AML Award (shortlist) for Dorian

.

The highest recognition in the field of Mormon criticism is the AML Award. And thus it is thrilling to announce that Dorian has been shortlisted for the 2015 award. This is a recognition to everyone who was involved in the project, from writing the essays to the notes to quadruplechecking we’ve included only the typos that were in the 1921 original. Congratulations, everyone, on a job well done.

The other work on the shortlist is The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, edited by Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow for Oxford University Press. The shortlist announcement notes that the volume “includes several articles on Mormon literature and culture, written by Jana Reiss, Eric A. Eliason, Paul L. Anderson, Michael Austin, and Michael D. Hicks.”

Mason Allred

.

Mason Allred earned a BA in history from Brigham Young University–Hawaii and an MA and PhD in German studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a cultural historian of media, historiography, and historical experience. As a Fulbright Scholar, he spent a year in the archives of Germany for his dissertation on the relationship between cinema and modern historicity. He was a contributor to the documentary sourcebook, The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory 1907-1933 (UC Press, 2015). His interdisciplinary work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Jewish Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Transit, as well as in edited scholarly volumes. He recently accepted a position as historian at the Joseph Smith Papers.

He is the author of  “Integrating the “Best Books”: Interwar Intellectualism And Extratextuality in Nephi Anderson’s DORIAN” included in our Peculiar Edition of Dorian.

Jacob Bender

.

Jacob Bender is a current PhD candidate in English at the University of Iowa, with an MA from the University of Utah and a BA from BYU-Idaho.  He has previously published in Dialogue, Sunstone, shipsofhagoth, and West Trade Review, among others.  His current research focuses on comparativist approaches to Irish Modernism and Latin-American literature.  He formerly taught at SLCC and LDSBC, and has also worked as a reporter in Mexico, an ELL instructor in China, and a missionary in Puerto Rico.  He hails from western Washington.

He is the author of  “This Is Not a Photograph: Nephi Anderson’s DORIAN as a Sort of LDS SONS AND LOVERS; or A PORTRAIT OF THE MORMON SOLIPSIST AS A YOUNG MAN” included in our Peculiar Edition of Dorian.

 

 

Harmonizing Mormonism and Science “in the Valley of Sunshine and Shadow” by Blair Dee Hodges

.

In the lead-up to the March 31 release of our Peculiar Edition of Nephi Anderson’s novel Dorian we will be running a series of posts featuring the first paragraph (and one other paragraph of the editor’s whim) from the essays included in that volume. Come back for more every Tuesday and Thursday.

.

The turn of the twentieth century marked a period of intense cultural shifts, not least of all regarding widespread views about the relationship between the natural sciences and religion. John William Draper’s massively influential History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) promoted the view that these were irreconcilable foes fighting to the death. Draper’s book is one of the chief disseminators of “the greatest myth in the history of science and religion… that they have been in a state of constant conflict.” True, Enlightenment-inspired confidence in human reason and technological advances challenged religious beliefs as the nineteenth century closed. Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) contributed to larger concerns about humanity’s place in an apparently indifferent universe. The Bible lost credibility due to developments in geology, biology, and textual criticism. Charles Taylor, who traces prehistories of skepticism, naturalism and humanism, identifies the nineteenth century as the period in which “unbelief comes of age,” but argues that science and religion have had a more interesting relationship than simple “subtraction stories” suggest….

Anderson’s eternal-progression evolution was not unique to him. It increasingly found expression in more sophisticated philosophical works by Mormon writers like Nels Nelson, but Added Upon reached more Mormon readers than more technical works could. Anderson’s preface presented the book’s speculative nature as a benefit rather than a drawback, hoping that “the mind of the reader, illumined by the Spirit of the Lord, will be able to fill in all the details that the heart may desire, to wander at will in the garden of the Lord, and dwell in peace in the mansions of the Father.” Anderson affirmed the ability of human imagination guided by inspiration to flesh out nascent possibilities in Mormon thought, reflecting the Romantic side of Mormonism’s “rational theology” as developed by educated Mormon leaders like apostle John A. Widtsoe and seventy B.H. Roberts, both of whom, like Anderson, emigrated from Europe to the United States after their families converted to the faith.

“Why Are there Classes among Members of Our Church?”: Anderson’s Economics of Mormonism in Transition by Sarah C. Reed

.

