out how best to mark the occasion. We might start by asking, what’s so big about a centennial? As a measure of literary history, the century seems like a holdover from Frances Turner Palgrave, who put so much confidence in it that he felt almost no other terms were needed to organize his Golden Treasury. As Palgrave helped introduce to his readers—and the Golden Treasury remains one of the bestselling poetry collections ever published—each century has its distinguishing language and style, typically distinguished by a single author. Hence, four distinct volumes, which represent the Ages of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Collins and Wordsworth. (Palgrave does not explain why this pattern does not take hold until the sixteenth century.) The result is a version of literary history that few literary historians make sense of, along with a measure that none of the poets
included in the famous anthology actually use, for all their obsessions with time and the passing of ages. In fact, to read Shakespeare is to recall that a century meant something very different before it became a convenient way to mark that moment in chronology when the years start to feel distant from us. When applied to Gatsby, one hundred years feels all too much for characters who view their own lives in terms of decades.
Still, we should keep this outdated time frame in mind as we look back to the “Jazz Age,” to use the term that Fitzgerald helped coin. How much do our memories of those supposedly halcyon days help us take stock of our own? How much do they help us to keep out of our minds? Consider, for instance, why so many publishers are preparing centennial editions of the novel, but nothing similar for The New Negro, Alain Locke’s landmark anthology of the Harlem Renaissance. For aside from its own merits, which are considerable, The New Negro can go a long way in helping us appreciate Fitzgerald’s remarkably nuanced handling of race: why it strikes the narrator as “nibbling at the edge of stale ideas” when Tom Buchanan makes his pseudo-scientific speech about the forces that threaten the dominant white race, or why it matters that it is a “pale well-dressed negro” who identifies the car that killed Myrtle Wilson. Meanwhile, we can imagine what Fitzgerald would be thinking if he discovered what The Great Gatsby has turned into over the course of a century. For starters, he might be surprised to learn that his novel was still in print. By the time he died, the novel appeared to have run its course. By 1940, the year of his death, poor sales forced Random House publishers to remove Gatsby from its Modern Library series. Since the author was aware of the typical course for most books, which tended to lose their shelf life within a few years at most, he might be hard pressed to say how Gatsby somehow managed to escape that gloomy outcome. How much did he owe to those same critics that Fitzgerald made such a point of not including on the book’s original jacket? How much did he owe to stage adaptations? How much to the army, which adapted the book for its
Armed Services series, and distributed over 150,000 copies to soldiers during World War II? And who can count the copies that have sold since Gatsby was introduced to high school English courses? Of course, chance plays a role in all of this, but once they do get into print books tend to endure as objects. Among the many reasons why readers could choose to revisit certain titles over others, nothing helps as much as having a copy ready to hand.
Whether we read it year after year or just hold on to an old copy that we sort of hope to get to, April 2025 is a wonderful occasion to celebrate The Great Gatsby at the century. It is an opportunity to return to the novel with fresh eyes and see what it has become. For those who want a richer experience with the abundance of supplemental material, reading through some of the pages that Fitzgerald spun off into separate stories is not a bad place to start. Neither is looking at some of those adaptations; for those who can’t make it to Broadway or the ART, there are two good film versions. If we start to pay more attention to some of those overlooked characters, what new paths will they open, what new stories for the telling? And just as we do with any other anniversary, we can take the occasion to say: thank you for being part of our lives. l
ADAM KITZES is a professor of English at the University of North Dakota, where he writes and teaches about Shakespeare’s legacy, along with other varieties of literary history. Originally from Chicago, he has lived and worked throughout the Midwest before making his home in Grand Forks. When he is not on campus, you can find him on one of the many trails, whether in North Dakota or the no less wonderful state of Minnesota.
Did you find this article interesting? Adam Kitzes will be teaching Gatsby at 100 on Thursdays, April 3, 10, 17, 24 - 6:30-8 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classesevents
A SLIM VOLUME OF KEATS’ POETRY/ ON SITTING IN JOHN KEATS’ GARDEN
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness.”
– John Keats
by Sarah Faulkner, PhD
On a recent trip to London, I told myself I wasn’t allowed to buy any books. Like any self-respecting English professor, I broke that rule three hours after I arrived. The Waterstones bookstore in Kensington was, in fact, the first place I went after checking into my flat. Filled with the excitement of solo traveling and the buzz of London, I couldn’t resist the window display of books as I walked toward Hyde Park on a blustery April afternoon.
The wayward purchase was a green cloth-bound copy of John Keats’ poetry. The slim volume fit perfectly into the pocket of my raincoat, and I quickly justified the acquisition as practical—one always needs something to read while traveling alone, especially on the Underground. And as I traveled six miles northeast the following day to the charming neighborhood of Hampstead, it was this collection of Keats’ poetry that I wished to read.
Many of us might have read John Keats in high school, or perhaps university. We might have seen Bright Star, the wistfully romantic 2009 film about Keats (played by Ben Whishaw) and his fiancé Fanny Brawn (Abbie Cornish) and their ill-fated love affair. We might know that the poet was tragically short-lived, dying of tuberculosis at the age of 26, or that he was a champion of the imagination and the beautiful.
Born on Halloween in 1795 in London, Keats trained as a surgeon’s apprentice and attended medical school in his youth, holding bowls to catch patients’ blood and dressing their wounds (many inflicted by the surgeon himself). Yet when he received his own apothecary’s license in 1816, at the age of 21, he had already decided to pursue a different profession: poetry.
His first poem appeared in print to little critical notice or acclaim. Yet other poems followed, and Keats’ publishers soon introduced him to the notable minds of the day, many of whom championed the work of the timid yet passionate young poet. He took a long walk along Hampstead Heath with author Samuel Taylor Coleridge and met his own poet-hero, William Wordsworth. He moved in with Charles Brown, a friend who had considerably more money than he did, in a beautiful home called Wentworth Place, so that he could write.
And write he did in the spring of 1819. At the tail end of what we call his Annus Mirabilis, or Marvelous Year, Keats produced five of his most famous poems, all odes: “Ode on Indolence,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “Ode to a Nightingale.” These poems give us some of the greatest lines in British literature, including one of my personal favorites:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Various quasi-legends have sprung up around Keats’ composition of his odes. While in Hampstead, I heard the story that he was sitting under the plum tree in Wentworth Place’s garden when he heard the song of a nightingale. Struck, he immediately picked up his pen and began to write. Keats was ill with tuberculosis when he heard the beautiful song and could not help but ponder the mortality—and immortality—of himself, the bird, and her song. Keats contrasts the loveliness of the bird with the miseries of the world around him and particularly his own illness:
The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
He ponders whether poetry has the power to transcend reality, at first jubilantly claiming that he will follow the nightingale “on the viewless wings of Poesy.” He acknowledges that he Is “half in love with easeful Death” and its ability to take away his pain, while also praising the evergreen power of art to lift us out of our cares and sorrows.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down; The voice I hear this passing night was heard In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Just as it seems that Keats has also achieved aspirational immortality through his own flight of fancy, he is brought back to reality about him, complaining bitterly that “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do.” The poem ends with enigmatic lines of confusion as Keats ponders the purpose and even the reality of his imagined flight with the nightingale:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?
Even without the knowledge of Keats’ tuberculosis, his unfulfilled engagement to the woman he loved, and his disappointment at the reception of his verses, the poem is affecting. The final lines fill me with a deep sense of restlessness, the desire to get up and move around without aim, to pace, to look longingly up at the moon for answers. Keats’ poems frequently capture life’s unanswered yet pressing questions: Is beauty the enemy of philosophy? Is imagination the opposite of or our companion to reality? Can our imaginations truly transcend the miseries of our world?
Wentworth Place is now the Keats House Museum in London. I made my way there after purchasing the small green book, revelling that the day remained dry and admiring how the hazy sun shone with determination through a now-grey sky. I walked the charming streets of Hampstead toward Keats’ Grove, paid nine pounds for admission to the museum, then moved with poignant awe through the house in which Keats had lived, loved, and written.
I then moved into the garden, propping the book of poetry open in my lap. I read through several poems slowly, all the while glancing up at the house and gardens as Keats, Fanny Brawne, and Charles Brown might have done. I wrote letters to dear friends on cards from the gift shop, trying to capture the feeling of being in this magical place. I took a single forgetme-not from the garden and pressed it between the pages of the book, that I might indeed remember this literary pilgrimage and the soft beauty of his home.
I was lucky to visit Keats’ house while the flowers were still settling in amongst the boughs and hedges. His lines extolling the beauties of nature in all seasons are some of my favorites, and lately, I have dwelt with pleasure on his nature poetry. As I have watched my own tulips bud, bloom, and fade, I think of the immortality they might achieve in art, yet also feel the poignant pleasure of the passing of the seasons. Rainbows, after the initial delight they bring in constantly rainy Seattle, always make me think of Keats’ passionate arguments that understanding the science behind a rainbow’s appearance was not superior nor more efficacious for the mind than simply appreciating its miraculous beauty. And, of course, when I hear the sparrows warbling in the blooming thickets about my own home, I think of Keats and his nightingale.
This love of nature and its beauty can seem a foundational aspect of both the human spirit and art to many of us. Yet in Keats’ time, this appreciation for nature, as well as the glorification of it in poetry, was still rather new to British verse. A group of writers we now call the Romantic poets brought nature poetry into vogue. This group of male and female poets praised the dancing joy of daffodils in the wind, the melancholy of ruined cathedrals beside swift-flowing rivers, the melting sorrow of the moon, the mellow melancholy of autumn, and the sublimity of mountain clifftops. With greater political and revolutionary charge, the Romantics also claimed the power of the individual—rather than society, rather than the court—to think, to create, to inspire. They believed that strong feelings were the basis of true poetry, and that nature could—and should—be our teacher.
