Northeast Modern Language Association 51st Annual
Convention, 5-8 March 2020
Marriott Copley Place, Boston, Massachusetts
Friday, Mar 6 Track 8,
11:45-01:00
Location: FAIRFIELD (Media Equipped)
8.10 Afterlives of A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Sponsored by the Alliance for the Promotion of Research on
the Matter of Britain
Organized by Michael A. Torregrossa, Independent Scholar
Chair: Michael Torregrossa, Independent Scholar
American & Cultural Studies and Media Studies
"Sir Boss, His Successors, and His Surrogates:
Classifying Adaptations of Connecticut
Yankee" Michael Torregrossa, Independent Scholar
Writer Mark Twain and illustrator Daniel Carter
Beard’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) has
had a long history of adaptation in popular culture, but the full scope of its
reception remains untold. There are, of course, the obvious texts, both in
print and on film, that merely retell the story. Along with retellings, there
are also a small number of works that continue Connecticut Yankee.
These appear entirely unknown to Twainians but offer a unique approach to the
author’s legacy. More importantly, Connecticut Yankee itself
or its story as mediated through one of its many retellings has also stimulated
new narratives detached from Twain and Beard’s telling that recast characters
and restage events. Also relatively unknown by scholars of the novel, these
materials can be found throughout modern popular culture, and, although
Elizabeth S. Sklar somewhat derisibly labels these as “spinoffs and ripoffs” of
the novel, they are of value (as she suggests) and perhaps more so than the
retellings because such items serve as the base for an extensive corpus of
transformations of the novel that send various protagonists, all characters
more familiar to contemporary readers and viewers than Twain’s Hank Morgan,
into the medieval past and set a common pattern for time travel stories.
Serving as an introduction to the themes of this session, the goal of this
presentation will be to offer a broad view of adaptations of the Connecticut
Yankee story to situate both retellings and the lesser known and/or
hitherto unknown continuations and recastings into a new continuum to offer a
more complete picture of the novel’s effect on popular culture and provide
fresh insight into the various ways that the producers responsible for these
re-imaginings have appropriated the story and its time-travel motif for their
own purposes.
Michael A. Torregrossa is a graduate of the Medieval Studies
program at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) and works as an adjunct
instructor in English in both Rhode Island and Massachusetts. His research
interests include adaptation, Arthuriana, Beowulfiana, comics and comic art,
Frankensteiniana, medievalism, monsters, science fiction, and wizards. Michael
has presented papers on these topics at regional, national, and international
conferences, and his work has been published in Adapting the Arthurian Legends for Children: Essays on Arthurian
Juvenilia, Arthuriana, The Arthuriana / Camelot Project Bibliographies, Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays, Film & History, The 1999
Film & History CD-ROM Annual, The
Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, and the
three most recent supplements to The Arthurian
Encyclopedia. In addition, Michael is founder of The Alliance for the
Promotion of Research on the Matter of Britain, The Association for the
Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture
(successor to The Virtual Society for the Study of Popular Culture and the
Middle Ages), and The Northeast Alliance for Scholarship on the Fantastic; he
also serves as editor for these organizations’ various blogs and moderator of
their discussion lists. Besides these activities, Michael is also active in the
Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association and organizes sessions
for their annual conference in the fall. Michael is currently Monsters and the
Monstrous Area Chair for NEPCA, but he previously served as its Fantastic
(Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror) Area Chair, a position he held from
2009-2018.
" ‘Thou Swell’: The Power of Words (and Music) as a Connecticut Yankee goes Back to the Future" Tammy Rose,
Independent Scholar
Both the Broadway Connecticut
Yankee (1927) and the Back to the
Future series (i.e. BTTF, 1985-1989) contain similar time travel elements:
an outsider with certain knowledge (read: power) travels in time ostensibly
with the ability to bring the benefits of modern society to the impoverished
peoples of the past.
In both of these variations on Twain’s work, it is music
that delivers most cleverly on this meta-message. Including double edged
musical choices has the same strong sensory effect as a weighted suit of
armour.
