J. Saunders Redding lecture, "19th Century Afro-American Literature and Culture," at the University of Iowa, February 26, 1970

Speaker 1: This is KSUI FM. We're broadcasting from Shambaugh Auditorium. Currently, we're awaiting the lecture of Dr. Saunders Redding. Speaker 1: At this time, we'd like to mention some of the future speakers who will be appearing for the special lecture series, sponsored by the Department of English and the Committee on Afro-American Studies. Philip Butcher, Professor of English at Morgan State College, will be speaking on Some Neglected Black People in American Literature. Professor Butcher is the author of two books and an essay called Mark Twain Sells Roxy Down the River. He will speak the week of March 2nd. March 16th through March 20th, the speaker will be Donald Gibson, Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, speaking on Afro-American Writing from 1890 to 1920. Gibson has taught in Poland, and is the author of The Fiction of Stephen Crane and Twain's Jim in the Classroom. Speaker 1: March 23rd through the 27th, Charles H. Nichols, Jr. will speak on the Slave Narrative and Some Sources of the Black Picaresque in Biography and Fiction. Nichols is the Director of the Afro-American Studies Program at Brown University. He has taught in Germany, and is the author of a book on slaves, Account of their Bondage and Freedom. April 6th through April the 10th, the speaker will be Charles T. Davis, Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. He will be speaking on the Harlem Renaissance. He is the author of books on Walt Whitman and Edwin Arlington Robinson. April 13th through April the 17th, Clinton Oliver will speak on Plays by Black Dramatists. Oliver is Associate Professor of English at Queens College and former visiting professor at the University of Iowa. He has edited an anthology of short stories by Black writers as well as an edition of Henry James' novel, The Princess Casamassima. Speaker 1: Charles H. Nilon, Professor of English at the University of Colorado, will speak the week of April 20th through the 24th on Contemporary Black Fiction. Nilon is the author of Faulkner and the Negro. On May 4th through May 8th, Don L. Lee, writer and residence at Northeastern State College will speak on Contemporary Black Verse. Lee is a prominent, young Afro-American poet. Speaker 1: J. Saunders Redding, the speaker for this week, is the Professor of American civilization at George Washington University. Redding was born in 1906. He has a Phb, MA, and D, Literary Degree from Brown University. And held Guggenheims in 1945, 1946, and 1959, and 1960. He has taught at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, Southern and Hampton Institutes. From 1966 to 1969, he was director of the Division of Research and Publication for the National Endowment for the Humanities. His publications include On Being Negro in America, 1950, Stronger and Alone, published in 1951, The Lonesome Road, also published in 1951, Soon, One Morning, published in 1963, The Negro, published in 1967, To Make a Poet Black, published in 1939, No Day of Triumph, published in 1942, and They Came in Chains, Americans from Africa, published in 1950. Speaker 1: March 2nd through March the 6th, Some Neglected Black People in American Literature, the guest lecturer that week, as I mentioned earlier, will be Philip Butcher, Professor of English at Morgan State College. Professor Butcher has his A.B. and M.A. from Howard University and a 1956 Columbia PhD in English. His publications include George W. Cable: The Northampton Years, 1959, George W. Cable, 1967, and Mark Twain Sells Roxy Down the River, also published by Mr. Butcher. Speaker 1: The broadcasting service of The University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the University, presents a series of lectures by a Black specialist as material for the University's course, Afro-American Literature. The lecture for this week is Saunders Redding, Professor of American Civilization at George Washington University, giving a general survey of 19th Century Afro-American Literature and Culture. Redding is the author of On Being Negro in America and They Came in Chains, Americans from Africa. J. Saunders Red...: Well, this is absolutely the last of the formal lectures. Tomorrow, I hope, maybe, or a part of this afternoon... I hope we can have some dialogue going, some real dialogue. I shall feel an absolute failure if I have not been sufficiently provocative to encourage an interchange. My attempt has been to state, in rather general terms, the historical and social background out of which Black writing has emerged up to the present day. Today, I'm going to make an effort to project where it's going, or at least where I think it may go. I won't say where I think it ought to go. J. Saunders Red...: Recently, there has been a steady undercurrent of concern about the Black American writer, his roots or his lack of them, his subject matter and his themes, his public and his publisher, and in general, his situation, which weakened by all sorts of compromises has never been good, and is now thought to be deteriorating, not only rapidly but inevitably. The notion seems to be that as the climate grow more salubrious for the Black man's participation in the whole complex of American life, the thinner