About Dr. Leonard
George J. Leonard
Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities (tenured)
21st year at San Francisco State University
5th year review: 2001-2006
Education:
BA Columbia 1967
MA Columbia 1968
Ph.D. with Distinction Columbia 1972.
Languages learned:
Mandarin Chinese, Greek, Russian, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish
Academic Positions held:
Assistant Professor of English, Yale;
Visiting Assistant Professor of English, U.C. Irvine;
The Writer-in-Residence, Scripps College, Claremont Colleges;
Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities, San Francisco State University.
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
The influence of my work, 2001-2006
In the period of this review, 2001-2006, there was a rapid expansion of scholarly interest in my theories. I'll divide this section into
1. Aesthetics, theory of the avant garde
2. Multiculturalism, particularly the Confucian survival in transnational Chinese and Chinese American culture
3. "Invention of History" Early years in entertainment
1. Aesthetics and Religion
In 1994, I published Into the Light of Things: the art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Within four years, Philip W. Jackson in John Dewey and the Lessons of Art, (Yale University Press: 1998) spent fifteen pages on "George Leonard's Argument" using my theories as exemplars of "spiritual" explanations of the main Western avant garde. (See, "Spirituality of Art-Centered Experiences" 69-78, 86-89, 102). Art critic David Carrier's interview originally done for Bomb magazine, is posted on this site.
In the period 2001-2006, interest in that "spiritual" theory of the avant garde rapidly spread. This list is not exhaustive. I limited it to books from major presses; no articles.
1. Jack Miles, "Global Requiem: the Apocalyptic Moment in Religion, Science, Art," in Susan L. Mizruchi, editor, Religion and Cultural Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)
"I should like to review the career, particularly the late career, of John Cage...." George J. Leonard, in a brilliant study entitled Into the Light of things: the art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage, writes [continues for four pages, basing his reading of Cage on my book. Into the Light quoted or reviewed for four pages, 200-204 passim.]
2. Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: a Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)
"Varieties of Resistance: Emerson, Marx, Ruskin, Morris"
"George Leonard has argued that Wordsworth's vision of a 'blissful hour' when we will find Paradise in 'the simple produce of the common day' was a dream of eventually dispensing with the separate work of art. Leonard reads the famous lines in this sense..." (234ff continues for four pages, expanding on ILT)
[I tried to disentangle Cage from Duchamp. I sharply distinguished between Pop and Dada. Shiner elaborates:]
"George Leonard has argued that whereas Duchamp failed to do away with art, the composer, John Cage, succeeded, bring Western society to Wordsworth's hoped for blissful hour when the art object can be dispensed with, and we may emerge 'into the light of things.'" (Continues for several pages, expanding on my point that Cage is not Dada. 292 ff.)
3. Steven Johnson, The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts (Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture, V. 5, New York: Routledge, 2001) Johnson too was interested in the Cage/Duchamp distinction.
"George Leonard has shown that there are important differences between Cage and Duchamp. He explains that Duchamp's work was a protest against art and the concept of beauty, while Cage advocated that beauty exists in everything. His Zen inspired rejection of emotionalism notwithstanding, Cage was hardly indifferent to the sounds around us. For Cage, Duchamp's readymade demonstrated that everyday objects have beauty. Leonard explains that this elevation of the 'commonplace' is part of a tradition that he refers to as 'natural supernaturalism' and traces back to William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. See George J. Leonard, Into the Light of Things, (etc)" (132)
