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English
347
Colonization:
Puritanism & economics
(the
individual vs. the state).
- Population boom & dissenters. The “plantation.” -
Extreme Puritanism: that “all groupings, all associations, no matter how
‘separate’ & pure could only corrupt the spirit in search of
salvation.” Puritan qualities: diligence, accountability, self-denial,
“the scrupulous use of every god-given moment of time” – all were
also qualities of nascent Capitalism.
Leads to cynicism towards all governments and
anti-authoritarianism. A demand for a direct experience of religion free
of institutional interference. The
perceived openness and vast emptiness of America. -
The projection of desires and fantasies onto the new continent – “New
England”/promised land syndrome. Enlightenment:
the perfectibility of human life. -
The Great Awakening (1730s & 40s). -
Abolishionism and temperance. First women’s rights convention, Seneca
Falls NY, July 1848. Free Soil Party. Slavery & the South (1850
Fugitive Slave Act). The
Monroe Doctrine (1824) & Manifest Destiny (1845). 19th
century sexuality. -
“’Spermatic economy’ became the rationale for martial abstinence.”
Sex
as an aberration.
-
The upper strata of European society was absent from the beginnings of the
colonies. -
Even before the Revolution, the sheer number of those who could vote
distinguished America from England. -
British use of colonial conscripts in fighting 18th century
wars against France and Spain. Taxation & enforced trade laws
favourable to the British. Restriction of manufacturing in America.
Intensified exercise of “Imperial power” and thus increased
dissatisfaction with and suspicion of “remotely wielded political
power” in the 1860s. Rise of print and print-based agitation against
British rule. Outpouring of political writing – the working up of
“liberty” into an ideology. “The Puritan’s ‘City on a Hill’
now assumed a new Republican character.”
-
The Revolution fostered the idea that America had the special destiny to
lead the world towards liberty. The first nation in the modern world to
found itself on intellectual principles. -
Decentralization: the independence of the various states; congressional
power vs. executive power. -
Rising Nationalism and individualism replacing classical Republicanism
after the War of 1812. The “self-made man” and (after 1828) the
Jacksonian era of patronage politics. -
Crisis of bourgeois society in mid-19th century: a class issue
in Europe, it was one of slavery and race in America. -
The business man replaces the farmer as the archetypal average American.
1850s: the rise of the railroad, the iron ship, the factory – the rise
of a modern market economy, even as economic inequality increased. The
American Renaissance as “the last struggle of the liberal spirit of the
18th century in conflict with the rising forces of
exploitation.” -
With the Revolution and the ideology of “liberty” the problem of
slavery was thrown into stark contrast as an “excruciating
contradiction.” “The extension of what Jefferson termed an empire for
liberty was also the extension of an empire for slavery.” -
The American novel as a “mixed mode” somewhere between realism and
romance. American romantics turned politics into art; American politics
was itself not dominated by “realism.” -
As colonists they knew themselves to be derivative imitators of European
traditions – marginality. -
The poetic task to write a national epic.
-
The division between high and low culture. -
With no international copyright restrictions, it was cheaper for American
publishers to pirate and reprint English books than to publish new
American authors. The difficulty of making a living by the pen. -
Dominance of women writers by the 1850s – Hawthorne’s “damned mob of
scribbling women.” Fiction not yet seen as “an elevated literary
form,” and authors were encouraged to write ‘factual fiction’ or
morally uplifting sentimental stories.
-
“He believed America was losing her soul to slavery, imperialism,
materialism, and greed, and his writings are a protest against
injustice.” -
America as “the Israel of our time.” -
Travel allowed Melville insight into cultural relativity and
“radicalized” him, bringing him to question “who the ‘savages’
were and who the ‘civilized’.” Sexuality on the Marquesas. Typee “created
a partially romanticized picture of native life as a foil to condemn the
puritanical religious and sexual politics of Victorian America.”
“Melville feared democracy would not survive the abuses of power
sanctified by militaristic colonialism.” -
“unfold[ing] within myself,” and crossing boundaries wherever he could
(between high & low art forms, genres, gender characteristics, etc.).
Going “deeper and deeper into himself.” “’We are full of ghosts
and spirits; we are as graveyards full of buried dead’” (Mardi). -
“the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.’” -
Writing as a safe form of sexual sublimation. -
Mardi’s
failure: his “reckless violations of narrative convention” and the
“instability” of his narrator seen as “lapses of narrative
control” – “destabilizing narrative authority was like dethroning
God.” -
Comments on slavery and racism in Redburn – Lavender with his
white prostitute – the Declaration of Independence seen fulfilled in
miscegenation. The attempt “to escape the straightjacket of Victorian
masculinity.” -
“’it is my earnest desire to write those sorts of books which are said
to ‘fail’” -
Melville “preferred to write organic, mixed-genre works that gave a
sense of the narrator’s mind probing, questioning, reflecting, shaping
and composing.” -
Importance of Hawthorne: “shoots his strong New England roots into the
hot soil of my Southern soul” (“Mosses”). -
“Melville saw the self as essentially unknowable and the universe as a
conundrum.”