grows the atmosphere in which the Black writer can work in honesty and truth. One basis for the concern seems to be, that once the American dream is realized, the Black writer will no longer have a special vision of the world and no peculiar affinity to it, and therefore, no particular revelation to make about the relations of man to man. In short, when the millennium comes, the American Black writer will be an Othello, with his occupation gone. J. Saunders Red...: For all that this is recognized and admitted to be a narrow view. It is been expressed widely by critics and commentators as various as Arthur P. Davis, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, and Malcolm Cowley, and even by some Black writers themselves, John A. Williams, the author of Night Song and Sissy, complains about, quote "labeling and grouping" unquote, negro writers and confining them to a quote, "literary ghetto," unquote. LeRoi Jones complains that writing for Negroes has been a social preoccupation, exactly as if it has always not been a social preoccupation for writers of every race. J. Saunders Red...: And Julian Mayfield seems to think that once equality and freedom are achieved, and the Black man becomes, quote, "just another American embracing," Mayfield goes on, "White American literary values, the Negro will have no way of defining himself." "He will have nothing to say," Mayfield seems to think, "for his sanctions will derive from an audience, whose imagination is fed by his own sense of the reality." And Mayfield suggests that to fall silent is better than to accept the quote, "shoddy literary values", unquote, of white American writers. Quote, "A stultifying respectability hangs over the land," Mayfield [avers] "and it is a sign of decline. The literary mainstream of America is running dangerously shallow," end of quotation. I might add that John Oliver Killens, using much more vitriolic language and using it in a different context, says much the same thing about the shallowness of the main stream. J. Saunders Red...: Now it must not be thought that Mayfield's view is an extreme one, for it is not. Nearly everyone who has expressed himself on this matter, of the Black writer's situation, has taken a position very close to Mayfield's. No doubt thinking of Baldwin's, Giovanni's Room, and Motley's, We Fished All Night, and Frank Yerby's very profitable, Apostasy, and thinking too, perhaps, of the silence of Sterling Brown, and [Dan Petrie], and Owen Dodson. Arthur Davis declares that quote, "the leaven of integration is very much at work, and it has forced the Negro creative artist to play down his most cherished tradition. And it has help to silence a few of the older writers, now living," end of quotation. At first glance, this seems a rather curious conclusion or state of mind for Davis, Mayfield, and others to come too. J. Saunders Red...: But a second glance reveals that it is less curious than it appears. It is, I think, emotionally sound. I think it is the instinctive and even the only logical answer to those who have denied that the Black man really want equality, freedom, integration. It is the final defense against those who have epitomized their view of the Negro, in the well-known stereotype of a lazy, shiftless, lecherous clown, atavistically yearning for the jungles and the thatch huts of Africa. Without quite realizing it, Mayfield, Davis, and the rest who think that the Black writer will fall silent when the American dream comes true, are answering those who entertain the delusion that Black folk merely wish to be and that they just exfoliate naturally and simply, like plant life. J. Saunders Red...: A second glance reveals that there is another aspect to this matter. In so far as Black writers themselves hold the view that they will inevitably fall silent when the millennium comes, they make a denial of something that is fundamental to all art. And that is its universality. It's seeking after a new kind of wholeness and integrity. Good art transcends geography, transcends nationality, transcends race. The ultimate purpose of all truly created endeavor is to satisfy man's hunger for a sense of community with others. The end of all art is the revelation of the human condition through the discovered knowledge of self. And surely, this knowledge must be achieved before it could be seen that a particular identity has a relation to a common identity, commonly described as human. J. Saunders Red...: This is the ultimate that the honest artist seeks. He knows that the dilemmas, the perils, and the likelihood of catastrophe in the human situation are real. And that they have to do, not only with the quality of mankind, but with whether men understand each other. The artist, and it seems to me, particularly the writers, ultimate purpose then, is to use his gifts. And, as John Oliver Killens puts it, To tell as much of the truth as he knows the painful truth to be, in order to develop man's awareness of himself, so that he, the individual man, can become a better instrument for living with other men. This hunger for identification and the need to satisfy it, is the impulse behind all truly creative effort. J. Saunders Red...: And there is still another aspect of this thing that we have been discussing, the probable impending silence of Black writers. And I hope I