In the lead-up to the March 31 release of our Peculiar Edition of Nephi Anderson’s novel Dorian we will be running a series of posts featuring the first paragraph (and one other paragraph of the editor’s whim) from the essays included in that volume. Come back for more every Tuesday and Thursday.

.

The publication of Nephi Anderson’s last novel, Dorian, in 1921, came near the end of an era of Mormon history marked by a number of dramatic changes. During the 50 years from 1880 to 1930, the Mormon Church abandoned

many of its idiosyncratic practices: polygamy was officially ended, the LDS political party disbanded, communitarian economics de-emphasized. At the same time, it increasingly participated in American politics and culture: Mormons sent a delegation to the 1893 World’s Fair, Utah gained statehood in 1896, Reed Smoot weathered the congressional hearings regarding his election and was finally seated in the Senate in 1907. This process has been called “Americanization” or even “assimilation” because of the way the Mormon cultural region (to borrow Ethan Yorgason’s term) came to conform to hegemonic economic, political, and social norms; nevertheless, the integration of the region into America was not an unequivocal development. Mormonism’s doctrines and narrative had to be reinterpreted to harmonize the change from a separatist society to one accommodating the dominant cultural conventions….

As Mormonism shifted from communalism to capitalism, the individual began to displace the community in the building of Zion. The emphasis on self-sufficiency moved from a community effort to the onus of individuals. Even so, vestiges of the older model remained in the discourse. For example, apostle Anthon H. Lund was himself a Danish immigrant and was sympathetic to the difficulties that other immigrant converts faced. In various conference talks he reminded the saints of their responsibilities in helping these new members integrate into the community. Similarly, Andrew Jenson, assistant church historian and also a Danish immigrant, continued to speak about the gathering and praised the Mormon communities and warned against their dissolution, even as other leaders de-emphasized this model. Uncle Zed’s immigrant background fits in with this perspective; for him, communitarianism wasn’t just an economic model, but had a theological implication. In one of their theological talks, Uncle Zed explains to Dorian his idea of salvation, blending together science, religion, and economy. Christ works for those of us below him who can’t get there “by self-effort alone,” that “the great error” of evolutionists is that “higher forms evolve from the initial and unaided movements of the lower,” which “is as impossible as that a man can lift himself to the skies by his boot-straps” (122 – 123). In working out individual salvation, Uncle Zed gives three principles: 1) the individual must be willing to progress; 2) he must be willing to accept help; and 3) he must be willing to “share all good with others” (125). Uncle Zed goes on to expound on the third principle: “Coming back now to the application I mentioned. If it is God’s work and glory to labor for those below Him, why should not we, His sons and daughters, follow His example as far as possible in our sphere of action? If we are ever to become like Him we must follow in His steps and do the things which He has done. Our work, also must be to help along the road to salvation those who are lower down, those who are more ignorant and are weaker than we” (124 – 125).

“The Dead Virgin and the Accidental Whore” by A. Arwen Taylor

.

In the lead-up to the March 31 release of our Peculiar Edition of Nephi Anderson’s novel Dorian we will be running a series of posts featuring the first paragraph (and one other paragraph of the editor’s whim) from the essays included in that volume. Come back for more every Tuesday and Thursday.

.

The history of men writing women shows an established tendency to corral female characters to one side of a sexual dichotomy, such that they embody one of two tropes, the angel or the whore. These polarized figures represent men’s response to the masculine perception of women’s sexuality, which means that women are defined according to their (apparent) sexual availability, both to the male from whose perspective we’re currently gazing, and to men in general. Thus we have Eve and Mary (the seductress who lures man into sexual knowingness, and the virgin so pure she gives birth without having sex); Veronica and Betty (the sexy shopaholic who dates widely, and the wholesome, loyal girl next door); the White Swan and the Black Swan; Arabella Donn and Sue Bridehead; Helen Ramirez and Amy Fowler; the list goes on. The angelic woman is pure, good, modest, faithful, and, most critically, sexually restrained, while the whore character tends to be voluptuous, exotic, irresistible, and sexually flagrant. The male protagonist’s desire is fraught as he navigates between these two types: the sexually available woman can never belong exclusively to him, and the woman who can be his exclusively is by nature non-sexual—or worse, if she is convinced to have sex, then she will no longer be the virginal ideal worthy of his desire. Stories that rely on the tension between angel and whore tend most often to show the male protagonist seduced by the latter but desiring the former; the allure of the whore is only a distraction from his pursuit and eventual conquest of the angel….