John Keats is a central figure of this movement amongst other poets, novelists, and essayists.
John Keats is a central figure of this movement amongst other poets, novelists, and essayists. As I walked through the “Age of Romanticism” room in the National Portrait Gallery in London, I gazed on portraits of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Keats himself. Other portraits were sadly missing from their rightful places in the room, such as those of Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Prince, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Olaudah Equiano, and Felicia Hemans. Much work remains to be done to bring their work into its proper light.
As I gazed on the portraits of the people whose writings had in many ways defined my life and given it its purpose, I marveled how much and how little has changed in two hundred years. The words of Romantic writers ring true in their beauty, their sorrows, and their questions today. How do we balance horror with beauty? Peace with progress? The desire for immortality with the assurance that we cannot achieve it, except perhaps in art? And can we do even that? Whenever I feel the restlessness captured in Keats’ final lines of “Ode to a Nightingale,” I open a volume of poetry, a collection of essays, or a novel by a Romantic writer, and find solace in the soft beauty and raging tempests of their writing and lives. I also try to walk outside, to hike toward waterfalls, and let nature be my teacher.
As my trip to Wentworth Place—now the Keats House Museum—proved to me yet again, these writers still captivate and move us. Sometimes they move us across the world, searching for poetry, flowers, and a glimpse of immortality. l
SARAH FAULKNER received her PhD in English from the University of Washington, where she taught eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature as well as writing for eight years. She currently teaches at Bishop Blanchet High School in Seattle, Washington. This will be her fourth course with Public University.
Did you find this article interesting? Sarah Faulkner will be teaching The Romantic Age on Mondays, March 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, April 7 - 7-9 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events
A HISTORY OF HORROR IN FIVE FILMS
by Sean Burt, PhD
We all know that there’s no shortage of opportunities to watch visual media today. Endless content is waiting for all of us on our TVs and tablets and phones, whether in a Netflix binge or a grim doomscroll session. In our media context, the humble movie, with its nice, cozy, not-too-shortnot-too-long 90-minute runtime, becomes something special: a moment to fly into a fantasy world, to snuggle with a loved one in front of a romantic comedy, to cry out in righteousness with the heroes who fight injustice, or to gather with family to relive holiday memories. Many beloved movies bring people together and uplift the human spirit. And that’s great, but I’m not going to be talking about those movies. On the other side of the soaring cinematic experiences, but no less intense, are the kinds of movies that are designed, on purpose, to make us feel really bad. Films that cause fright, disgust, embarrassment, loathing. To some, the idea of watching movies that unflinchingly show evil, violence, and torment is far from their idea of a fun time. And it can be enough to make one wonder why the genre of horror films is so popular across categories of age, gender, ethnicity.
It may have unsavory associations, but horror in the movies has a long, influential history around the world, going all the way back to the silent era. Some early horror films from Germany in the 1920s, such as Nosferatu, The Golem: How He Came into the World, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, not only exemplified the German Expressionist movement with their disorienting, non-realistic visuals, but also helped to create the language of film style that remains influential to this day. In fact, the genres of silent film that remain most watched today are the comedy, especially of the slapstick kind (Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton), and horror. There’s a kind of affinity between comedy and horror: both rely heavily on using visual cues to evoke reactions that you feel deep in your body (the belly laugh, the shudder). Both genres
place a high value on the set-up for the “gag.” That is, just like slapstick comedies use a bit of visual suspense to tell a joke (think of Wile E. Coyote with his latest Acme contraption), the horror film too trades on clever set-ups and tension and release. That could be something like the (in)famous “jump scare,” or the inventive and baroque “kill.” What kind of contraption or what kind of bizarre bodily contortions will the movie show when it offs a minor character? This is the kind of morbid visual surprise that often both frightens and delights fans of horror.
Accordingly, while I did just claim that horror films are in the business of creating ugly feelings, it’s always true that, for horror audiences, watching these films can be a lot of fun, especially when shared with friends. An important feature of horror fan culture is the embrace of its iconic characters. Even if you never plan to watch any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies in your lifetime, you likely will recognize the indelible striped sweater and metal claws of Freddy Krueger, and probably because a miniature version of him has stopped by your door on Halloween night. While these modern nightmares like Freddy, Jason, and Chucky remain 21st-century pop icons, they are contemporary reflections of monster phenomena of the past. The early 20th-century
monsters made famous by Universal Studios—Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy—were huge pop cultural phenomena. They launched several sequels, met Abbott and Costello a few times, inspired magazines, toys, and Monster Mashes. Even after the life drained out of the Universal franchises themselves, these monsters resurrected in the mid 20th century in more lurid versions, such as Christopher Lee’s iconic fanged Dracula in the UK’s Hammer Films, and then in increasingly outlandish inbred offspring like The Addams Family and The Munsters. While Frankenstein and Dracula have immeasurable influence on popular culture, they nonetheless emerged out of a renowned Gothic literary tradition. Mary Shelley’s novel is one of the true classics of English literature and appears on college syllabuses around the world. There’s a kind of dignified respectability to the spooky castle and the moody, tragic monster (even in the villainous Vincent Price adaptations of Poe’s stories). A whole lot more of horror movie tradition is, well, a bit seedier and more unruly. After the Universal Monsters declined in popularity in the postatomic age, the silver screen turned to science fictional terrors, as if a century of world wars meant that a new kind of horror had been unleashed. The 1950s bring us the Japanese classic
Godzilla, but also American films on almost every kind of invasion possible: aliens, sure, but also insects, reptiles, spiders, mollusks, blobs. Shrinking men, transparent men, colossal men, colossal women. But it was the 1960s that suggested that the most disturbing horrors are the ones closest to home. Rosemary’s Baby suggested that the machinations of a global Satanic cabal would be no more horrifying than the domestic abuse that Mia Farrow’s Rosemary is subjected to. The later films of Alfred Hitchcock, and especially Psycho, showed that violence can erupt into even intimate spaces and that the monstrous can be found anywhere among us. Similarly, the low-budget realism of Night of the Living Dead introduced the zombie into popular imagination and reflected the violent tumult of that decade. The kinetic realness of that film, its bleak documentary style, makes for an immediate, compelling viewing experience. It captured the attention of “midnight movie” shock-andgore audiences as well as of European art cineastes, who noticed its complex and searing political edges. It further became a harbinger of the association of horror with exploitation films, or “B movies,” films without much in the way of budgets, stars, or respectability. The 1970s and onward ushered in the growth of
films that drew in audiences with promises of violence, sex, drugs, cannibalism (yes, that was a big one for a while, in films such as the classic Texas Chain Saw Massacre).
Perhaps the most key moment in the history of horror movies was the VHS home video revolution, which brought horror out of the cinema and on to every television. Several classics of the late 70s and early 80s such as Carrie, Halloween, and A Nightmare on Elm Street began to set horrors among teenagers, often suburban white teens. Then, as the video rental market began to grow exponentially, an accompanying culture of horror fandom also took off. Fans of horror came to delight not just in the macabre, but also in the outlandish and grotesque, and particularly in inventive special effects (such as the distorted parasitical alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing). This explosion of horror fan culture led to a proliferation of sequels and cheaply made films. Filmmakers created vast numbers of bloody killers, creepies, and even horror comedies like the Gremlins movies. Maybe some of you are old enough to recall the fascinating and repulsive rectangular boxes that lined the shelves of the horror section at the video store. (I for one wish I could have forgotten the slimy sneering green
Perhaps the most key moment in the history of horror movies was the VHS home video revolution, which brought horror out of the cinema and on to every television.
guy emerging out of a toilet on the cover of Ghoulies).
The influx of inexpensive consumer electronics like the camcorder into the 80s and 90s also enabled would-be amateur auteurs to create nobudget movies in garages and backyards. The number of horror movies that entered circulation starting during this era probably outstrips anyone’s ability to watch them all, and I’m not sure how many of the seemingly endless number of Friday the 13th sequels one needs to see. But there certainly are gems out there (would you believe me if I said that 1987’s Slumber Party Massacre 2 is an incredible pastel-colored and bloodspattered hallucination of 1980s American suburban nostalgia?).
A lot of horror movies and fan culture remained (quite happily) on the far edge of respectability, disturbing concerned parents’ groups, while in the UK the most notorious of these videocassette shockers were collected on the
notorious “Video Nasties” list and banned by censors. Yet that doesn’t mean that mainstream and prestige cinema hasn’t also found great inspiration in the horror film tradition. Some of the true movie classics of the late 20th century—Jaws, Alien, The Shining, Coppola’s Dracula, The Silence of the Lambs—are horror films made with big budgets by A-list directors which, in some cases, garnished Academy Awards. Further, celebrated contemporary filmmakers continue to work in the horror genre, including Jordan Peele, M. Night Shyamalan, and David Fincher. Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro won a Best Picture and Best Director for The Shape of Water, a film that evokes the Universal Monsters era. South Korean director, Bong Joon-Ho, who won multiple Oscars for Parasite, also made the creature feature The Host, which hearkens back to the 1950s sci-fi horrors, with an anticolonial twist. As the success of these films suggest, the current horror movie scene is deeply international, and many of the most original and beloved films of the past 30 years have come out of East and Southeast Asia, from countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia.