can make it clear. For it seems to me to have a crucial bearing on the discovery and the knowledge of self, which I have suggested in the first step in the achievement of that human relationships, that is the aim of artistic endeavor. The prediction of the silence that will settle upon the Black writer, when the present social revolution is crowned with success, if ever, implies that the Black writers has no organic vision of the universe, and no concept of a pattern underlying all human behavior. And perhaps, the implication has a certain surface validity. J. Saunders Red...: But briefly stated, there are several major tendencies in Negro literature. There is the early folk tradition based mainly upon southern, rural material, which has been richly exploited by several generations of Black writers. There is the important tradition of racial protest, first during the anti-slavery struggle, including the slave narratives, many of which have genuine literary value. And social protests in modern times. There are the novels of cast that began with J. McHenry Jones, Hearts of Gold, back in 1896 to the novels of Walter White, in the 1920s, and then the Harlem... and the so-called Negro... the Harlem school and the so-called Negro Renaissance, whose gifted writers derided the pretensions and genteel style of the older group. J. Saunders Red...: Later, there were those involved with the naturalist tradition and the proletarian literary school. Now, there a new forces and talents at work in the Black literary world. Some, like the gifted William Denby are influenced by existentialism, by an awareness of modern man's estrangement from a world which is somewhat absurd. Denby's second and most recent work, The Catacombs, is a most unusual book, using the techniques of the cinema, the fast imposition of image over image, Denby has attempted to break through the conventional form of the novel to something else. It is a large risk taken only by Black writers. In The Catacombs, Denby gives further proof of the rich literary imagination indicated in his first novel, Beetle Creek, published in 1950. J. Saunders Red...: The theme and the material of Beetle Creek is the subject matter of great literature. And in the hands of a more developed writer, Beetle Creek could be expanded to realize the full potential of its theme. The material in the work of a mature writer, reverberates back through experience, so that what is evoked in the reader is more than the dimensions of what is written. What one could call, I suppose, the novel's fourth dimension. The commentary that is always larger than that which is described. William Denby, in this book, is possessed with a powerful idea. He edges up to it, invites it, and then, leaning away, falters and writes around it. In Beetle Creek, he just misses, making the leap into that place where great writing lies. Although, Beetle Creek was virtually ignored by most critics, it is powerful and significant contribution to contemporary American letters. And is now, again, available in paperback... selling his book for him. J. Saunders Red...: Among other influences upon the work of the contemporary Black writer, is the concept of negritude as found in the writings of Leopold Senghor and the other French speaking poets of negritude, who have provided the Black American writer, a body of myth that Sartre describes as anti-racist racism. Senghor writes of negritude as quote, "the sense of communion, the gift of mythmaking, the ensemble of cultural values of the Black world." American Blacks including artists and writers, have been imprisoned in the culture and in the social assumptions of the western world. And for centuries, the western world has held them in derision, if not always in absolute contempt. Their first concern, both as individuals and as members of a race, has been with liberating themselves from this prison. And putting aside the history of their social revolution over the last 10 years, there longest sustained effort along this line, has been to repossess a cultural heritage worthy and to create out of the context of that heritage an identity that could be embraced with dignity. J. Saunders Red...: Excuse me. J. Saunders Red...: This is the most apparent meaning of the Back to Africa movement that has been regenerated periodically, since the days of Gustavus Vassa. "In Africa, 'one poet says, though Black, "we were kings." Now, this preoccupation with repossessing a heritage and acquiring an esteemed identity has resulted in a certain distortion of values and of reality, all along the line, But among Black writers, this distortion has led lately to two quite contradictory results. On the one hand, confusing identity with identification, Black writers have shown a tendency to ascribe to their Negro characters, the same social and emotional reference that a certain school of white American writers ascribe to their characters. They make heroes of heels, such as we have seen in Chester Himes, If He Hollers, Let Him Go, in John Williams', Night Song, in James Baldwin's, Another Country, and more recently, in a novel symbolically titled Bird at My Window. J. Saunders Red...: On the other hand, Black writers have tended to assume that there is a cohesive moral and a source of psychic energy in exalting power in the concept called negritude. The