A few days ago, I said historians need better translators. I sat down and attempted, as an example, to translate academic writing into lay words, and something unexpected happened. Here is the passage I whacked at, from this book:
I argue that sentimentalism is not dismissed as a process of feminization until it is no longer a compelling market strategy. The demotion of sentimentalism to a process of feminization is concurrent with a loss of middle-class interest in sentimental aesthetics after the Civil War. Sentimentalism was not merely a commentary on the development of capitalism but one of the central strategies of market development. Men and women used the language of sentimentalism to insist on and describe an acceptable form of integration of those two spheres. Sentimentalism was a conscious strategy rather than a paradox, a social delusion, false consciousness, or assertion of cultural difference as a critique of mainstream culture. Whereas literary studies of sentimentalism have found the market in the home, I extend this analysis by finding the home in the market. I reexamine the definition of domesticity by asserting the importance of men in the cultural work of class formation and the importance of women in the economic work of class formation. Sentimentalism did not function as the marker of difference between a private feminized domestic sphere and a public masculinized commercial sphere; it was social and cultural phenomena that provided complex connections between those two rhetorical worlds.
Is that not cool? Obviously it would make more sense if read in its original context, but this is a pretty self-contained passage. I suspect, however, that most folks (i.e. non-historians) have no idea what’s going on. Quite a bit, actually.
This idea of translators doesn’t mean that something like this needs to be clarified for a popular audience. What I mean is that historians should make clear what the author is doing. Is that too-fine a distinction? You tell me.
What does that mean? There are generation’s-worth of historical writing being addressed here. There are at least three separate historical phenomenon with their own separate body of literature under review. She is responding directly to another, venerable, historical work. Academics recognize that. When she writes, “I reexamine the definition of domesticity by asserting the importance of men in the cultural work of class formation…”, it is loaded with meaning, and I think of all the work done on domesticity, middle class households, the place of women in the market, class formation, economic trends, and cultural forces. (What appears to be new here is that she will assert that men had significant role in defining domesticity whereas historians of the past generation focused almost entirely on women and domesticity.)
Now…here. I’m doing it again; that unexpected thing. I don’t know how to explain what’s going on in this passage without reverting to academic-speak. I bet the end of this previous paragraph was denser than the original passage. (This is an accomplishment for me, but a handicap in the real world.)
I guess this is insight, if far, far, from original—historians are in conversation with other historians and, just like two friends talking about football, the dialog (published material) is loaded with previous knowledge, shorthand language, specific vocabulary, and an intuitive understanding of where the other person is coming from. It seems near impossible have the same conversation with someone who lacks those prerequisites.
But I believe this passage has relevancy and can illuminate our present circumstances. If you’ve paid attention this summer, you might have noticed that the middle class died recently. Certainly this hits close to home with blog readers. Well, what are we losing? What assumptions about American life are going to be overturned? Assumptions about what men and women do in the home, what they do at work, what they spend money on, and how is that money acquired? Is the decline of American fortune an agonizing and unique break in human history? Or just the end of something that started sort-of randomly in the middle of the nineteenth (or twentieth) century? Wouldn’t you like to know? (Here is a good historian assessing the same questions today.)
Anyhow, I’m thinking out loud here and fear I’m being ponderous about a boring topic, not to mention getting all worked up again (the worst time for me to be putting my thoughts online.)
How would you translate that passage? How could you better understand it?
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