4. David Carrier, Writing About Visual Art, New York: Allworth Press, 2003.
"Danto's definition responds to this modernist art but his general way of thinking, George Leonard notes, was anticipated by the Romantics. 'Natural supernaturalism had been about awakening to the world; now we awaken to what Natural Supernaturalism did to the art world. We know ourselves, and thereby, free ourselves... There's every chance that we may decide that one of the experiences we want to continue having from art is what transfigurationist art has given us: the awakening, the wonder.'" (182)
5. Jeff Kelley, The Art of Allan Kaprow. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) John Cage's friend and best student, Allan Kaprow, created the "Happenings" inspired by Cage's 4'33" in the 1950s. I pointed out that their techniques became the techniques of Earth Day and the ecology movement, a kind of 24'00" about the Earth's sacredness. Cage and Kaprow were both Zen practitioners, and they were encouraged by my rehabilitation of D.T. Suzuki. Jeff Kelley, another member of the group, writes in the definitive biography,
"Zen had been a philosophical interest and an aesthetic influence for Kaprow since his involvement with John Cage — that is, for most of his career... In Into the Light of Things, George Leonard argues that D.T. Suzuki, who popularized Zen Buddhism in the United States though he was not himself a Zen master (he was an English teacher in Japan before moving to Chicago in 1897) in fact introduced a 'new variant' of the long held American taste for seeking divine potential in everyday things." (199-204) Note in acknowledgments: "George Leonard's insights about American Zen were spellbinding reading and crucial to my thinking about Kaprow's koanic works of the late 1970s..." (230)
6. Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present. (Oxford University Press, 2006) Like Kelley, Sheringham, who is the Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at Oxford, accepted my argument that Earth Day began in Wordsworth's poetry and that, in Cage's work and Kaprow's concept art, Natural Supernaturalism has finally abandoned the artworld, to become a modern religious movement, "ecology."
"George J. Leonard traces this back to Wordsworth's vision of Paradise as 'a simple produce of the common day'. For Leonard, the evolution of the 'art of the commonplace,' from the Wordsworthian 'hallowing' of the ordinary to recent conceptual art, with its jettisoning of the art object, has a spiritual orientation. In the 1960s, he argues, 'concept art' led inevitably into world ecology and habitability.' Cage went on (etc. for two pages)" (pp 80-81)
7. Lawrence Buell, Emerson. (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard U. Press, 2004). The Chair of Harvard English, Lawrence Buell was also interested in my account of American Zen's debt to Emerson. ("I am an enthusiastic reader of Into the Light of Things" he wrote me.) and Leonard is cited. Dr. Buell, whom I subsequently advised through emails, adopted my discovery about Suzuki and Emerson, but more importantly, accepted my rehabilitation of Suzuki. Using Harold Bloom's concepts of influence, of the dignity and inevitability of creative misinterpretation, I tried to give Suzuki's now maligned, unhistorical Zen for the West a new dignity. Lawrence Buell writes,
"One may sniff at the actual results of such efforts as superficial popularizations by liberal do-gooders, east and west. One may complain that figures like Suzuki and Emerson... were unhistorical and obfuscatory.... Nevertheless, their goal of arriving at common grounds of ethico-religious understanding across cultures is bound to seem increasingly crucial as the world continues to shrink...." Note: "See George J. Leonard, Into the Light (etc) pp 147-162... for further insights on the interpenetration among strands of Suzuki's and Emerson's thought and influence." (197-198)
8. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme. (Berkeley: University of California, 2005). Martin Jay (not to be confused with Jay Martin, later in this list) adopts my neologism, "art of the commonplace."
"In England, critics like Archibald Alison, painters like John Constable, and poets like William Wordsworth were able to validate an 'art of the commonplace,' which disparaged the notion of an elite art object in favor of the subjective response of the artist or the sensitive beholder to virtually anything, no matter how trivial or mundane...." Footnote: "For an account of this tradition, see Leonard, Into the Light of Things." (151)
9. Martin Jay, Refractions of Violence. (New York: Routledge, 2003)
"Moreover, what Arthur Danto famous called the 'transfiguration of the commonplace' has now been extended to those dimensions of human experience that were below all previous thresholds of respectability and suitability...." Note: "For similar analyses see... George J. Leonard, Into the Light of Things etc." (215)
10. Walter J. Jost, Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism. University of Virginia Press, 2004) Walter J. Jost is intrigued by my point that Cage's effort is largely linguistic — the stretching of an old word over new things. Jost expands the idea. He seems to have found "provocative" the idea that the contemporary global ecology movement is continuous with Natural Supernaturalism and concept art.