One such notable Japanese film, 1998’s Ring, tells a story that revolves around a videocassette that brings a death curse on whoever watches it. Just as the
rise of the videotape format bolstered the horror genre, the tape itself becomes a source of horror in contemporary films. Indeed, horror films have long offered sly winks toward the audience’s own voyeurism, going back to Norman Bates’s voyeurism in Psycho, or even to the horrific reveal of the face of Lon Chaney’s silent-era Phantom of the Opera. It’s as if to say we all know that there are some things that one should turn away from, but here you are, choosing to watch it. A contemporary innovation on the idea that horror lies primarily in watching images is the “found footage” trend, popularized initially by 1999’s The Blair Witch Project. This kind of filmmaking, not coincidentally inexpensive to produce, builds movies out of fictional documentary-style filming. This approach has the advantage of increasing the realism of the film. Many rumors swirled around Blair Witch, suggesting that it was an authentic documentary. Even more, though, the found footage film locates the discomfort of horror movies firmly in the materiality of the image—it’s not just the story that terrifies you, but the very pictures that you’re watching. The idea that a filmed image can cause terror, perhaps leads us back again to the question that arose at the start of this essay. Why would someone
We all know that there are some things that one should turn away from, but here you are, choosing to watch it.
make (or watch!) horror, then? I’d suggest that part of the answer lies in its very ability to release uncontrollable energies. Human existence is that it is haunted by cruelty, violence, emptiness, confusion, thoughtless, or purposeful destruction, and all are legitimate and illuminating subjects of art. Horror as a genre dwells directly in good and evil (well, at least evil). Though the central figure of horror is often a monster, who at first glance seems to be a strange outsider, all the best horror films show how (to spoil the ending of 1978’s slasher Black Christmas) the “call is coming from inside the house.” Film critics and fans frequently note how horror is especially well suited to diagnosing and critiquing systemic social problems. Part of the enduring power of Night of the Living Dead is its deft and alwaystimely portrayal of the real-world horrors of racist mob violence. Its sequel, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, places the zombies in an undead shopping mall, skewering capitalist consumerism. Get Out pointedly explodes the self-satisfied assumptions of supposed post-racial liberalism
to uncover what lies beneath it. But while horror films have a political edge, they also ask viewers to look directly at the terrors of life, such as the torture and deception Mia Farrow’s Rosemary undergoes at the hands of those she trusts in Rosemary’s Baby. Or the sheer horrors of the always-divided human heart itself, as in Carrie. Or even the empty and lonely abyss of the digital age in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film Pulse. Horror enables us to reflect on the totality of human experience, without having to force it into a tidy “happily ever after.” It shows us that the monster will always return, at the very least because the audience demands a sequel. l
SEAN BURT is the Chair of the English Department and an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and English at NDSU. He has a PhD in Religion from Duke University. He teaches classes on religion, literature, and film and writes on biblical poetry and the Bible in contemporary literature and film.
Did you find this article interesting? Sean Burt will be teaching A History of Horror in Five Films on Wednesdays, March 19, 26, April 2, 9, 167-8:30 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events
THE UKRAINE WAR AND THE SELECTIVE MEMORY OF STATIST RUSSIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
by Roby C. Barrett, PhD
In February 2023, Russia invaded Ukraine and shocked much of Western World. Conventional wisdom in Europe had postulated that given Russia’s growing economic power, an attempt by Putin’s Russia to absorb Ukraine by force was not only unthinkable but also irrational and unnecessary—so much for convention and rationality.
In the fall of 2022, US and British intelligence predicted a full-scale Russian invasion, but a more nuanced strategic understanding of the Russian capabilities and likely tactical outcomes was blatantly off base. Senior US military officials briefed Congress, stating that Kyiv would fall in three days, and the Ukrainian government would collapse in three weeks. The Pentagon focused on supporting a Ukrainian guerilla war that would follow the Ukrainian collapse. They were shockingly misinformed about both the actual Russian military capabilities and the Ukrainian determination to resist, despite billions spent on analyzing just that.1
Following the invasion, it became apparent that hubris and misconceptions about Russia’s global clout blinded Vladimir Putin to the politics of an invasion and Russia’s lack of military capability. In addition, the Kremlin leadership also misjudged the level of latent hostility with which Ukrainians viewed Moscow’s attempts at political, economic, and military intimidation. In point of fact, the West should not have been surprised—either that Putin would launch an overt territorial grab or that Russian ethnocentric ignorance would cloud their judgment. This was not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Russia’s imagined self-image and flawed perceptions of reality led to catastrophic decision making with disastrous consequences.
The questions now should be: Why does Russia repeat these mistakes? How could the leadership of a “modern” state be so misinformed? Is there some socio-cultural explanation for what the West views as irrational behavior? The Russian historical context and more importantly how state-sponsored Russian historians have presented that context created a fractured prism through which Russian leaders and, to a certain extent, Russians in general, view themselves.
As a general rule, perceptions of historical context provide the background in which political elites perceive their identity and make decisions. These perceptions, which ideally would reflect a nuanced, broad-based understanding of history, instead can be simplistic and narrow or totally flawed and irrational. In the case of Russia, they have been historically fundamental to the national self-image and shockingly influential regarding even contemporary policy. Much of the current situation reflects the distorted self-percipience that informs Russian nationalism and Russian governments—it is not a new phenomenon.2 In Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, he argues that national identity is fundamentally an artificial reality that emerged in the 19th century to support state unity. “Nationalism is the pathology of modern developmental history…and largely incurable.” Anderson points out that every “Nationalism” writ large also contains “sub-nationalisms,” each of which view their own nationalist self-determination as a right or even destiny. “Nationalism” writ large and “sub-nationalisms” are usually in conflict.3 Of course to be more precise, groups classified as “sub-nationalisms” do not see themselves as
This was not the first time, nor will it be the last, that Russia’s imagined self-image and flawed perceptions of reality led to catastrophic decision making with disastrous consequences.
such, but rather view themselves as “subsumed nationalisms”—there is a difference. In the post1789 world, “no modern state could afford to be without it (nationalism),” and the “hapless fumbling” of the Romanovs proved what could happen when it collapsed. “The myth of national brotherhood and ethnic unity mattered.”4 In the 20th century, pressure from ethnic and racial subgroups and external adversaries undermined the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, while the Russian state theoretically embraced an ideology that espoused socialist brotherhood and the façade of a postnationalistic state. Nevertheless, the fundamental ideas that underpinned the Soviet state were little different from those of Imperial Russian (or for that matter, the post-Soviet Russian) political and military elites. The themes and statist theories of 19th century Russian historical writing—the historiography of Imperial Russia—carried forward through the Empire and Soviet eras into the contemporary Russian state.
What is historiography, and how does 19th-century Russian historiography pervade contemporary Russian policies, including Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine? This discussion focuses on three Russian historians, pillars of Russian historical writing, whose works established history as an academic discipline in the 19th century and transitioned it into the 20th and 21st centuries. In contemporary Russia, Putin and his supporters have consistently attempted to justify their policies in terms of interpretations put forward by statist historians, of which Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyev (1820–1879), Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky (1841–1911), and Sergei Fyodorovich Platonov (1860–1933) are preeminent examples. The interpretation of history has consequences, particularly when
those utilizing it have an unsophisticated grasp of the essentials or a distorted view of the historical context; it is quite simply asking for trouble. In Russia, “history isn’t dead; it’s not even past.”5
Published between 1851 and 1879, Solovyev’s History of Russia from Earliest Times, a monumental work of 29 volumes, was the first truly comprehensive work tackling the entire scope of Russian history.6 He graduated from Moscow University in 1842 and joined the history faculty there in 1845 during the reign of Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855) who was arguably the one of the most repressive czars in Russian history. The idea that Russia’s special role as the protector of traditional monarchy and Christian Orthodoxy from the revolutionary movements in the West and the threat of Asian influences in the East consumed the Czar, who backed up his rule with the Third Department, the first Russian internal security service. In this regimented system, admission to the university, a teaching position, and the ability to publish were all dependent on adherence to interpretations of Russian history found acceptable under the mantle of “Official Nationality.”7 The glorification of the state, and particularly the Rurik and Romanov dynasties’ roles in the “gathering of Russian lands”, and the idea of Russia’s special place as the protector of Christianity and the bulwark against Asian domination and revolutionary Western ideas and movements, meshed perfectly with the Czar’s reactionary regime. Solovyev’s writings centered on the idea that Russia’s historical contribution and mission was the expansion and consolidation of control over other Slavic and non-Slavic peoples and its special role as the arbiter of political orthodoxy and Christianity—albeit state-controlled Orthodox Christianity. He wrote extensively on the Time of
Troubles (1598–1613), in which political instability brought social, economic, and religious chaos that threatened Russian identity, and on Peter the Great’s contribution to modernization and the expansion of the Russian state. Solovyev believed that Peter the Great dragged Russia into the modern era by force of will—the great man theory of history. (The fact that Solovyev served as the tutor to Nicholas I’s second son, the future reactionary Czar Alexander III, underscored his acceptability to the regime.) These ideas became the basis for the official state ideology through the 19th century and into the 20th, including becoming the de facto mantra of the Soviet state, with Marxist-Leninist theory replacing Russian Orthodoxy as the ideological component of Soviet policy.