first of these results needs no particular examination. It is, as I have said, first, a confusion of identity and identification, and secondly, it is imitative. But rooted in a different reasoning and a more valid complex of reference. Such writers, white writers as [O'Hara] and [Donleavy], also make heroes of heels and twerps. But we cannot escape an examination of the second result, the Black American writer's recent orientation to negritude. The term itself is not easy to define. It is an oversimplification to say that it is an aesthetic mystique, compounded from a recognition of characteristics and traits that may be considered more distinctly Black than white or more African than European. J. Saunders Red...: In one sense, and perhaps in only one sense, negritude represents the Black creator's effort to recover for himself and his race, the self-pride and confidence that has been lost for centuries. To rediscover a world in which he can again have a sense of unashamed identity and a significant role. Negritude is less subject than object, less matter than spirit. It is something that the artist possesses in the deepest recesses of his being, and he wishes to make it manifest to others. On the social level, it is what [Sartre] called it, anti-racist racism, a reaction to the notion of white supremacy. J. Saunders Red...: Finally, and to repeat for the sake of emphasis, negritude is a quest for a cultural endowment, a patrimony, and who has greater need of this than the American Black. He has undergone a physical and spiritual alienation without parallel in modern history. He has been subjected to the daily impress of a dominant cultural elite, which has been so uncertain of its own identity that it has sought to assure its own socio-cultural status by denying such status to others. When we consider the place, the Black man has occupied in America's cultural design, and when we consider further, the poverty of America's contemporary contribution to the world's culture, then it does appear that American Blacks should take Mayfield's warning to heart, and curb any eagerness to jump into the cultural mainstream. The mainstream is a barrier to those origins to which the Black writer must return, if he is to recover a fullness of self. Who wished to be immersed in a mainstream that, at least for the moment, resembles a sewer? And who with the slightest love of language and the slightest concern for the experiential wholeness of life, the life of the mind, the life of the emotions, the life of the senses, can put up with or see much hope for the future in the rather infantile babblings of Mr. Kerouac, and the hallucinatory howls of Mr. Ginsberg, and the silly, snickering, chaotic aberrations of [Gowan] and [Govac]? J. Saunders Red...: There are great and challenging issues abroad, but too many American writers in the mainstream have turned their backs on them in order to deal with the growlings in their own despective guts, the tripe foibles of tarts in bikinis, of beat-up women, hysterical with frustration, and of ground-down homosexuals slobbering their ecstasies in dark alleys. Of course, we would be expecting too much of American Black writers to ask them to avoid these subject entirely, since they are a part of the American reality. But we would be demanding too little if we permitted them to restrict their concept of reality to the depth in life agonies of a world that exists only on the fiction list of the Grove Press, and in the pages of the Evergreen Review. For it both wrong and, I think, foolish to suppose that everything in America is either dead or dying. J. Saunders Red...: Parenthetically, one may point to the egalitarian ideal and the growing success in achieving opportunities for a more abundant life at the broad base of society. Then one may suggest two, that the American experience of the interaction of minorities is an actuality that Europe has not lived with, and from which it can extract some truths that Europe yet, may need. The writer cannot exclude any aspect or element of his living culture. And among the elements of the Negroes living culture, is this scarcely definable thing called negritude, in the light of which, it becomes silly to say that the Negro's roots are American only and that they begin their growth only in Virginia in 1619. It is impossible to know beforehand to what extent the African heritage can be utilized by the American Black writer. Experience rather than prediction will provide the answer. But I, for one, do not feel that the Black writer's identity as an American precludes him from a substantial participation in his rich African heritage. And I do not feel that his identity as a Black man, an American Black, will result in his silence when the American millennial comes. J. Saunders Red...: We're told that in the sea isles off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, there is an expression now used in another context, that has survived since the earliest days of slavery. The expression is "gone to Guinea." When the old Negro slave was weary from labor in the fields or overcome by the troubles of the spirit, he would say that he would soon be gone to Guinea, which remained faintly, nostalgically, sentimentally in the debris of the memory of his shattered past. As a part of the continuing effort of the