"Grammatical Judgment
Of course, it may be objected that in any case, as George Leonard has shown in his provocative Into the Light of Things, so-called ordinary and everyday people, objects and practices have been quite prevalent in all the arts for at least two hundred years... From the Renaissance onward... sacralizing the mundane in the rise of Protestantism and its work ethic; seeing everyday life as full of expressive possibilities in romanticism; rejecting ordinary conventions in the name of a more freely constructed existence in twentieth century varieties of avant garde; and even (as Leonard argues) overcoming the art of the ordinary altogether in the name of the real things themselves, as in the ecology movement in contemporary art." (107)
11. T. Saler Michael, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground. (Oxford: Oxford U. P. 2005) English critic T. Saler Michael, responded to my concept, "Industrial Supernaturalism" (Monet painting the steam from a steam engine in the Gare St. Lazare as reverently as Constable would paint a cloud vapor).
"The traditional historiography has emphasized intellectuals disdain for the products of mass culture. See, for example, (etc.) [But] George Leonard has also traced an important lineage of artists, extending from the early nineteenth-century English Romantic poets through John Cage, which regarded 'art' and the products of everyday life (including industrial commodities) as indistinguishable, as they all were expressions of a transcendent spirit. George J. Leonard, Into the Light etc." (184)
2. "Multiculturalism," U.S. China relations
"Silicon Valley" by Cathy Newman, National Geographic Senior Writer. National Geographic (52-75) Volume 200, number 6, December 2001. When the Geographic did its Silicon Valley article, I served as principal advisor on Asian American issues. Cathy Newman ended the article,
"I had driven to Redwood City... to talk to George J. Leonard, a professor of humanities and Asian studies at San Francisco State University. We sat in his teahouse, a sanctuary really, poured green tea into thimble-like cups. As the fragrance of tea filled the room, we admired the translucent glaze of a celadon bowl and an earthenware pot in the shape of a lotus leaf.
Silicon Valley sits on the edge of the future. Perhaps it even is the future. Yet, so many were being left behind. The contrasts were as unsettling as the earthquake zone that helps define its geography. To keep my balnce, I needed an anchor, a steady handhold. Leonard offered one, using as a framework the teachings of Confucius.
‘Confucius says, 'Of course, you want to be rich and famous,'' Leonard said. 'It's natural. 'Wealth and fame are what every man desires.' But Confucius understood there is a moral decision too, and sooner or later an accounting begins. 'The question,' Confucius said, is, 'What are you willing to trade for it?'" (75)
"The Monkey King Spirit Resurfaces in China" by Cathy Newman. In progress.
3. The "Invention of History": Early years in entertainment
1. "Fabricated Fifties" in Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro: the Culture of Revival, (Chicago: Reaktion Books and U of Chicago Press, 2006.) Guffey, a Stanford Ph.D., is cleverly doing with the "Retro" concept, much what Susan Sontag did with "Camp" (lots of American pop culture and French philosophy).