Solovyev’s student, Vasily O. Klyuchevsky, emerged as the most prominent Russian historian of the late 19th century. His collected works Sochineniya were republished during the Soviet era in an eight-volume set.8 Classified as a “populist” historian, Klyuchevsky viewed great men more as a byproduct of social movements and economic change rather than as a singular driving political force. He viewed the role of Peter the Great in terms of the need to supplant the ineffective, corrupt ruling Boyar class. He argued that prior to the Mongol invasion, the Eastern Slavs represented a single group, but after the 13th century, the “Great Russian” and the “Little Russian” (Ukrainian) identities emerged, an aberration that had been corrected by the “gathering of Russian lands” in the 18th century.9 These interpretations are statist views with the acceptance that it is social change—the people—that brings about the conditions from which the leaders of Russian history emerge. For example, Klyuchevsky viewed Peter the Great’s administrative reforms as one of his greatest achievements, but he argued that those were brought about by social and governmental changes that necessitated increased tax revenues.10 Klyuchevsky took over Solovyev’s chair in history at Moscow University in 1879, where he taught for the next 30 years during the repressive reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas
I and contributed, inadvertently, to the rise of semimystical Slavophile philosophies. His views on the “gathering of Russian lands,” the special role of the Russian people, the unity of the Eastern Slavs under the “Great Russians”, and Russian social and economic dynamics bringing about the emergence of great leaders like Peter the Great fell in line with sanctioned state policy. Klyuchevsky would flirt with democratic ideas and movements but only in the era between the 1905 Revolution and his death in 1911.
Sergei M. Platonov studied and taught at the University of St. Petersburg, and his career survived the Revolution, extending into the Soviet era; hence, there are those who would set his interpretations of Russian history apart from those of Solovyev and Kluchevsky. The core of his work—the interpretations of the Oprichnina, the Time of Troubles, and Peter the Great—despite nuanced differences, consistently follow interpretations that were acceptable within official Russian statist history. Platonov explains as rational everything from the “gathering of Russian lands” to the necessity of autocratic leadership and the use of terror. His career spanned the revolutionary period, and his works, The Time of Troubles and the Oprichnina during the reign of Ivan IV (the Terrible), became classics. Platonov argued that the terror of the Oprichniki did not reflect bouts of insanity but rather were “rational and deliberate” acts supporting “reform.”11 Despite his refusal to embrace Marxist interpretations, he remained in relatively good stead with the Bolshevik regime before being caught in the early Stalinist purges of the 1930s and forced into internal exile. That said, his interpretations of historical Russian state development and the threat of chaos and disorder fed the idea of Russia as requiring an authoritarian political system that was acceptable to Soviet authorities. Given his views on autocracy and the use of terror, it was neither surprising that the Soviets rehabilitated Platonov’s writing nor difficult to see the relationship between Platonov’s ideas and the policies of contemporary Russia.12
Since the early 19th century, Russian historiography has been a fundamental product of
state control and has fed historical and nationalistic narratives that were acceptable to the state. This approach promulgated several simplistic, ethnoand dynastic-centric narratives. Perhaps first and foremost, they elevated the importance of “Great Russians” over “lesser” Slavic groups in the formation of the Russian state. Statist historiography viewed non-Slavic minorities as groups to be ruled and enlightened by their “Great Russian” betters. Closely coupled with this notion of socio-cultural and even racial superiority is the assertion that great autocratic leaders, like Ivan IV and Peter the Great, had a special mission, an almost mystical calling backed by Russian Orthodoxy as an ideology to physically expand the Russian state and exert control over the “lesser” subsumed nationalities.
In contemporary Russia, the official view—i.e., Putin’s view—is that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest disaster of the 20th century,” and despite the enormity of his crimes, Stalin was a great authoritarian leader; but there is a caveat. Marxist-Leninist ideology, in theory at least, erased the distinctions between Great Russians and other groups. This opened the door to separate socialist republics which de facto recognized latent subsumed nationalisms in the USSR. Stalin himself and his most trusted security officials were Georgians, who could hardly take the position that they were culturally and racially inferior to the Great Russians. The current Russian nationalists and Putin see this as a flaw in Communist ideology because it fed Ukrainian nationalism, and that of other subsumed nationalisms, at the expense of Great Russian preeminence. Soviet authoritarianism and other dubious “accomplishments” of Stalin’s rule are acceptable, but the results of racial and ethnic leveling are not. The recognition of separate identities such as Belorussian, Ukrainian, and others was a historical mistake; it did not fit the 19th-century Russian statist narrative nor that of Putin and his ethno-centric Great Russian nationalists.
Despite this nuanced contradiction, the pervasive themes of 19th-century statist historical interpretation informed two centuries of Russian leaders through
a controlled educational system; and these views, of course, filtered down to the population at large. Institutionally, within the Russian political system— Imperial, Soviet, or Putinist—the ‘official’ version of history has precluded the inclusion of interpretations that challenge or contradict the statist, authoritarian, and quasi-Messianic Russian narrative. In Russia, a healthy, meaningful debate about history is simply not possible because it threatens the legitimacy of the rulers.
This lack of intellectual freedom and debate brings us to Vladimir Putin and the contemporary Russian reaction to stagnation and instability since 1990, culminating in the Ukraine War. Two parallel historical issues are at work here. The first is the “imagined” past of official Russian statist history, and the second is a more objective view of the Russian historical context—the imperatives and pitfalls of authoritarian rule in the face of the constant threat of instability and chaos. Since 2023, the principal focus has been on Vladimir Putin as a leader from a dysfunctional, disadvantaged Leningrad background, and a product of an educational system that indoctrinated him with the unquestioned maxims of the imagined Russian past. His acceptance into the Second Directorate of the KGB might have been the biggest opportunity of his life, but intellectually, it likely served to reinforce narrow views of Russia’s past. He is a classic example of the “Hedgehog” in Russian political leadership, knowing ‘one thing well.’ In the post-Soviet era, after working for the mayor of St. Petersburg, he managed to attach himself to Boris Yeltsin, who succeeded Mikhail Gorbachev as president. Putin’s meteoric rise resulted from the fortuitous combination of opportunity and luck, but his personal interpretation of that rise flows directly from the systematic propagation of the statist interpretation of “official” Russian history. There is a straight line from Solovyev through the Soviet era to the truncated Russia of today.
Putin’s speeches, interviews, and his so-called written manifesto echo the 19th-century themes.13 He believes in “the gathering of Russian lands,” which were in fact not Russian at all, and embraces
In Russia, a healthy, meaningful debate about history is simply not possible because it threatens the legitimacy of the rulers.
the concept of the “Great Russians” and the “Little Russians”—the Ukrainians. He argues that the Ukrainian identity is artificial. His Slavophilelike obsession with the “moral superiority” of the Russian spirit and/or Russian Orthodoxy and the decadence of the West echoes Nicholas I and “Official Nationality.” He likens Russia of the 1990s and the dominance of the oligarchs to Boyar nobility during the early 17th century’s Time of Troubles, borrowing the arguments of statist historiography. Fear of and revulsion toward Western liberalism mirrors that of Nicholas I, and his obsession with the victimization of Russia at the hands of the West is borrowed directly from official 19th-century Russian doctrine. The glorification of Peter the Great and his self-identification with Michael Romanov, who saved Russia from the chaos of the Time of Troubles, are foundational to his own self-image and in lock-step with the statist histories of the 19th century.14 In fairness to Vladimir Putin, his superficial interpretation of Russian history and grandiose self-image are more manifestations of the Russian environment as opposed to his personal hubris or accomplishments. Putin did not invent a narrow interpretation of Russia’s historical context; his thinking is merely a product of it. Undoubtedly, there were other Vladimir X’s out there who would have done as well.15 Authoritarian leaders often attach themselves to simplistic, useful narratives and surround themselves with sycophantic admirers and underlings. Russia does not have a corner on this market; however, historically, in authoritarian Russia, no one comments on the emperor’s lack of clothes and survives.
Had the Russian political tradition included a more balanced approach to ‘official’ history, another Russian leader might have considered that the price of Petrine stability was a system of autocratic rule
in which incompetent and unstable rulers created extended periods of political instability. Historically, Russian leaders have nurtured a corps of minions who support ruinous policies for the sake of personal survival. This ultimately led to the destruction of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. A different historical narrative might have argued that the greatest “gatherer of Russian lands” was not Russian at all but rather Catherine the Great, a German princess. Had the historians not been creatures of the state, the official history might have included an analysis of Nicholas I’s injudicious obsession with his role as protector of Orthodoxy—which if he could have forborne, would have allowed Russia to avoid the ruinous Crimean War of 1853–1856 that exposed Russia’s backwardness and lack of military capability, a humiliation that further isolated Russia from the mainstream of Western development.
The parallels to the delusional decisions that led to the contemporary war in Ukraine are stunning. A more introspective understanding of the problems created by Nicholas I’s rule and that of his successors, particularly Alexander III and Nicholas II, might have led to a more nuanced approach to the exercise of power and a cautionary tale about imagined power and influence. A more sophisticated interpretation might have resulted in a better understanding of the relationship between the Ukraine and Russia and, for that matter, the Russian Empire or Soviet Union and their component republics in central Asia, with the subsequent realization that invading Ukraine might not be a walk-over.