Mildred’s fate reverberates remarkably with Snow White’s. As she is dying, her room is evacuated of books and artistic materials, and her speech is reduced to a single sentence; the last time Dorian sees her, he finds her “thinner and paler than ever, eyes bigger, hair heavier and more golden,” and Dorian is able to enjoy looking on her “angel-face,” now “marble-like” (63 – 64). Stripped of her trappings of culture, she is reduced to a body to be admired. Dorian does not visit her again, not even when he learns that the crisis has come and she is on the verge of death. Instead he lingers outside her home until someone comes out and tells him that she has died. Then, “He felt the night wind blow cold down the street, and he saw the storm clouds scuttling along the distant sky. In the deep blue directly above him a star shone brightly, but it only reminded him of what Uncle Zed had said about hitching to a star; yes, but what if the star had suddenly been taken from the sky!” (66). At the critical moment of pathos, Mildred, who has been curiously absent from her own death scene, is projected as a star—beautiful but utterly out of reach, high above the world; incorporeal for all intents and purposes, and even more so now that she is “taken from the sky.”

“This Is Not a Photograph: Nephi Anderson’s Dorian as a Sort of LDS Sons and Lovers; or a Portrait of the Mormon Solipsist as a Young Man” by Jacob Bender

.

In the lead-up to the March 31 release of our Peculiar Edition of Nephi Anderson’s novel Dorian we will be running a series of posts featuring the first paragraph (and one other paragraph of the editor’s whim) from the essays included in that volume. Come back for more every Tuesday and Thursday.

.

The wonder of Nephi Anderson’s Dorian is that it isn’t called Carlia, who is arguably the far more interesting character. In Carlia we have someone straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel, a Mormon Tess of the d’Urbervilles: She is a poor, rural, working-class farm girl forced by poverty and circumstance to forsake any chance of higher learning and a better life, instead to toil obscurely for her broken and indifferent family. She is ignored by her would-be lover and her spirit cracks under the constant grind and toil. In a moment of weakness she is seduced, violated, and disgraced by an unscrupulous interloper. Ashamed, she runs away into even greater penury and misery, her child dies soon after birth, and she is left alone to suffer in the dead of winter. As compared to Dorian, she is the more fascinating, pathos-ridden character, but Anderson didn’t give us Carlia. He gave us Dorian, and hovering around the peripheries of Dorian is a more interesting novel wherein Carlia’s suffering resonates more profoundly and speaks to the human condition more deeply than golden boy Dorian’s good fortune ever does….

Then at the end of chapter four, something remarkable happens: While Stephen ponders whether to become a priest, he stumbles upon a girl walking along the surf of the beach. She barely acknowledges him. This becomes an epiphanic moment in Stephen’s life, for he has beheld the intensity of someone else’s experience—someone living an entire life outside of his own. “Heavenly God!” he cries. He decides to become an artist so as to see, like Meredith, more than is commonly seen. Near the novel’s close, Stephen writes, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience.” For Joyce, an artist recognizes the intensity of life and experience. Meredith also recognizes life’s intensity through artistic perception. She is in fact training Dorian to look more closely, to experience life more intensely, that is, to think more like an artist—like Stephen Daedalus before him.

“Integrating the “Best Books”: Interwar Intellectualism and Extratextuality in Nephi Anderson’s Dorian” by Mason Allred

.

In the lead-up to the March 31 release of our Peculiar Edition of Nephi Anderson’s novel Dorian we will be running a series of posts featuring the first paragraph (and one other paragraph of the editor’s whim) from the essays included in that volume. Come back for more every Tuesday and Thursday.

.

The twentieth century began with Mormonism being forced into the limelight. With the problematic appointment of Reed Smoot as the first Mormon senator, the stage was set for a reexamination of “this most strange and peculiar faith” (qtd. in Flake 100). How, if at all, did Mormons fit into the nation and world at large? As if striking the tuning fork of assimilation and listening for resonance in Mormon thought, a generation of academically trained leaders of the Church also set their minds to work out the place of Mormon thought within a wider intellectual framework. The first few decades of the twentieth century bear this significant trend of intellectually and culturally locating Mormonism within a broader context. Major figures forming a constellation around this drive to integrate, or even circumscribe, Mormonism include John A. Widtsoe, James E. Talmage, and B.H. Roberts, among others. Their influential work engendered a new rationality in Mormon intellectual history, which can be characterized by an increased awareness of secular knowledge and a sustained effort to reconcile such with Mormon faith-based knowledge….