"Retro" [means] a kind of subversion in which the artistic and cultural vanguard began looking backwards in order to look forwards.... As Voltaire noted, history does not change, but what we want from it does. [Retro's] most potent connotation is often overlooked: retro suggests a fundamental shift in the popular relationship with the past... Half-ironic, half-longing, retro considers the recent past with an unsentimental nostalgia.... Often insinuates a form of subversion while side stepping historical accuracy." {9-11]
"On the fourth day of the Woodstock Festival of 1969," Elizabeth M. Guffey — a professor at SUNY Purchase — writes, "just before Jimi Hendrix's celebrated finale, the stage was held by a group of unknown undergraduates from Columbia University. But these students were not from the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), leaders of a revolt that had rocked the campus the previous year. Instead, the rock-'n'-roll revivalist group Sha Na Na bombarded the audience with tightly choreographed of 1950s classics like 'Teen Angel' and 'At the Hop.' The festival's unlikely scene stealers sported dated looks, including greased ducktails, white socks and cigarettes rolled into T-shirt sleeves. Sha Na Na's impossibly upbeat and exuberant version of the 1950s seemed the opposite of the arty psychedelica and hard rock that characterized Woodstock. (98)
"The best-known group to recall and satirize 1950s tunes remained Sha Na Na, whose synchronized dance moves and vocal harmonies were subtly infused with Camp. George Leonard, the group's leader, described himself as a '22-year-old Susan Sontag buff.' Recalling the group's transformation from Ivy League glee club to television stars, Leonard spoke of a 'vision of a group that would sing only '50s rock and perform dances like the Busby Berkeley films that he 'learned to love in college readings on Camp.'" (106)
"Posters for Sha Na Na's appearances on college campuses evoked what one band member [Leonard] called 'a pre-political teenage Eden,' announcing 'Jocks! Freaks! Rotc! SDS! Let there be a truce! Bury the hatchet (not in each other)! Remember when we were all little grease balls together.'" (113)
2. Daniel Marcus, Happy Days and Wonder Years: the Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press 2004). Marcus (without mentioning me by name) describes how Sha Na Na's invented "Fifties" have been used politically. Marcus and Guffey both have been corresponding with me, since the Columbia Alumni Magazine, Columbia College Today is doing a 4000 word article with illustrations, "Sha Na Na and the Invention of the Fifties."
"Conservatives [in the Reagan Era] parlay(ed) the cultural nostalgia for the Fifties that had circulated in the 1970s into the basis for a political offensive...." (58) But, Daniel Marcus discovered, like Elizabeth Guffey, that image of the "Fifties" was no older than Sha Na Na, and it had replaced the early popular image of the Beat Fifties. "Sha Na Na, the first and most successful of the [Fifties] groups, formed in early 1969, and quickly gained popularity... This ascription of the social domain and style of hoods (in 1950s slang) or greasers (as they came to be known in the 1970s) as the emblematic experience of 1950s youth came to be a common trope in later media discussions of the era." 12-13 ff.
"The massive popularity of The Fonz [on Ron Howard's TV show, Happy Days] completed a process of cultural redefinition that had begun with Sha Na Na — that the prototypical figure of youth culture in the Fifties was the urban, white, male working-class greaser. [The Beats] were superceded by mainstream interest in the greaser." (30) Reagan and the Baby Boom politicians, Marcus then shows, battled during three presidencies over who was the legitimate heir to an invented historical era.
[Note by GL: A Columbian like myself has to note with satisfaction that the invention of history is a Columbia tradition. The original Beat Fifties we replaced was the invention of two Columbians, Ginsberg and Kerouac. Marcus describes in detail Bill Clinton's later attempt to cast himself as a worth descendant of "Elvis." Actually, that was the work of his campaign manager, Dick Morris, my Columbia College classmate.]
New Works 2001-2006
Screenplays
Sale of new professional screenplay, EXTINCTION
I believe the reader will accept that the sale of one's screenplay on the Universal Pictures/ Imagine Entertainment level is the equivalent, for that profession, of publication by Knopf or Simon and Schuster.
Screenplay: EXTINCTION
Purchased by Ken Schur, producer in conjunction with Universal Pictures. Ken Schur developed Leonard's The Ice Cathedral for Ron Howard/Imagine Entertainment/ Universal Pictures, Hollywood. Writing began at the Essex House on Central Park South in January 2005. Finished 2006. Currently under contract and in development.
Screenplay: THE ICE CATHEDRAL (status report)
Director Ron Howard had exercised his option to complete the purchase of The Ice Cathedral for Imagine Entertainment in conjunction with Universal Pictures, Hollywood.