‘Thou Swell’ is a Rodgers and Hart song featured in their
1927 Broadway version of A
Connecticut Yankee. A version of Ye Olde English mixes with modern slang-
one of few songs which include the word “lollapalooza”- a clever trick of
anachronism created by Hart. Rodgers uses the shorthand of ragtime and unusual
rhythm to ground the music in a particular era.
The song is a trick of time travel itself, appearing
Zelig-like every few years with new famous friends including Bing Crosby, June
Allyson and Boris Karloff.. It is even heard in All About Eve (1950) as the characters fasten their seat belts for a
bumpy night.
In BTTF, music is
also juxtaposed to reinforce the time periods. Marty McFly delivers
musical messages from the future; he can play like Jimi Hendrix and really show
the people what an electric guitar can do. In fact, BTTF III has an oblique reference to Clara Clemens. The meet-cute
of the characters Clara Clayton and Doc directly mirrors a runaway sleigh event
experienced by Clara and her soon-to-be-husband Ossip Gabrilowitsch.
Twain juxtaposes 2 specific times and places to tell his
story of time travel; subsequent variations of the plot echo his attention to
detail, especially in one of the most powerful modes a storyteller can use;
sound.
Tammy Rose is an award winning playwright, writer and
performer and has been creating theater for the past 20 years. Out of her 10
plays total, 5 have focused on giving voice to 19th Century Authors, primarily
the Transcendentalists and also Mark Twain. Her history plays are based on intense
research, and utilize source quotes from primary sources, to bring literature
into modern conversation. Her most recent play, Thoreau/Twain: Brothers on the River was performed for The Thoreau
Society Annual Gathering in Concord, Massachusetts, the Samuel Clemens
Conference in Hannibal, Missouri and several other venues. Ms. Rose is the 2020
Playwright in Residence for the Thoreau Farm and Birthplace. Her Antislavery Play will premiere there on
July 12th, Thoreau's birthday.
"A Secret Agent in King Arthur's Court: MacGyver Saves
the 7th Century from Nuclear Proliferation" Emily Race, Sewanee: The
University of the South
In 1991, the final season of MacGyver featured a two-episode special called “Good Knight
MacGyver” in which our eponymous hero is struck by a falling window box and
wakes up in King Arthur’s court. He must dodge treason plots, solve
assassination attempts, and finally confront the villanous Queen Morgana, who
has discovered gunpowder. Obvious nods to Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court include a lasso joust and
an unintended rivalry with Merlin. However, as a folksy hero who has been
fighting the Cold War villains for half a decade, MacGyver takes a different
tack than does Hank Morgan. Whereas Morgan amasses an amory and destroys not
only his enemies but his allies in an orgy of death at the end of the novel,
MacGyver protects seventh-century England from Morgana’s new terrifying
discovery of gunpowder.
Echoing fears of nuclear proliferation and the hopes of the
Threshold Test Ban Treaty and Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, this two-part
episode shows a benevolent, wiser head prevailing against the heady power of
mass destruction, an American hero saving a European country from its bordering
enemy and preventing the widespread destruction of firearm proliferation. This
paper will explore how the framework of a tentative end to the Cold War shifts
the Connecticut Yankee stand-in social commentary to 1990s foreign policy and
nuclear proliferation, ending with a hopeful victory as the enemy destroys
herself and her dangerous knowledge with the help of MacGyver’s sense of
justice and folksy American know-how.
Since receiving her BA in Secondary Language Arts Education
in 2007 from Anderson University, Emily Race has taught high school English
classes in Indiana. In efforts to keep her scholarly skills sharp, she has presented
papers as an independent scholar at conferences such as Catwoman to Katniss:
Villainesses and Heroines of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Midwest Popular
Culture Association / American Culture Association Conference. In 2016, Emily
started an MA program in American and British Literature at University of the
South (known colloquially as Sewanee). Having finished her courses over
subsequent summers, she is now preparing to write her thesis on a Reader
Response analysis of Mike Carey and Peter Gross’s The Unwritten, examining the agency of the reader and story logic
in a world where narrative has very real power, and characters have very
little.