Whether a result of the Imperial system, the Soviet structure, or the contemporary state, the imagined Russian past coupled with unchecked, unaccountable rulers creates the conditions for periodic disasters that undermine Russia’s ability
Russian leaders have proven themselves adept at making ill-informed, irrational decisions, and, from a historical perspective, the Russian people as a whole have proven themselves almost incapable of doing more than following orders and marching to the slaughter.
to take a sustained positive role in the global community. In Russia, a grievance-driven leadership fueled by hubris, paranoia, and deep-seated insecurity complicated by political and economic incompetence and social dysfunction are givens. The decision to invade Ukraine is a prime example. Russia had Western Europe dependent on cheap natural gas. Putin’s popularity at home and his image abroad had soared. The US was convinced that Russia’s military was the second most powerful in the World—a near peer. Putin had the economic resources to play the long game and dominate his neighbors. NATO membership for Finland and Sweden was virtually unthinkable. The Russian economy reaped the benefits of increased Western investment, and key technological sectors were growing. Why risk throwing it all away? The answer is straightforward—the imagined Russian historical context created by officially approved history contributed to a distorted perception of reality. Autocratic power and a limited understanding of inherent weaknesses of the Russian system and Putin’s own limited grasp of global dynamics brought a catastrophic mistake.
If this misunderstanding of the Russian historical context contributed significantly to Russia’s current strategic fiasco, what does a more objective appraisal of Russian history tell us about the future? The past informs the present, providing the basis for predictions about the future. In the case of Russia, this does not bode well for the ability of the West, or perhaps for anyone else, to maintain a long-term constructive relationship. The Russian leadership simply cannot help itself, and any improvement merely awaits the arrival
of the next autocrat. Perhaps more importantly, the Russian people, the narod, have proven over the centuries that they cannot help themselves either. Whether it was the incompetence of the Crimean War, the embarrassment of the RussoJapanese conflict, the slaughter of World War I, or the catastrophic experience of World War II, Russian leaders have proven themselves adept at making ill-informed, irrational decisions, and, from a historical perspective, the Russian people as a whole have proven themselves almost incapable of doing more than following orders and marching to the slaughter. Russia has bought into the distorted narrative of its official history and combined it with unrestrained autocracy, a malignant victimization complex, and xenophobic paranoia—it simply cannot escape its imagined past. For the West, finding a rationale for pursuing relations with Russia on anything other than a hard-nosed transactional basis is preposterous.16 l
ROBY C. BARRETT is a former Foreign Service Officer with an intelligence and special operations background who served in North Africa, Yemen, the Levant, and Arabia. He is a scholar and Gulf expert with the Middle East Institute, Washington, D.C. Originally trained as a Russian and Soviet expert, Dr. Barrett has over forty years of handson experience in the Middle East and is a security expert on the region. He is an expert on Russian policy and interests in the Middle East. Barrett is the author of numerous books and articles on the Middle East and Southwest Asia, including The Cold War in the Greater Middle East: U.S. Foreign Policy
under Kennedy and Eisenhower (2007), The Gulf and the Struggle for Hegemony: Arabs, Iranians, and West in Conflict (2016), the nine-article “Series on Gulf Security” for Manara Magazine at Cambridge University (2020–2022), and nine monographs for US Special Operations Command. He has held research grants and fellowships at the LudwigMaxilians University of Munich, Oxford University, and the Eisenhower Foundation. He has a Ph.D. in Middle East and South Asian history from the University of Texas at Austin.
Did you find this article interesting? Roby Barrett will be teaching Political Islam: A Narrative of Ideology, Revivalism, and Conflict on Tuesdays, Feb 18, 25, March 4, 11, 18, 25, April 1, 8, 15, 22 - 5:30-7 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events
1 Phillips Payson O’Brien, “How Defense Experts Got Ukraine Wrong.” Atlantic (September 27, 2024): https://www.theatlantic. com/ideas/archive/2024/09/how-defense-experts-got-ukrainewrong/680045). This article discusses another issue that plagues the US military, namely the weakness of their organic capabilities in intelligence analysis. In February 2023, General Miley found himself relying on “experts” with inbred attitudes and lacking any in-depth contextual perspective on Russian capabilities, while his organic military capabilities were weak. It was hardly surprising that General Miley’s report to Congress was off base. This resulted in an over reliance on technical collection that could count vehicles, amass signals intelligence, and predict that an invasion was coming; but, beyond that, the US military understanding of real Russian capabilities was woefully inaccurate.
2 Anthony J. Constantini, “The Russian World Gorbachev, Putin, and Russian Nationalism,” Foreign Affairs (May 2024): https:// americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/05/reforging-the-russian-worldgorbachev-putin-and-russian-nationalism/.
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso Press, 2006): 3–5.
4 William H. McNeill, Poly-Ethnicity and National Unity in World History (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1986): 33–56.
5 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun.
6 S.M. Solovyev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen. (Moscow: Izd. Akademiia Nauk, 1961). This is a Soviet-era consolidation of Solovyev’s 29-volume work into 16 volumes, underscoring the acceptability of his historical arguments in the Soviet era.
7 Nicholas Riasanovsky, Nicholas I and the Official Nationality in Russia, 1825–1855 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967): 73, 124–125. The policy of Nicholas I’s regime became known as
“Official Nationality.” The state was to be regimented on the basis of “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality.” In this system the term “Russian people” acquired a “supreme metaphysical” and “mystical importance” that promoted the idea that the “people” owed total “devotion and obedience” to the Orthodox church and the ruler.
9 Klaus-Detlev Grothusen in Die Historische Rechtsschule Russlands (Giessen: Wilhelm Schmitz Verlag, 1962), 59–61) offered an elaboration on Klyuchevsky’s idea. “The great man is a monument of the people and the more meaningful the people, the greater their historical personalities.”
10 Klyuchevsky, Peter the Great, translated by Liliana Archibald (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), 181–191.
11 Sergei M. Platonov, Ivan the Terrible, translated by Joseph L. Wieczynski and Richard Hallie (Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic Press, 1923): xviii, xviii–xxiii, 10, 16. While extolling the importance of the ruler, Platonov rejects interpretations of Ivan IV’s insanity, including the killing of his son, an act that effectively ended the Rurik line, arguing that such outbursts “do not constitute his historical significance” and were “personal weaknesses.”
12 Brian Whitmore, “The New Oprichniki,” Radio Free Europe – Radio Liberty (June 8, 2017): https://www. rferl.org/a/the-newoprichniki/28536410.html.
13 Peter Dickinson, “Putin’s new Ukraine essay reveals imperialistic ambitions,” The Atlantic Council (July 15, 2021): https://www. atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putins-new-ukraine-essayreflects-imperial-ambitions/.
14 Sarah Rainsford, “Putin and Peter the Great: Russian leader likens himself to 18th century Czar,” BBC (10 June 2022): https://www.bbc. com/news/world-europe-61767191.
15 An early opponent of Putin in the 2000 presidential election who became his advisor and political ally, Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, was a highly sophisticated politician, diplomat, and KGB chief who would have likely avoided the mistakes that led to the Ukrainian War and at the same time achieved Russian goals through a more sophisticated approach using economic leverage. Primakov as a successor to Yeltsin was problematic. He was halfJewish and born in the Ukraine. Given “Great Russian” prejudices, it is hardly surprising that both viewed Primakov’s popularity and competency as a threat. For example, Yeltsin authorized Putin, who had risen to head the FSB, to bug Primakov’s office and phones and then refused to let Primakov remove him from the FSB. “Obituary: Yevgeny Primakov,” The Guardian (June 28, 2015): https://www.theguardian. com/world/2015/jun/28/yevgenyprimakov. Robert O. Freedman, “Russian and the Middle East: The Primakov Era,” Middle East Review of International Affairs (May 1998): https://ciaotest. cc.columbia. edu/olj/meria/meria598_ freedman.html.
16 Beth Daley, “Ukraine War: What is the Budapest Memorandum and Why Has the Russian Invasion Torn it Up?” The Conversation (March 2, 2022): https://theconversation. com/ukraine-war-what-isthe-budapest-memorandum-and-why-has-russias-invasion-torn-itup-178184. On point, ask the Ukrainians about the 1994 Budapest agreement in which Russia recognized their territorial integrity in return for giving up Kyiv’s nuclear arsenal, obviously a big mistake on Kyiv’s part, and a black mark on the US and other Western powers who encouraged it.
LEARNING TO LOOK: THE ART OF DESCRIPTION
by David Bjerklie
More than a century ago, Wallace Stevens wrote a poem he titled “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I’m not sure I understand the poem, I’m not even sure I like it, though the imagery is vivid. But what I have decided is all important—what I have taken from the poem and made my mantra—is simply the title. I tell myself (and anyone within earshot) that it is the single best piece of writing advice I’ve ever stumbled upon, and then I declare it has guided my work as a science journalist for forty years.
Even as I say it, though, I know I’m laying it on a bit thick. But still, I do believe it’s mostly true; I am indeed convinced there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird—or a banana or your little brother—or the town in which you grew up; there are thirteen ways of looking at winter, death, a farmer’s field, cyber-currency, anniversaries or arguments. And I believe the ability to look at people, places, plans, and processes from multiple perspectives is fundamental, not just to good writing, but also to tolerance, civility, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, and empathy.
And yet, I resist the underlying notion of the maxim, “It all depends on how we look at things.” Of course it does, but relativism can also get scary pretty quickly. Do we not need to draw any lines at all? Do we agree to disagree on when and why heroes should be seen as villains and villains seen as heroes? Do we shrug our shoulders and accept, rather than argue, any and all claims or positions contrary to our own?
These are critical questions, ones we should raise often and perhaps never fully settle. But such conundrums are not my concern here. My point is that what I have claimed is my guiding light as a writer is not license to justify any observation or interpretation I might fancy, to see a thing “my way” and leave it at that. It is, rather, a mandate to always pay attention, observe closely, and strive to see what I’m looking at from a variety of vantage points. The problem, of course, is that paying ever-so-close attention to the world is always easier said than done.