In an April 13, 2004 letter, Suzy Barbieri, the Vice President for Motion Pictures at Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's Imagine Entertainment (Universal Pictures) confirmed that Ron Howard still intended to personally direct, and that they had paid for screenwriters to do a new draft of the screenplay. "As an update to previous correspondence, your novel THE ICE CATHEDRAL, which we have been developing into a feature film, is moving forward at an exciting pace. We are currently expecting a new draft of the screenplay and have high hopes that Ron Howard will direct the film in the next few years. The story has a compelling premise, and is filled with such fascinating characters and themes, that we all believe it will make a smart and emotionally gripping film."
New Published Articles
1. "Steinbeck, Beckett: Waiting for Godot." In Ali, Syed Mashinkoor, John Steinbeck: a Centennial Tribute, (Jaipur, India: Surabhi, 2004.)
Identifies a likely allusion to Of Mice and Men in Waiting for Godot as a typical Beckett footnote thanking an earlier work for inspiration; in this case, to the then-fashionable leftist author, Steinbeck, a particular favorite in Beckett's postwar French circles. Essay explores the parallels between the two sets of waiting bums, notices that Steinbeck's ending is far bleaker than Beckett's. (80-88.)
2. Long theoretical article, "David Antin, Improvisation, Asia" appeared in special David Antin issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 2001, Vol 21 no. 1.
On the aesthetics of the odd genre called "improvisation" in the West, trying to know it through comparison with some Chinese aesthetic categories; David Antin as the test case. (106-124)
Participation in the world of ideas:
The San Francisco Art Institute made Leonard's speech: "Cage, Suzuki and the making of American Zen." its first live webcast.
Thanked in the Acknowledgement by Jay Martin, Journey to Heavenly Mountain, 2002.
Thanked in the Acknowledgement by Jack Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, New York: Knopf, 2002. (In October 2003, Miles, already a Pulitzer Prize winner, won the MacArthur "Genius" Award for this book, a half million dollar grant of seed money to free him for his next project.)
Thanked in the Acknowlegement, by Howard Isham, Image of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century (Peter Lang 2004) xxiii + 415 60 illus. $81.95
David Carrier, Writing About Visual Art, New York: Allworth Press, 2003. Dedication of the new edition of this much-assigned text to me and to Richard Kuhns, aesthetician. "George Leonard, a distinguished commentator on Richard Kuhns, was a rock and roll star and the choreographer for Sha Na Na. George has written about popular culture in ways that have decisively influenced me."
Sole Anonymous Referee, U. of Chicago Press on Nu, (the Nude). a work of Chinese aesthetics written in French.
Finally, as for collegiality, I am proud that I was able to persuade Wordsworth Circle to let me review the Humanities Department emeritus professor Howard Isham's work, though published by Peter Lang.
"Image of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century." Wordsworth Circle (Refereed) September 22, 2004
Publisher: Wordsworth Circle Volume: 35 Issue: 4 Page: 207(1)
Service as a Professor to the College of Humanities:
2001- Currently: Editor, The San Francisco Humanities Review.
With co-Editor James Kohn, we first transferred much of our old print publication, MAGAZINE, to permanent online access. Then — once the new software became available — we conceived, designed and maintained an online book review, which currently receives two books per month, much of it from small presses who can't get their authors reviewed by commercial publications; but also from the likes of Duke University Press. I've reviewed four books in the past year. Reviewers include Bill Christmas and Eric Solomon. The San Francisco Humanities Review has just created "Working Papers," a SFHR sub-site where the best student work can be permanently published online by any sponsoring College of Humanities professor.
For the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities:
Chair, Hiring, Retention, Tenure, Promotion Committee 2000-2001
Chair, Retention (two tenure track candidates and lecturers) 2005-2006
Member, Retention 2006-2007
[End of Review statement.]
Links
Dr. Leonard's Writing Methods
(from L.A. Times and N.Y. Sunday Times)
With John Cage (We've Ruined the Silence)