1.
Narration -
Direct address to reader. -
Point of view: First or third person? -
Digression. 2.
Genre -
Drama. -
Essay. M.M.
Bakhtin, dialogism & heteroglossia Roland
Barthes, writing as “a tissue of quotations” 3.
Self-reflexivity -
Scholarship. -
Ishmael as author. -
Textuality. -
The empty sign. Jacques
Derrida, Signifier & signified. -
Body/text.
1.
Gender/sexuality -
Homoeroticism? -
Male isolation & spermatic economy. -
Masculinity under fire: literature and religion. 2.
Race & the Other 3.
Political Allegory? -
America in 1848/1850. -
Moby
Dick,
begun when fears of disunion were strongest, opens with the inter-racial
bond between Ishmael & Queequeg. -
The Pequod: a multiracial proletariat, but also economics
personified as greed, obsession, violence, rapacity – an attack on
otherness. -
Commodification. -
“American freedom was originally founded on the subjugation of
peoples of color” … Ahab “reveals the rebellion and the desire for
domination entangled in the wish to be free.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
- Born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister. He also becomes a Unitarian minister, only to resign in 1832.
- Travels to England meeting Coleridge, Wordworth, and Carlyle.
- Publishes “Nature” in 1836 – considered the key text of Transcendentalism. The Transcendental Club begins to meet.
- Editor of the Dial (1842-44). Work as a lecturer and essayist. - By 1850s he becomes an advocate of abolition.
- Perhaps the most influential American intellectual and literary figure of the 19th century.
- “Nature”:
- “Every man’s soul is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put” - There is a “relation between mind and matter”, between the soul and nature, but “the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind”, and is there “for the profit of man.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
- Born in Concord Massachusetts, where he lived and “traveled” most of his life.
- Attended Harvard (1833-37), and then taught school for a number of years.
- A jack of all trades, he supported himself with a variety of temporary odd jobs: “a schoolmaster, tutor, surveyor, gardener, farmer, painter (house painter, that is), carpenter, mason, day-laborer, pencil maker, and a writer.”
- Lives with Emerson 1841-43. Squats on Emerson’s land at Walden pond 1845-47.
- Arrested in 1846 for refusing to pay poll tax – experience leads to his writing Resistance to Civil Government (1849).
- Publishes his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849).
- Lives with his parents from 1848 on.
- Walden (1854).
- Thoreau’s lasting influence as the grandfather of environmentalism and civil disobedience.
- His “calculated refusal to live by the materialistic values” of his day. - “I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.”
- Emersonian “self-reliance.”
- “Waking” & “seeing” - Living attuned to nature: “I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself” – “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” - When the outer is pared down to its essentials, the inner life of the mind shows through.
- Born in Cambridgeport and educated by her father, she later gained admittance to the male-only halls of Harvard’s library. - Taught in Bronson Alcott’s experimental Temple School in Boston. - Meets Emerson in 1836; edits The Dial from 1840-42. - 1839-44: leads “conversation” classes – while Emerson wrote, Fuller talked. - 1843: “The Great Lawsuit.” - 1844: Summer on the Lakes. She moves to New York, becoming the literary critic for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. - 1845: Woman in the Nineteenth Century. - 1846: sails to Europe, eventually settling in Italy to cover the Italian revolution for the Tribune. - Love affair with Giovanni Ossoli. Begins work on a history of the Roman Republic. - Drowns, with Ossoli and their child, after shipwreck off Fire Island, New York. - “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.” - “torn between terms that her society considered mutually exclusive: female and intellectual.” - “Margaret” rather than “Miss Fuller.” - Her rejection of “feminine fantasy” for “masculine reality” – fiction for history and journalism. - “She was one of the first to argue that sexual stereotyping restricted personal freedom” - Her use of transcendentalism to “diagnose and prescribe a remedy for the condition of women.” - Her aims: to argue that women have the same need for and right to inner and outer freedom as men; and to propose an ideal of womanhood starkly at odds with that imposed by the conventions of the day. - What Fuller attacks: The “cult of true womanhood” used to obscure the subjection of women; the home’s economic function replaced by a gendered, “moral” function which taught that women were “by nature pious, pure, submissive, and domestic;” “only by insisting on essential differences in gender could men pursue supposedly universal values of economic freedom and individual development.”
Engl.
347 Write a short essay in response to ONE of the following quotations. Discuss the passage in question in terms of what it tells us about the themes at play in the given work (either Moby Dick or Walden). In addition to your own thoughts you may apply whatever ideas or theories that we have discussed in lecture and seminar, but do not spend all your time proving that you have been listening: read the paragraph carefully and respond to it thoughtfully. 1. “I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those very same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” 2. “Hark ye yet again,–the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still unreasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” 3. “Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake….I went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Engl.