Even if we don’t literally follow the admonition to “stop and smell the roses,” shouldn’t we at least be aware of the roses?
And there’s a simple reason for that: our brains are designed to take shortcuts. Once we know how to recognize a thing, neurological efficiency kicks in, and we pay less attention to the details of that thing. Brains take shortcuts so they can instead devote their neural firepower to making decisions, taking actions, getting on with life.
Scientists have devised elegant demonstrations of how our brains actually stop us from paying too much attention. In the early 1800s, a Swiss physician discovered that if we are presented with an unmoving image in our peripheral vision, once our visual system sufficiently registers the image, our neurons will decide such a static image is boring and therefore can be safely ignored. Our brain then lets it fade from view; “let’s move along folks, nothing more to see here.” Troxler fading, named after the Swiss doctor, is just one example of what psychologists refer to as habituation. We do this in a variety of ways; I often marvel at how quickly I become habituated to a low, droning background noise and only become re-aware of the sound once it stops.
The fact that habituation conserves our attention resources doesn’t mean this always works in our best interests. I do a lot of cross-country driving, and I’m regularly amazed (and more than a little alarmed) how often, especially during long, boring stretches of turnpike (sorry, Ohio), much of what lies beyond the shoulders of the road effectively disappears. Even if we don’t literally follow the admonition to “stop and smell the roses,” shouldn’t we at least be aware of the roses?
And not just notice roses as a category, but to see and appreciate individual roses. Again, our penchant for shortcuts makes that effort harder; it demands of us a more conscious exertion. Our neural default to place everything we encounter into categories is triumph of human cognition. As George Lakoff states in his book, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, “Without the ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual lives. An understanding of how we categorize is central to any understanding of how we think and how we function, and therefore central to an understanding of what makes us human.”
But while understanding something as a kind of thing—whether it’s a concrete thing, a bird, flower or planet, or an abstract thing, a feeling, goal or theory—is a fundamental human capacity, this reflex often makes it harder to also see everything in the world as individual and particular. And yet, it is in looking at the particular that most enriches our lives.
What to do? Well, to start, be aware there is always more in our everyday world than we will ever notice, more than we can ever truly “see” in its entirety. Next, vow to pay more and closer attention. Heed Samuel Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
WHEN WE CHANGE THE WAY WE LOOK, WE CHANGE THE WAY WE THINK Imagine the following scenarios. A flock of birds landing in a farmer’s field. A wedding party winding down in the wee hours. A pond freezing over at dusk
in early December. There are countless details you could notice. Color, light, and shadow. Look at the shades of green, brown, and black in the farmer’s field, the shifting patterns of reflectivity on the pond’s surface, or the gradations of blue, indigo and gray in the dusk sky. Follow the dynamics of change and movement. Train your attention on sound, tease out the individual elements, note how they combine or clash. We use our senses, of course, in taking in the specificity of a scene. But we also bring more to the table, wedding or otherwise. Recast your gaze in terms of the psychological or emotional, however subtle or slippery. What do you see or imagine in the expressions of the wedding guests; who is giddy, pensive, relieved, or exhausted; where do you spot desire, disappointment, impatience?
Now step back and focus on what people are wearing. What does their style or attire reveal? In the early 1970s, journalist Tom Wolfe delighted in the use of brand names and price tags to add dimension—good, bad, and ugly—to the characters that populated his nonfiction. The references were shorthand clues to who the people were on the inside, what values they held dear—what do $800 Italian shoes, bejeweled disco clutches, or mohair suits with working sleeve buttonholes really represent. It is a technique of description adopted by so many writers that it can easily become tired and stale.
The challenge, always, is to actually see what our eyeballs are focused on, not what our brains think we are looking at. That typically requires us to step back from our ideas about flocks of birds, wedding parties, or freezing ponds. To do this perfectly requires perfect detachment, and yes, that’s an impossibility. To some degree, no matter how unconscious, interpretation and subjectivity come with the human territory. Cue the Beckett again.
There are techniques we can consciously employ, however, to prod us into new ways of looking. Early in the 20th century, the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky used the word ostranenie to describe this process. It’s been translated as “to de-familiarize” or “to make strange.” The problem,
Shklovsky argued, was that “we do not see things, we merely recognize them.” The result blunts our senses, and reality arrives prepackaged. But this is what the great writers subvert by following the road less traveled, says Shklovsky. “In order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.”
It has become a standard exercise for art students to draw an object turned upside down. The task is to look with new eyes, without preconception. Shapes, colors, and volumes become newly independent. There’s an amazing YouTube video in which speed painter Michael Ostaki entertains an audience with a flashy execution of a painting. It’s fast and confident, a slash of color here, bold strokes there, an array of seemingly abstract volumes you struggle to mentally assemble. Is that a car? No. An off-kilter cat? A blaze of sunset? Nothing recognizable seems to emerge. Suddenly Ostaki spins the canvas 180 degrees, and it’s a brilliant portrait of Jimi Hendrix!
THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A WILDFIRE
Looking at the world from multiple perspectives has been a key part of my day job for 40 years. Like a million other land-locked kids brought up on Jacques Cousteau, I dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. Instead I wound up in New York City as a science reporter at TIME Magazine. It was my background in biology, however, that provided me with tools that would prove fundamental. In college I had classes that required us to keep field journals in which we would carefully observe a patch of habitat, a coulee, slough or stream, a pocket of prairie. Our assignment was to look closely enough to see the details reveal patterns, cycles, as well as anomalies, to follow the course of change over time. We recorded the weather—temperature, barometric pressure, dew point, cloud cover and precipitation. We listed birds we spotted or heard. We examined stray feathers on the ground. In winter, we followed tracks in snow. Often, we had only droppings to inspect. We noted which trees leafed out first and last, when grasses and forbs bloomed, when berries
or seed pods formed and ripened. On a tiny island in the middle of Leech Lake in Minnesota, we tracked the behavior of a population of spotted sandpipers, recording what they ate and when, how much time they devoted to courtship display, how much time spent nesting or resting. On a small lake within Itasca State Park we observed daily changes in water chemistry, temperature, and turbidity throughout the water column.
It is one thing to record data, however, quite another to use details to build narratives. Observation is flexible, contingent, it forces choice. At TIME, of course, narratives also had to keep readers turning pages. It was after decades of experience that I came to liken the choices that writers make, in terms of observation, to the act of focusing a camera or a pair of binoculars, choosing how, when and why to zoom in and zoom out. The ability to adjust and re-adjust focus is a powerful tool. To expand the camera metaphor, other tools include changing lenses, filters, films, and lighting, using long exposures, creating time-lapse series, changing the angle from which to observe, finding alternate ways to frame the subject. Writing teachers counsel us to eliminate adverbs, choose stronger verbs, more specific nouns; they encourage us to give our five senses a workout, urge us to craft keen metaphors and smart analogies. All of which makes total sense. But what I often need most in my work is the ability to examine a phenomenon from a variety of angles.
An especially good example of this can be seen in how my colleagues and I at TIME covered wildfires. The first big wildfire story I was involved in was the Yellowstone fires of 1988. They were a series of fires that got a lot of attention because collectively the result was the largest, most expensive wildfire in the history of the National Park Service. Local and regional media, both print and broadcast, covered the progress of these fires on a daily basis. As a weekly magazine with a national reach, however, TIME felt it should use particular fires as a way to look at all fires. Here’s how it worked:
A wildfire bursts its seams and the area under
threat expands. In week 1, we feature lots of dramatic photos and first-hand reporting on the ground. We track down numbers: how many acres are involved, people displaced, casualties, as well as preliminary guesses on what started it and how it might spread. In week 2, we dig deeper into the fire’s origins and try to more fully assess the fire’s ongoing environmental impact. In week 3, we look at estimates of how many billions of dollars of damage were caused, but we also step back to place the fire into the larger context of recent fire seasons. The Yellowstone fires happened in early September. In late June of that same summer, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, gave his historic testimony to Congress, in which he announced NASA’s conclusions that global warming was now significant enough that computer simulations could ascribe, with a high degree of confidence, a cause and effect relationship between rising CO2 levels and warmer temperatures. An increase in wildfires was certainly part of that scenario. I’m not positive we raised the issue of global warming in our coverage of the Yellowstone fires in 1988, but within a few fire seasons, it would be mentioned in nearly every story any media did on wildfire.
If the fire was important enough to merit a month of coverage in TIME, we might invite a fire researcher or historian to contribute an essay, perhaps on how fire shaped land use and development (and vice versa) in the past 50 years or even a century. Another possibility would be to feature an essay written by a fire jumper to give a first-hand account of battling a raging inferno. We could also look at wildfires in terms of new technology. How are geographic information systems and remote sensing helping to map fires? What role do drones play? How can AI assist? We might profile one of the fire research labs run by the US Forest Service; there’s one in Missoula, another in Asheville, NC, as well as labs in the southwest and Pacific northwest.
There are health angles to wildfires; epidemiologists conduct research on the health
impacts, both acute and chronic, of smoke and particulates on childhood asthma, for example, or respiratory illness in the elderly. Another triedand-true approach is to go into a habitat severely disrupted by fire and watch how it recovers. The aftermath of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens comes to mind. A time-lapse look at scorched earth is an inherently fascinating ecology story. It’s a chance to look at the botany of fire, as well as physical processes, such as flooding and erosion, to which burned areas are subject. How do different types of soils respond to fire? What do we know about those fires that burn under the radar, peat fires in the Arctic, coal seams that have been burning for decades?