This modern notion of navigating the world outside oneself is evidenced in Dorian’s consumer trips to the city. It is perhaps appropriate that the novel opens with Dorian strolling the city streets, as a flaneur of sorts. Dorian is flaneur-like in his consumption of books and candy and in his detached stance to the city and its pleasures. However, unlike the flaneur roaming the city in Baudelaire, Benjamin, or Poe (Benjamin 79), Dorian’s experience with the material reality of modernity often underscores his ignorance and asserts his solitude. Yet, despite his lack of knowledge about automobiles and moving picture shows, Dorian is connected to a broader world through the “imagined communities” of established readership (Anderson, B. 25). Selectively partaking of the city, yet remaining distinctly separate is the modus operandi of Dorian and Dorian. They both pick and choose of the best texts to “use” in their construction of self.

“Critical Analysis of Dorian: Nephi Anderson’s Dorian and the Project of Twentieth-Century Mormonism” by Scott Hales

.

In the lead-up to the March 31 release of our Peculiar Edition of Nephi Anderson’s novel Dorian we will be running a series of posts featuring the first paragraph (and one other paragraph of the editor’s whim) from the essays included in that volume. Come back for more every Tuesday and Thursday.

.

At the time of his 6 January 1923 death, Nephi Anderson was the premier man of letters in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His friend, Church President Heber J. Grant, credited his writing for making “a financial success” of one of the Church’s official magazines, the Improvement Era, which had published Anderson’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for more than twenty years. Indeed, three months before his death, Anderson received an admiring letter from Grant telling him “that there are few, if any, of the writers to the Improvement Era that I feel more grateful to than your dear self for the many contributions which you have made to our splendid little magazine” (Grant). This praise was echoed in Anderson’s two-page obituary in the Improvement Era which called him “a gifted writer of fiction” who “always provided clean stories permeated by the spirit of the gospel” (“Nephi Anderson” 373 – 375). Another obituary, published on the front page of the Box Elder News, claimed that Anderson’s novel Added Upon had been “read by almost every person in the state” of Utah (“Called by Death” 1)….

Cracroft’s positive appraisal of Dorian is a welcome reprieve from the criticisms of Anderson’s detractors, yet his lamentation for what might have been distracts in some ways from what the novel was and continues to be for Latter-day Saints and their fiction. Reading it today, nearly one hundred years later, it is easy to see that Dorian was not only a generally successful aesthetic production and a milestone in Mormon literary realism, but also a statement of identity for Mormons in the early twentieth century, particularly young Mormons whose task it was to take the Church into the future. As one reviewer pointed out in the January 1922 issue of the Improvement Era, the novel provided “boys and girls” with “a class of reading which [aimed] to teach the way of righteousness in attractive story form” (“Editor’s Table” 361). Its Horatian mixture of entertainment and instruction, in other words, could serve as a vehicle for shaping Mormon character, clarifying cultural boundaries, and teaching correct gospel principles. To a Mormon community still in the process of steadying itself from the institutional trauma of the Woodruff Manifesto, the 1890 edict that signaled the beginning of the end of the group-defining practice of Mormon polygamy, Dorian served as a kind of guidebook for performing twentieth-century Mormon identity.

News on the Dorian project

.

Peculiar Pages’ edition of Nephi Anderson’s Dorian will be published by the end of 2013.

That’s right: this very year.

To celebrate, please enjoy this list of essays contributed by scholars which will be included in our Peculiar Edition of this classic work:

Mason Allred—Integrating the “Best Books”: Interwar Intellectualism and Extratextuality in Nephi Anderson’s Dorian

Jacob Bender—“This Is Not a Photograph”: Nephi Anderson’s Dorian as a sort of LDS Sons and Lovers; or A Portrait of the Mormon Solipsist as a Young Man

Scott Hales—Nephi Anderson’s Dorian and the Project of Twentieth-Century Mormonism

Blair Dee Hodges—“Harmonizing Mormonism and Science ‘in the valley of sunshine and shadow’”

Sarah Reed—“Why are there classes among members of our Church?”: Anderson’s Economics of Mormonism in Transition

A. Arwen Taylor—The Dead Virgin and the Accidental Whore

Not to mention notes on the text and two essays from Anderson himself!

This is going to be a terrific book. Whether you already know and love Dorian or it’s something you’re about to experience for the first time, this edition has been worth the wait.

And just in time for a new year of reading!