Adam Sweeting

There is a kind of ambivalence that is wonderful in novels and even in exposition, as in Emerson's wandering essays. This book misses that quality by a long shot. The book begins by telling you all the things that cultural history is not, and all the things that the author is not going to form any coherent opinion about (such as the origin of the term Indian Summer). The whole first chapter reminded me of one of those PowerPoint presentations where the presenter stands up and tells you about how they didn't have time to prepare, and the slides aren't in the right order, and they hate their visual aids, and they woke up with a cold.

Sweeting seems determined to follow the idea that Indian Summer is used as a metaphor by different authors and artists to express different ideas. And yet he keeps tripping up on pesky objective historical questions like the origin of the term, and why it was suddenly in widespread use in the early 1800s. He acknowledges that these questions are interesting, and then just sort of sails by.

The first few chapters of content, after the introduction, are littered with the kind of disciplinary rigidity that seems to be common in university professors, particularly those engaged in cross-disciplinary endeavors. Sweeting says over and over again that Indian Summer "crosses boundaries" of art and science, which just ends up emphasizing that he feels that the two are completely unrelated. Or worse, he talks about labels that critics apply to types of art as if they were essential to the art itself: "The first emerged within an odd confluence of nationalism, sentimentalism, and Romanticism, which the second occupied the overlapping cultural space on nineteenth-century literature and science." [p. 32] "We have seen how popular antebellum conceptions of the season hovered within the cultural space between Romantic and sentimental writing." [p. 43] "Simultaneously caught between sentimentalism, Romanticism, and science, the early literary accounts of Indian summer offer a case study in how we might move from the thing observed to the thing imagined." [p. 48] What does that last sentence even mean?

The tone of the book is really odd. Sweeting keeps making judgments on the quality of the authors/artists he is quoting or describing ("...he offers lines that read like store-bought greeting cards rather than heartfelt expressions of longing or loss." [p. 158]). He also often writes tacky summations at the end of the chapter, e.g. "For commentators working in the new mass media of the day, the season arrived in the right place and the right time." [p. 36] and "Each white version of Indians came with its own form of haze." [p. 72] These two habits seem completely at odds with each other. Surely someone with such sharp criticism for others read over his own prose?

The chapter on Thoreau was almost the last straw. There's a long diversion on what a lousy birdwatcher Thoreau was (there's more than a hundred years of history here and only 163 pages, and yet the book still feels bloated). Sweeting makes an interesting point about Thoreau's conception of seasonal cycles using his writing as evidence. He then proceeds to ruin the effect at the end of the chapter by quoting Thoreau's probably apocryphal "last words" as if that were actual evidence to prove his point.… (plus d'informations)