Another way to look at wildfires is to look at how forests are moving—or not. Last year Stanford University researchers found that a warming climate has left one-fifth of the conifer forests in California’s Sierra Nevada stranded in habitats that no longer suit them. These “zombie” forests, as the researchers call them, are vulnerable and easily replaced, especially through fire, by nimbler species better adapted to a warming environment.
These are all different ways to look at a fire. And it bears noting that these views don’t just represent the accumulation of more details, but rather different sets of details, through which different stories can be told. Creating an account of what we see, according to Mark Doty, in his book, The Art of Description, is the process by which we turn “world into word.”
But any such account, Doty reminds us, can only be partial, tentative. Looking is always a work in progress, a constantly moving target. “In fact, all perception is limited,” says Doty, “no matter how acute your eyesight, how sharp the hearing, how sensitive the sense of touch. What we can take in is a partial rendering of the world”
So why bother? “The need to translate experience into something resembling adequate language,” offers Doty, “is the writer’s blessing or the writer’s disease, depending on your point of view.”
But what is inarguable is that description demands of us a “thinking through” of what we observe. Our
efforts at description represent the exploratory twists and turns of our consciousness. And yes, good description will reveal the look, feel, and shape of things in the world, but it will also reflect back “the complexities of the self that’s doing the looking.”
Says Doty: “The more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking, a sensibility at work. It’s as if the harder the eyes and the verbal faculties work to render the look of things, the more we see that gaze itself, the more we hear that distinctive voice.”
If the desire (or compulsion) to describe the world is more curse than blessing, it is at least, notes Doty, “a condition that winds up giving real gifts to others. The pleasure of recognizing a described world is no small thing.” That famous ancient Greek dictum, recorded by Plato and attributed to Socrates, the one that declares “the unexamined life is not worth living,” can seem harsh and absolute, not to mention elitist. There is certainly no reason to declare that the “undescribed” life is also somehow mortally deficient. Let’s just say that the unexamined, undescribed world, even if we are creating this world only in our heads as we look and make our way through life, is in so many ways a missed opportunity. l
DAVID BJERKLIE has been a science reporter, writer and editor at TIME Magazine, TIME For Kids, and TIME Books since 1984, as well as a freelance contributor to national and international magazines and newspapers. He has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT; a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow; two-time grant recipient at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings in Germany; and a National Science Foundation Media Fellow at McMurdo and South Pole Stations in Antarctica.
Did you find this article interesting? David Bjerklie will be teaching Writing and the Art of Description on Sundays, March 23, 30, April 6, 13, 20 - 2-3:30 pm Central time, using the Zoom platform. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events
SPRING 2025
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MAKING PEACE WITH CHANGE
Christine Ellsworth
This is a 5-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Sundays, Jan 12, 19, 26, Feb 2, 9: 1–2:30 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
Change is so hard. Change is scary! If change feels like that to you, join Christine Ellsworth, MA for five poetry sessions on a journey toward making peace with change. We'll wander through colorful poetry from around the world—and North Dakota—geared toward helping us identify where we came from, who we are now, and the amazing people we're becoming. All of that equals LOTS of change and transitions!
Our sessions do not constitute professional therapy. What we do is commit to come together for five weeks (because each week builds upon the previous), read some poetry and talk about it, then write some lines (prose or poetry) and share as we are moved to with the rest of the group. You may feel surprisingly more empowered and peaceful with transitions as a result.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Christine Ellsworth has undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, is a published poet, and is in her fifth year of training to become a poetry therapy facilitator through the International Federation of Biblio-Poetry Therapy (ifbpt.org).
WRITING AND THE ART OF DESCRIPTION
David Bjerklie
This is a 5-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Sundays, March 23, 30, April 6, 13, 20: 2–3:30 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
A flock of birds landing in a farmer's field, a wedding party winding down in the wee hours, a pond freezing over at dusk in early December. Whatever we choose to look at can be viewed from many angles. Obvious, right? And yet, easier said than done, and the reason is simple: our brains are designed to take shortcuts. Once
we know how to recognize a thing, neurological efficiency kicks in, and we pay less attention to that thing. But learning to look with new eyes makes the world come alive to writers. This is true for poets, novelists, essayists, speech writers, academics, or journalists. When we change the way we look, we change the way we think. Yes, it takes practice. But there are ways we can hone our powers of observation as well as our skills at description. Join us in a workshop where we will use readings, prompts, and class discussion to broaden and deepen our abilities to describe in writing what we see or imagine.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
David Bjerklie has been a science reporter, writer, and editor at TIME Magazine, TIME For Kids, and TIME Books, as well as a freelance contributor to national and international magazines and newspapers. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT; a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow; a twotime media grant recipient at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings in Germany; and a National Science Foundation Media Fellow at McMurdo and South Pole Stations in Antarctica.
THE ROMANTIC AGE
Sarah Faulkner
This is a 6-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Mondays, March 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, April 7: 7–9 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
For decades, the literature of the Romantic Era (1770-1830) has been dominated by six male poets: Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. This class explores these fantastic authors while also illuminating their debt to and influence on their female contemporaries: Charlotte Smith, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Felicia Hemans, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley.
How did poets, novelists, and essayists respond to the tumult of the French
Revolution? How did increasing urbanization affect the poet’s relationship to nature? Are we individuals, or just the products of our environment? What is freedom, and who can have it? How can daffodils waving in the wind, frost at midnight, a letter from a man you’ve refused, or the singing of a nightingale change a person’s life?
These authors lived fascinating lives, full of scandal, strife, messy love affairs, and refusals to conform to society’s expectations. This class will be a mix of literary history and biography. We’ll read short selections from each writer’s work (poetry, essays, novel excerpts) for each class, and Dr. Faulkner will have an ample further reading list ready for you to peruse. Come learn about the people and literature that define the Age of Romanticism and find your life enriched.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Sarah Faulkner received her PhD in English from the University of Washington, where she taught eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature as well as writing for eight years. She currently teaches at Bishop Blanchet High School in Seattle, Washington. This will be her fourth course with Public University.
GATSBY AT 100 Adam Kitzes
This is a 4-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Thursdays, April 3, 10, 17, and 24: 6:30–8 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
This April marks the 100 year anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby. Anniversaries are an occasion for taking measure: what we hold on to, why we value it, how we should take care of it. They're also a cause for celebration. We'll do this by looking at the novel and considering how Gatsby's story—really, Nick Carraway's—comes across to us as readers today. We'll put it alongside some of the other stories Fitzgerald wrote while he composed his best known work (readers who like Gatsby might really enjoy "Absolution").
We'll take stock of Gatsby's journey among formats: from stage play to film, from classroom reading to comic book. And maybe we can ask what needs to happen if we want to keep the story alive for the next hundred years.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Adam Kitzes is a Professor of English at the University of North Dakota. Originally from Chicago, he bounced around various parts of the Midwest until winding up in beautiful Grand Forks. Aside from English and American literature, his enthusiasms include distance running and juggling.
A HISTORY OF HORROR IN FIVE FILMS
Sean Burt
This is a 5-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays, March 19, 26, April 2, 9, and 16: 7–8:30 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
A survey of major moments in the history of the styles, themes, and media of the horror film, from the silent era to Hollywood thrillers, trashy exploitation films, the VHS revolution, and the terrors of the digital age.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Sean Burt is the Chair of the English Department and an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and English at NDSU. He has a PhD in Religion from Duke University. He teaches classes on religion, literature, and film and writes on biblical poetry and the Bible in contemporary literature and film.
TOPICS ON THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Jeffrey A. Hoffer
This is a 9-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Thursdays, Feb 13, 20, 27, March 13, 20, 27, April 3, 10, 17: 7–9 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
This class is designed for those new to the American Civil War, providing content on a variety of topics ranging from military medicine of the period to weapons to tactics and strategy. This class will include the personal stories of those who experienced this period in our shared history.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Jeff Hoffer is a retired U.S. Army infantry officer and the former historian of Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park and the former command historian of the North Dakota National Guard. Jeff previously served as a battlefield guide at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park at Fredericksburg, VA. These days Jeff can be found touring sites of the Civil War and Indian Wars, teaching, and conducting living history programs.
50 YEARS LATER: AMERICA AND THE VIETNAM WAR, 1945-1975
Rick Collin
This is a 5-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Thursdays, March 27, April 3, 10, 17, 24: 7–9 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
This course will examine America in the Vietnam War, with an emphasis on perspectives after 50 years, since spring 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the conflict. An event that had an enormous impact on American
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society and the role of the U.S. in world affairs, it will cover from 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared an independent North Vietnam, to 1975 when South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam and America's role ended. The main focus will be on the years the U.S. was most involved, 1961-1975. The course will meet five nights—the first night will be an introduction, then each night after that will be devoted to a particular phase of the war. The goal of this course is to examine the chronology of the war and perspectives about it 50 years later, while also providing ample time for discussion.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Rick Collin is a historian passionate about history told through stories. Rick worked for the State Historical Society of North Dakota for 16 years. Previous Public University courses he has taught include From Camelot to Woodstock: America in the 1960s, America and the Modern Presidency: From Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, 1933-1989 and Riding the Back of the Tiger: America and the Vietnam War, 1945-1975.
IT'S NOT YOUR GRANDPARENTS' NORWAY!
