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Advice text authors invoked the amateur to break open what they viewed as cultural monopolies that limited wider public participation in the arts and that, in turn, challenged their own artistic relationship with these publics. Pound and Stein composed their advice texts in the 1930s when their reputations had begun to wane and before some of their majors works brought them wider recognition, such as Pound’s Cantos and Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Despite being a favorite of University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler was often at odds with his fellow professors, so much so that his department chair resigned in protest after Adler joined the philosophy department. Dale attempted to reclaim educators’ opportunities to act as cultural critics of film even as Hollywood usurped local critique of films by creating its own body of in-house censors who administered the Production Code. Advice texts offered such intellectuals the opportunity to imagine better relations with publics that their dubious status within professionalized cultural spheres rendered difficult. Advice to readers on theatrical, literary, and cinematic participation served as a route to renew affiliations with potential new audiences.

Forced to construct new kinds of expertise and relationships with outsiders, these advice texts authors justified their counsel on reading and viewing with grandiose visions of societal change. Community theater guidebooks formulated the growth of a national American theatrical tradition developed solely through small community theatrical endeavors.

Edgar Dale argued that adolescents, not the Catholic Legion of Decency or the federal government (who routinely threatened Hollywood with censorship in the early 1930s) would have a better chance of affecting the types of films Hollywood produced. Pound argued for a polyglot education as the general standard for a university education. Adler and Richards argued for nothing less than the survival of a Western liberal tradition and global peace in the wake of Nazism through the reading techniques their advice texts espoused.

Such plans which were to be enacted solely by amateurs overlooked the complexities of a society adapting to a corporate capitalism that

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promoted a division of labor and cultural participation dependent upon bureaucracy and specialization. Yet, the actual consequences of these advice texts point to the complexities of professional boundary-crossing and to the more realizable affiliations with amateur publics. Pageantry and little theater did not displace professional theater. Pageantry, in particular, by the Depression, had become limited to displays of civic pride on national holidays in the form of parades, rather than the grand spectacle of a town’s history across a hundred years. But the concept of training performers outside of professional theater repertory companies (the standard form of actor training throughout the nineteenth century) became the driving concept in the first drama department in the United States at Carnegie Mellon University, then Carnegie Institute, in 1912. Designed by pageant director Thomas Wood Stevens, the drama program adapted little theater ideals to the university, positioning that the little theater ideal of a critical audience could best be achieved with students within the school whose association with the department, as both performers or audience members, would help create a new generation of theater patrons.

While the guidelines of community theater advice texts found their ways into early university drama classrooms, books such as Pound’s advice text did not become a widely adopted pedagogical aid for students in literature classes. However, Pound’s pedagogical style, particularly his use of excerpts and sample of poetry that students would use to test their reading of stylistic traditions, would be replicated to greater effect with Brooks and Warren’s seminal Understanding Poetry two years later.

Ironically, however, Pound’s categories of great literature were used by his primary biographer and critical apologist, Hugh Kenner, to canonize Pound and to historicize the modernist poetic movement according to Pound’s aesthetic principles which were laid out in ABC of Reading.

Adler and Richards’s grand plans for great books and great words also became downsized into more realizable cultural projects. Adler became a popular speaker at women’s clubs on what to read, and he eventually left University of Chicago to help in the design of the Aspen Institute, a vacation resort in which corporate executives would attend educational seminars on great books. Richards’ Basic English program did not become the global language he had hoped; instead he employed Basic English in the teaching of first and second generation immigrants in New York, Chinese Nationalist submariners trained in the United States for military operations, and in mobile English labs that taught English to urban schoolchildren using animated films Richards helped create.

Many of these advice text authors despaired at the somewhat meager ends of their theories of reading and viewing. Richards, looking back over

his career in 1976, exaggerated both the acceptance of Basic English (“It sold like mad.”) and its decline (“Nobody’s been reading Basic English”

since it was trumpeted by Winston Churchill in 1943, even though Richards had just begun to utilize the language system widely at that time) (Epstein 17). Dale abandoned his efforts to affect motion picture production via film appreciation by the onset of World War II, shifting his attention to other forms of mass media, such as newspapers, with their capacity to represent societal debates. Community theater proponents noted the necessity of the university in harboring an experimental theater.

But by the 1930s, the inter-relationships of university theaters with the theater outside the university was increasingly difficult to theorize. In A Study of Drama (1934), Shakespearean avant-garde theater director Harley Granville Barker maintained that while drama classrooms should encourage their students to perform part of plays in class, “We should always be left well aware,” he warned, “that this study of the play, however lively and thorough, is in its nature an incomplete thing.

Completion comes with performance. And that is a theater’s business”

(Study 29). For Barker, and for other advice text authors, the immense responsibility they placed on training amateurs failed to produce the radical social changes for which they had hoped.

Yet, despite advice text authors’ personal reactions to the limited realization of their advice, their efforts to mobilize the public in democratic ventures, as Said describes the role of intellectuals, resulted in focused projects rather than the grandiose effects the advice text authors imagined. These ventures do not, perhaps, fit utopian professional narratives in which institutional boundaries are quickly erased or overcome. As Robbins maintains, professional critiques do not occur outside institutions because “the state and the profession exist in an organic and dynamic relationship to political constituency” (220). A culture of advice, and the intellectual who dispenses advice, depends, at some level, on a notion of expertise supported by the tenets of professionalism. While these advice text authors wished to critique the potential narrowness of their disciplines and professions, they could not imagine doing so if it meant that they destroyed the very structures that gave them the license to make their critiques in the first place. The invocation of the idealized amateur became a strategy to pry open the limits of that expertise, not make that expertise limitless, and hence, make all amateurs experts (or all experts amateurs). By invoking the ideal, if not the actualized amateurs, these advice texts point to a more difficult task than simply envisioning a level cultural playing field; rather they attempt to forge the pathways by which outsiders could become insiders and

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insiders outsiders. For the public, the figure of the amateur was the route inside institutions such as the university; but for the intellectual, acting as a guide, the mentor, the advisor to the amateur that became the route across professional boundaries. Their advice, or rather their cultural pedagogy, then, helped create the acts of engagement with a general populace to practice, model, and potentially adapt the theories of reading and viewing that intellectuals such as Richards, Adler, and Pound promoted. Consequently, the efforts of advice text authors to mobilize a public suggests that such a democratizing project means recognizing the numerous publics that intellectuals should engage, both outside the university, such as marginalized political groups, or those within the margins of the university, such as students. If for many advice texts authors, the amateur increasingly became synonymous with the student in the classroom, then one legacy of these guidebooks for intellectuals is that the classroom can become a site not only where the intellectual imagines the amateur, but where the two come face to face.

Works Cited

Adler, Mortimer. How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940.

Barker, Harley-Granville. The Study of Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934.

Dale, Edgar. How to Appreciate Motion Pictures. New York: Macmillan, 1933.

—. “Seeking New Educational Objectives through the Use of Films.”

Education. April (1938): 2.

Davol, Robert. Handbook of American Pageantry. Massachusetts: Davol, 1907.

Dean, Alexander. Little Theatre Organization and Management for Community, University and School. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1926.

Epstein, Bob. “I.A. Richards Speaks at University.” University of Minnesota Daily. 8 Nov. 1976: 17.

Perry, Bliss. The Amateur Spirit. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904.

Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1934.

Richards, I. A. How to Read a Page: A Course in Efficient Reading with an Introduction to a Hundred Great Words. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1942.

Robbins, Bruce. Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture.

London: Verso, 1993.

Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Sklar, Martin J. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Stein, Gertrude. How to Write. Paris: Plain Edition, 1931.