Guru

Chapter 3 argues that Rabindranath Tagore followed W. B. Yeats in becoming a cultural representative while traveling on the circuit, but it also contends that Tagore’s reception as a popular guru ultimately hampered his ability to engage with political issues in the same way that Yeats had on his tour. More specifically, this chapter considers how this specific reception history evolved across Tagore’s first two US lecture tours, which took place in 1912–13 and 1916–17 respectively. While US audiences certainly played a large part in labeling Tagore as a guru, the poet was also a much cannier manipulator of his own reception than his critics have previously acknowledged. Through his public lecturing on his first tour, Tagore cultivated a spiritual image without playing to certain stereotypes that painted the East as a place of staid contemplation. Yet this effort became much more difficult during his next tour, when he began using his lectures on Hinduism as a platform for waging an explicit anti-colonial campaign. At this point, the poet was met with criticism, not only from Euro-Americans, but also from Bengali immigrants living in the US. This chapter therefore comes to the conclusion that Tagore’s success in altering his identity as a spiritual leader came at the expense of his popularity as an international literary figure.

Introduction

The Introduction to this book provides a framework for analyzing both the “lecture” and the “tour.” The first half presents the lecture as a pervasive yet unexamined authorial practice. It draws on current theories of literary celebrity to demonstrate how lecturing is primarily concerned with the construction of an author’s “personality.” However, it also shows how an analysis of lecturing demands a close attention to live, embodied performance generally lacking among the scholarship in this area. The second half of the Introduction then looks at the social and historical contexts surrounding the US lecture tour. Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it highlights two institutions—the lyceum and the Chautauqua—that were crucial in connecting the practice of lecturing to a larger traveling-show culture that hovered between public education and popular entertainment. Detailing this context underscores how the US lecture tour injected modernist authors into an environment of great social variety where they had to learn how to vary the presentation and performance of their own authorship.

Coda

The coda to this book uses modernist authors’ diverse engagements with academic institutions on the US lecture tour as an opportunity to reconsider long-standing scholarly narratives about modernist institutionalization. In particular, it argues that the academic institution is not the closed, autonomous space that critics frequently make it out to be and that modernism’s relocation into the university during the postwar period should not be seen as a retreat from the social world. After highlighting several scenes from this book that reflect an alternative perspective on modernism’s relationship with the university, the coda makes a final call for us to model our contemporary institutions on the US lecture tour’s diverse social engagements as a way of furthering recent efforts in the public humanities.

Correspondent

Chapter 5 demonstrates how W. H. Auden’s public lecturing was deeply interconnected with his poetry writing during the World War II era. Important to this argument is the fact that Auden didn’t come to the US with the intention of conducting a lecture tour; instead, he arrived as a European émigré during the onset of World War II. Once in America, though, he started delivering lectures as a means of generating a secondary income. Taking these circumstances into account, this chapter examines how the outbreak of World War II informed Auden’s approach to public speaking. Through his work as a lecturer, the poet quickly assumed the role of a wartime correspondent. Yet his early lectures and addresses left him with deep ambivalence about how easily he could stir up the emotions of his audiences. This is an anxiety that compelled Auden to move to the university as a place of semi-detachment. The rest of this chapter thus goes on to trace how he used his poetry to develop a new mode of allegorical speech that still allowed him to address political issues from his new position within the postwar academic institution.

Documentarian

Chapter 4 considers how the US lecture tour provided the expatriate author Gertrude Stein with a chance to reacquaint herself with her native country. The media blitz that accompanied Stein’s 1934–5 tour—she made regular stops for photo ops, book signings, and radio interviews—has prompted critics to examine the way Americans saw Stein as a 1930s celebrity. This chapter is more interested, though, in the way Stein saw America, examining in particular her role as a social documentarian during one of the lowest points in the Great Depression. It specifically analyzes the way she developed a public lecturing practice invested as much in documenting her audiences as it was in speaking to them. It then goes on to compare her lecture-tour memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, to the state and regional guidebooks being produced at that time by the New Deal’s Work Progress Administration (WPA) to reveal how these two forms of 1930s documentary come together in their renewed belief in the American collective. Finally, the many points of overlap between Stein’s memoir and WPA documentaries become an occasion to question previous readings of the author’s late 1930s politics, which have typically portrayed Stein as a stalwart social conservative.

Diplomat

Chapter 2 explores how W. B. Yeats’s 1903–4 US lecture tour placed the poet in the role of diplomat. It demonstrates how this position required Yeats to engage in a kind of racial performance directed toward markedly political ends. In taking on this diplomatic function, Yeats was tasked with mediating the tensions of a changing imperial landscape. He became a representative for a country with a long history of anti-colonialism at the same time that America was awakening to its own imperial future. With these tensions in mind, this chapter attends to Yeats’s efforts to bring Ireland and America into productive contact with one another. In particular, it examines his early lectures at US colleges and universities, where he sought to establish an emotional connection with his audiences by channeling the voice of ancient Irish bards. It also shows how this was a project that sometimes backfired on the poet, as these bardic displays made it easy for Americans to exoticize Yeats when he moved into larger cultural arenas like Carnegie Hall and the St Louis World’s Fair. Yet, in the end, Yeats’s emotional diplomacy did prove highly successful when it came to connecting him with Irish American political groups, which suggests that the US lecture tour was instrumental in teaching the poet how to speak to his own countrymen.

Curiosity

Chapter 1 argues that the US lecture tour introduced Oscar Wilde to a form of curiosity entertainment that inspired him to continually modify his person for different regional audiences. Though Wilde’s 1882 tour has received much attention for the way it catalyzed the author’s celebrity, very little has been said regarding Wilde’s actual lecturing practices. This chapter therefore examines how the circuit connected Wilde to America’s increasingly commercialized forms of public speech. It does so by focusing on Wilde’s relationship to P. T. Barnum. While Barnum is best known as a circus magnate, he was also a popular speaker who specialized in self-improvement lecturing. Placing Wilde in this particular context, the chapter shows how newspapers readily associated Wilde not only with Barnum but also with his many curiosity attractions. However, its larger aim is to illustrate how Wilde incorporated a sense of Barnum’s overall rhetoric into his own lecturing. Throughout his tour, Wilde subtly adapted Barnum’s self-improvement into a means of self-manipulation, at times going so far as to alter his own class and racial identity in order to appeal to specific audiences.