American Black writer to achieve his full stature, not only in his American society, but as a contributor to a culture of the world, I think it might not be entirely fruitless for him to go back to Guinea, and to consider both the content and the spirit of the African past. The fact that the social, economic, and political organization of the American Negro is inextricably fused with and determined by American polity is, of course, evident. All things considered, it could not and, perhaps, should not be otherwise. J. Saunders Red...: Undoubtedly, in the long run, the American Black will be primarily concerned with the American scene, with American life. Yet Africa may well serve as a leaven, enriching the cultural loaf. "What is Africa to me:" "One three centuries removed From the scenes his father loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me? one poet asks. There is that aspect of this matter that as we have point out, has not to do with African content, but which is simply an affirmation of self. It would appear that the American Black has an imposing interest in, one, the development of a new concept of the world. Two, in corrected the distorted image of himself in the American society. And three, in the exploration and the fullest possible expression of his particular talents. The problem is largely a matter of emphasis. To access the degree of emphasis and the particular emphasis it is appropriate to the American Blacks cultural situation. And a present, that emphasis would seem to be upon his unique, creative personality. What is Africa to him? Perhaps a humanism of vital force that can validate a new concept of the world, help him correct his distorted American image, and sustain him until his true identity replaces the myth, the stereotype. J. Saunders Red...: John W. Vandercook said this a long time ago, quote, "A race is like a man, until it uses its own talents, takes pride in his own history, and loves its own memories, it can never fulfill itself completely. American Negro writers are beginning to take this saying to heart. J. Saunders Red...: Well, that's all. Are there any questions or comments? J. Saunders Red...: Yes. Speaker 3: You talk about the people that are heroes but heels, but at the end of the book, [inaudible]. Now, who's the heel [inaudible]? J. Saunders Red...: They're pretty nearly all heels, aren't they? Oh, she asked, who's the heel in James Baldwin's Another Country. And I answered her question with another. They're pretty nearly all heels, aren't they? Speaker 3: [inaudible] J. Saunders Red...: All right, let's take Rufus, let's take Rufus, let's take Rufus, who sets out as the protagonist, begins as the protagonist. The character that James Baldwin structures for him, well, is the character of a heel. Maybe we'd better find a better term for heel, a completely self-centered... a character who is completely organized around... or disorganized around self, and a character who because of this organization around himself... this failure as it were, which is a personality failure, is completely ineffective as a human being. One that document that by pointing out that when Rufus finally commits suicide, there is absolutely no motivation. And one, I suppose the ordinary reader, if he's I as an ordinary reader, felt no sympathy for him whatsoever. There are many people who will not agree with that conclusion, but that's mine. J. Saunders Red...: Yes? Speaker 4: Yeah, you say that Rufus is heel, Cleaver says that Baldwin [inaudible] the race. And when I read Another Country, I had got the idea that what Baldwin's trying to do with this book is, books like Go Tell It on the Mountain, trying to give you some idea of what makes the Black man tick. You want to do something that's Black. And if this is true, I don't quite see how you do it, refer to it as heels. J. Saunders Red...: Well, Go tell It on the Mountain, I think, you do that novel, that autobiography... that autobiographical novel, to be as kind as possible, to a artifact that needs no kindness actually. I think you do it a disservice when you try to make a comparison between it and Another Country. Speaker 4: What about [inaudible]? J. Saunders Red...: Eldridge Cleaver, of course... Eldridge Cleaver's opinion certainly has a right to be heard. And there are a lot of people who agree with him, that James Baldwin does hate the race, that he has never gotten over that kind of [inaudible], which I mentioned way back in an earlier lecture, which leads to such tragic ambivalence in so many Black Americans. And one supposes that this hatred of the race, if it is that strong, if hatred is the proper term... I suppose one finds that hatred expressed in the characters he has constructed for Another Country. J. Saunders Red...: Yes? Speaker 4: Does Baldwin, then, give an adequate picture of what the motivations of the Black man are? J. Saunders Red...: He establishes, certainly, an adequate rationale in his essays. And I think that Go Tell It on the Mountain is a very true delineation. In his novels, in other novels, no. J. Saunders Red...: Yes? Speaker 5: [inaudible] use the very positive and [inaudible] William Denby of course, remove the quote, "the existential theme and concept." It seems to me that [inaudible] existential characters [inaudible] everything, but it depends on [inaudible] existential characters portrayed by Black writers also [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Well, he does not carry it that far. He was influenced by existentialism, just as Richard Wright was. But he does not structure his characters to conform to, as it were, the ultimate philosophy. No, I cited William Denby not only because he is a good novelist and is so little known here. I cited him also because he is representative of the experimentation that Black writers are indulging in now, like LeRoi Jones. As a matter of fact, he precedes LeRoi Jones, and LeRoi Jones is as a craftsman, as a man of letters, probably the most questing or among the most questing of present day writers of current writers, Black or white in America. You certainly can't call a System of Dante's Hell, a novel in the sense the term is usually defined, but it is a novel. Experimental and very, I think, successful as a literary work. J. Saunders Red...: Yes? Speaker 6: [inaudible] I have a question for [inaudible] author for [inaudible] is a protagonist or heel, but while [inaudible] a kind of an existentialism, I think [inaudible] attitude. J. Saunders Red...: Well, my criticism really was not directed at those authors who make heroes of heels. It was directed at the fact that in making heroes of heels, Blacks use the same emotional and psychological reference that white writers use. And I think that this is basically false. I think it is certainly an effort to escape from their roots rather than to rediscover their roots. J. Saunders Red...: Yes? Speaker 7: You [inaudible] said the millennium [inaudible] Black writers, do you actually believe that that time will ever really come about? J. Saunders Red...: Not in your lifetime. Not in your lifetime. The stated ideals that represent the millennium will never, of course, be realized here or any place else. On the other hand, I want to make perfectly clear that if there is a heaven, it's got to be here on earth, but I don't think there is a heaven. Speaker 7: [inaudible] J. Saunders Red...: They are not... well now, I don't know, why they're... But we're all concerned about what's going to happen to the future, in the future, in one way or another. This, I think, is what philosophy is all about. This, on another level, is what banks and savings funds and insurance companies are all about. And of course, the concern for the establishment of a better world is a legitimate concern for the author, and what I've tried to make clear... God, have I failed again? But what I've tried to make clear is that, from period to period in Black writing, there have been those writers who have gotten beyond the small, the relatively small, parochial world of the American experience, and have acquired or repossessed or claimed or something what is usually called universality. And that this is beginning to happen again, among the best of present day Black writers. And beginning to happen consciously, as it were. It has not always happened consciously, but it's beginning to happen now, rather consciously. J. Saunders Red...: And I think certainly that this was... well, one of the efforts, probably the principal effort... no, I better not say it like that. But certainly, one of the efforts that James Baldwin made in Giovanni's Room... but there again, going back to these psychological reference, these emotional reference, James Baldwin... Well, nevermind, nevermind. And that question didn't come up. Okay... in other... ? J. Saunders Red...: Yes? Speaker 8: [inaudible] that [inaudible], female Black writers and men writers, and so, [inaudible]? J. Saunders Red...: Well, Mrs. [Swenson] wants to know what excuse I can offer for not including Black women writers in this general overall thing, that I tried to do? From her point of view, I had no excuse for doing this. From my own point of view, my excuse is that when I talked about the Black man, I was talking about Black humankind, which included both men and women. If you wish, Mrs. Swenson, I can read a passage for you from one of my lectures that is devoted wholly to, or almost wholly to women writers. But this is specific. It is much more specific than I wanted to be because the lecturers who follow me will touch upon all of these matters. My job was to establish, insofar as I could, the historical, and the social, and the critical context in which the individual writers we examined by the lecturers who follow me. Speaker 9: [crosstalk] why female writers are [inaudible]. J. Saunders Red...: Of course, I do. Of course, I do. And I'm certain that Charles Davis and Charles [Nichols] and the rest will make this absolutely clear. J. Saunders Red...: All right, tomorrow, I shall talk much less formally. I shall do some reading from Black poets, and then, throw the thing open again. Thank you. Speaker 1: ...Redding, Professor of American Civilization at George Washington University with today's lecture. This series of programs is presented by the broadcasting service of the University of Iowa in cooperation with the Department of English and the Afro-American Studies Program at the University, as material for the course. Speaker 1: Today's presentation originated as a live broadcast as 1:30 PM, February 26, 1970, from Shambaugh Auditorium. This is the Broadcasting Service of the University of Iowa.