Tami Carmichael
This is a 4-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Feb 4, 11, 18, 25: 2–3:30 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
Many people in North Dakota have important heritage ties to Norway and Scandinavia. But how has Norway changed in the decades— or even the century—since our Norwegian ancestors left that country for the opportunities and adventures afforded them in North Dakota? Though some of the hallmarks of heritage Norway still remain, modern day Norway has become quite a different and exciting country that prides itself on gender equality, environmental stewardship, progressive politics, technological advancements, and a strong welfare state. This course will allow us to understand and discuss what historical forces shaped this modern
culture and how Norway has created a society that consistently ranks as one of the happiest, most educated, and healthiest in the world.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Tami Carmichael is Professor of English, Theatre, and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of North Dakota. She also works regularly with the American College of Norway, in Moss, Norway, teaching classes and leading student field trips throughout Norway and other countries. She has authored books and articles and spoken nationally and internationally on interdisciplinary learning and teaching and on the value of travel and study abroad as essential learning experiences.
TRANSFORMING HIGH CONFLICT
Ann Crews Melton
This is a 3-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Thursdays, March 6, 20, April 3: 2–3 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
How do we break down the us vs. them binary, after a seemingly intractable conflict settles in? Can we step outside of our own beliefs, loyalties, and biases to revive curiosity and reevaluate our rivals? In this three-part class utilizing Amanda Ripley's High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, learn how to short-circuit high conflict and move toward constructive conversations that seek common ground and the common good.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Ann Crews Melton is executive director of Consensus Council, a Bismarck-based nonprofit, and previously served as an editor at the State Historical Society of ND and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in religion from Austin College and a master of arts degree in publishing and writing from Emerson College. She is an avid obituary reader and former reporter and community columnist for the Bismarck Tribune. Ann is an Aspen Institute Better Arguments Ambassador, former board officer of Humanities North
Dakota, and a strong proponent of civic engagement, restorative practices, and participatory decision-making.
THE ETHICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE: WHAT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO?
Tayo Basquiat
This is a 6-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Feb 4, 11, 18, 25, March 4, 11: 1–2:30 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
If you watched the series The Good Place, you’ll remember the philosopher who couldn’t make a decision about the right action because he could justify every option. Been there? Morality isn’t as clearcut as we’d like it to be, leading to paralysis (can’t decide, can’t act), relativism (“right” is a moving target, changeable), or acting in spite of the lack of certainty but not necessarily feeling good about what we are doing. In this class I want to talk about the various moral theories in the context of common everyday life situations, how they are used in moral deliberation, and how they can facilitate connection between people of different moral convictions, even absent agreement on the ultimate answer to the question, “what’s the right thing to do?”
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Tayo Basquiat writes to pay attention and teaches to pay the bills. He lives with a passel of creatures off-grid in the high desert of New Mexico.
REVISION WORKSHOP FOR WRITERS
Tayo Basquiat
This is a 4-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Jan 28, Feb 25, March 11, 18: 7–9 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
The secret to successful writing is revision (not once but many times) and is more expansive than mere line editing for grammar issues.
Revising work is often a complete re-imagining of the previous effort. Such work will be the focus of this workshop. Participation is limited to 8 participants who already have a piece of writing between 1,000 and 7,000 words needing revision, which will be submitted to me via email one week prior to our first session. Our first session will be a craft lecture about the revision process. You’ll then have one month to do a revision of your piece before we start the workshop for each writer, comparing the two pieces and examining the revised work.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Tayo Basquiat writes to pay attention and teaches to pay the bills. He lives with a passel of creatures off-grid in the high desert of New Mexico.
CRITICAL THINKING FOR VIOLENT TIMES
Ahmed Afzaal
This is an 8-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays, Feb 5, 12, 19, 26, March 5, 12, 19, 26: 1–2:30 pm Central time.
ABOUT
THIS CLASS:
This course is for you if you feel confused and overwhelmed by the news of war, terror, and mayhem, finding it hard to make sense of it all. During the 8-week class, students will learn to:
1. analyze any argument into its parts; 2. explain the importance of clarity and consistency when dealing with contested terms;
3. compare the standard definition of "violence" with three alternative definitions;
4. identify the principal types of violence and their mutual relationship;
5. recognize the psychological processes that make violence acceptable or necessary;
6. compare the various standard and alternative definitions of "terrorism;"
7. identify the principal types of terrorism and their mutual relationship;
8. define and explain the concepts of "peace" and "nonviolence."
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Dr. Ahmed Afzaal holds a PhD in the sociology of religion from Drew University (Madison, NJ). Currently, he is an associate professor in the religion department at Concordia College (Moorhead, MN). He is the author of Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse (2023, Cascade Books).
THE ART AND PRACTICE OF STREET PHOTOGRAPHY
W. Scott Olsen
This is a 4-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Sundays, March 16, 23, 30, April 6: 1–2:30 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
Street photography is part documentary, part photojournalism, and part anthropology and is a deeply personal way of examining our everyday lives. Including portraits, images of architecture, current events, and the ordinary ways we move about our towns, these pictures are spontaneous captures of our public lives. However, the genre has a complicated set of issues that go with it—everything from aesthetics, privacy, exploitation, exposition, and bias. This class will examine historical and contemporary street photography images as ways to prompt a discussion of the issues, and we will have an opportunity to practice the art itself to deepen our understanding.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
W. Scott Olsen is a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. The author of 12 books of narrative nonfiction, his photographs have been published and shown in galleries internationally.
POLITICAL ISLAM: A NARRATIVE OF IDEOLOGY, REVIVALISM, AND CONFLICT
Roby C. Barrett
This is a 10-meeting virtual class using the Zoom platform. Tuesdays, Feb 18, 25, March 4, 11, 18, 25, April 1, 8, 15, 22: 5:30–7 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
This course discusses the political, economic, and socio-cultural aspects of Islamic development from its inception in the 7th century. It examines the rise of factionalism in its earliest forms and carries the discussion into the contemporary period. The premise is that Islam is a multifaceted, diverse umbrella of many competing and conflicting groups and this diversity and adaptability, similar to that of Christianity, has led to its spread. It examines the schools of Islamic thought and law, sectarianism, and the challenge of the West within the various historical contexts. The course is less concerned with the religious forms of faith than with Islam as an ideological backdrop for the justification of geo-political, economic, and socio-cultural actions and movements. It is 10 sessions of 90 minutes each.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Dr. Roby C. Barrett is former Foreign Service Officer with an intelligence and special operations background and served in North Africa, Yemen, the Levant, and Arabia. He is a Scholar and Gulf expert with the Middle East Institute, Washington, DC Originally trained as a Russia and Soviet expert, Dr. Barrett has over forty years of hands-on experience in the Middle East and is a security expert on the region. Barrett is the author of numerous
PUBLIC UNIVERSITY REGISTRATION IS CURRENTLY OPEN!
Class sizes are limited. Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events
books and articles on the Middle East and Southwest Asia including The Cold War in the Greater Middle East: U.S. Foreign Policy under Kennedy and Eisenhower (2007), The Gulf and the Struggle for Hegemony: Arabs, Iranians, and West in Conflict (2016), the nine-article “Series on Gulf Security” for Manara Magazine at Cambridge University (2020–2022), and nine monographs for US Special Operations Command. A former graduate and research fellow at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich and Oxford, Dr. Barrett holds a PhD in Middle Eastern and South Asian history from the University of Texas at Austin.
HISTORY, CULTURE, AND CUSTOMS
OF THE NUETA AND HIDATSA: A CASE STUDY INTO NATIVE AMERICA
Mike Barthelemy
This is a 16-meeting hybrid class being taught to students at NHS College in person and those auditing the class using the Zoom platform. Wednesdays, Jan 15, 22, 29, Feb 5, 12, 19, 26, March 5, 12, 19, 26, April 2, 9, 16, 23, 30: 6–8 pm Central time.
ABOUT THIS CLASS:
Explore the history, culture and customs of the Nueta and Hidatsa by studying the relationship between anthropology, history, archeology, and geography as it relates to Native people with the intersection of Native oral history and perspective. This course covers the precontact era, providing us with a new vision
of the indigenous continent before European impact. The History of the Knife and Heart River complexes through the lens of Native oral histories and ethnographic studies is integral in understanding the history of these tribes as they have always understood it. These tribes were economic epicenters for the middle and upper Missouri region. Students will listen to oral histories to critically reflect on these narratives and how they work as expressions of culture. This exploratory study into the history of these tribes will take us from our origins in oral history tradition and late Pleistocene sites like Beacon Island to our cultural reimagining in the confluence region at Cherry Necklace's fasting grounds.
INSTRUCTOR BIO:
Mike Barthelemy is the current Director of Native American Studies at Nueta, Hidatsa, Sahnish College who previously served as the former tribal archivist for the MHA Interpretive Center and the Park Superintendent for the MHA Nation Tribal Park. Mike has worked in the community extensively, collecting indigenous oral histories to provide native perspective on historical places and events such as the cultural landscape report for the Knife River Indian Villages and making contributions to the Joslyn Museum’s Faces from the Interior exhibition. When Mike is not working on a multitude of projects, he is spending time with his family, mostly traveling to his stepson’s basketball games and taking walks to the park with his wife and their 14-month-old, Dahu.
PUBLIC UNIVERSITY REGISTRATION IS CURRENTLY OPEN!
Class sizes are limited.
Register at humanitiesnd.org/classes-events
701.255.3360
info@humanitiesnd.org humanitiesnd.org
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