347
3.
As opposed to the relative optimism of many of the
Transcendentalists, both Melville and Dickinson delve into the darker half
of the universe and the divine. Nevertheless, Melville and Dickinson do
not completely concur. Compare and contrast their respective
‘pessimisms’ (if this is the right term for their outlook) and
versions of the divine. 4.
The ideas of the Transcendentalists obviously foreground the
relation between the individual and society, if for no other reason than
their apparent focus on the former.
Frederick
Douglas
Abolitionism: -
The
flood of fugitive slaves and the popularity of their narratives. -
Journals
and the value of the narratives as propaganda. -
Garrison
and The Liberator – choice of the North over the South. -
Slaves
as lecturers. -
Use
of Southern advertising. -
Increasing
brutality of slavery/change in the narratives. Romanticism -
“the
second wave of the romantic movement in the social realm” -
“the
romanticist’s emphasis on the worth of the common man” -
Abolitionists
as “a group of earnest, sunny people, wholly convinced of the dynamic
perfectibility of man, effusive with sentimentalism, and happily
indifferent to the economic and political currents affecting the masses of
middle-class society” Douglass’
“ransom” -
“His
complete identification with the ‘Noble Savage’ formula endeared him
to the considerable number of romanticists in almost any audience of the
day” -
His
former master’s determination to re-capture him – flight to England. -
The
purchase of his freedom and the storm that follows. -
“The
focus of his many speeches, by and large, was the wrong done to the slave
and the slaveholder by the institution of slavery” while for Garrison
and others the issue “began and ended with the vision of slavery as a
sin and of slaveholders as sinners”
-
Uncle Tom serialized in The National Era – a magazine, when compared
with Garrison’s Liberator, characterized by a more moderate and
persuasive approach. -
Reaction
to the Fugitive Slave Act. -
The
novel is the runaway bestseller of the 19th century; quickly
reaches n even wider audience in its many theatrical adaptations. -
Often
characterized as the match that lit the Civil War’s fuse, not all
abolitionists were happy with Stowe, her advocacy of colonization in
particular drawing negative reactions. -
While
progressive on the issue of abolition, Stowe can be seen as conservative
on the issue of race. While she did not necessarily depict blacks as
inferior, she did participate in the romantic practice of feminizing the
racial other as childlike, affectionate, sentimental, docile, amiable, and
spiritual (“natural Christians”). -
Garrison
for one critiqued her advocacy of nonresistance – the
‘turn-the-other-cheek’ mentality of Uncle Tom. -
Stowe’s
main argument is that slavery above all undermines the domestic sphere
upon which American democracy is founded. -
“’The
formation of the moral and intellectual character of the young is
committed to the female hand. The mother writes the character of the
future man’” (Catherine Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy).
-
The
“cult of true womanhood” – private vs public, home vs market, spirit
vs body, heart vs head. -
But
– a feminist spin? – the domestic ideology emphasized the importance
of woman’s own sphere and made them answerable, ultimately, to God
alone. “’The family state is then the aptest earthly illustration of
the Heavenly Kingdom, and in it woman is the chief minister’” (Beecher
& Stowe). -
But
– that domestic, feminized sphere was imbedded in, and dependent upon,
the outer economic system of male dominated capitalism: domestic bliss
escapes the slaves for economic reasons.
Context
& Reception of 1855 Leaves of Grass -
Political
turmoil in the 1850s – at the time Whitman proclaims that “Of all
nations the United States … most needs poets” the very phrase
“United States” was something of an oxymoron. -
“His
growing disappointment with authority figures … sparked his deep faith
in common people and in the power of populist poetry” and led to his
attempt to solve “the central paradox of American life – the relation
between the individual and the mass” (David Reynolds, Walt
Whitman’s America). -
Re
slavery: Whitman, in his journalistic days, opposed both pro-slavery and
abolitionist extremists – above all, the Union had to be preserved. -
Emerson:
“America is a poem in our eyes” – Whitman: “The United States
themselves are essentially the greatest poem” -
Emerson:
“A remarkable mixture of the Bhagvat Ghita and the New York
Herald” – Whitman: the American poet “shall be kosmos” and
“the age transfigured.” -
Emerson’s
review (“the Gettysburg address of American literary commentary”). -
Whitman’s
reviews. -
Marketing
“Leaves”: Mary A Spooner’s Gathered Leaves (1848), Meta V
Fuller’s Leaves from Nature (1852), and Fanny Fern’s Fern
Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio (1853). -
“Everything
about the book manifested Whitman’s interest in dissolving boundaries
between different cultural levels” – the parlor outside / the street
inside. -
Also,
the boundaries between poetry & prose, polite diction & slang,
self & other.
1.
The
“I”, the Word, and the Other. 2.
The
Erotics of the Body. 3.
Form:
listing and parataxis.
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