Looking backward, looking forward: Past and future lives of “the oven bird’s song

Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day, I paused and said, “I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther - and we shall see. Robert Frost, “The Wood Pile Looking back at an article written some years ago by a younger version of oneself, it becomes possible to see more clearly the influences that shaped both the text and the author. As we conduct our scholarly work, we tend to imagine that we are freely choosing the ideas we pursue and the methods we employ. We are the agents of our own destiny - or so we tell ourselves as we move forward in time. But, viewed retrospectively, there is ample evidence to support a much more contingent, even deterministic, view. The author as auteur seems less plausible. The text is also - perhaps more significantly - written by its intellectual environment, by contemporaneous minds and scholarly works, by the events of the day, and by the quirks and happenstance of life. That is how it now appears when I reflect on the origins and influences of “The Oven Bird’s Song more than thirty years later. In the late 1970s, I found myself driving through the streets of what I called “Sander County, a small, predominantly agricultural community in Illinois. I had begun to understand that Sander County was undergoing major social and economic changes, largely as the result of a new factory that had opened the county to global flows of people, capital, and economic influence. In the course of my fieldwork, I identified former litigants who had been involved in different types of civil cases. I knocked on their doors and tried to learn from them how they had traveled the path to litigation in the local court and what the results had been. Later, I also identified and interviewed dozens of “community observers -ministers, youth leaders, beauticians, farmers, teachers, funeral parlor operators, social workers, town council members, insurance adjusters, lawyers, judges, and many others.