English 628-002
Seminar in Literature by Women: 19th Century American Sentimental Novel
Instr: Hamilton, Kristie
Office: CRT 478; 229-5959
e-mail: kgh2@uwm.edu
Office hours:
Course Information: W; 4:30-7:10pm; SAB G25
Course Description
Required Texts at People's Books, 2122 E. Locust Ave.:
Susanna Rowson. Charlotte Temple. Oxford UP
Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Hope Leslie. Penguin
Maria Susanna Cummins. The Lamplighter. Rutgers UP
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Norton
Harriet E. Wilson. Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black.
Elizabeth Stoddard. The Morgesons. Penguin Classics
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The Silent Partner. Feminist Press
Sarah Orne Jewett. Country of the Pointed Firs. Signet Classics
Also: 1) Two or three scholarly articles may be placed on reserve after the semester begins.
This course will challenge and also scrutinize carefully the following, oft-recited definition of "sentimentality": The effort to induce an emotional response disproportionate to the situation, and thus to substitute heightened and generally unthinking feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgment. It is a pernicious form of anti-intellectualism" (Holman, A Handbook for Literature).
We will read American women writers whose work helped shape and contest the national culture of the 19th-century United States According to C. Hugh Holman's A Handbook for Literature, sentimentalism in the study of literature refers either to "1) an overindulgence in emotion, especially the conscious effort to induce emotion in order to analyze it or enjoy it; . . . [or] 2) an optimistic overemphasis of the goodness of humanity." We will be thinking about whether and how well these early to mid-twentieth-century definitions capture the character and work of sentimental literature. Jane Tompkins and others have examined the ways the sensations generated by sentimentalism were designed to empower women in the 19th century, and Shirley Samuels and other have examined the complicity of middle-class white women in the oppression of American Indians and African Americans through the structures and strictures of a "culture of sentiments." More recently, Marianne Noble and others have been exploring the "eroticism of sentimental suffering as a double-edged sword" that articulates not only subjection or resistance to subjection but also pleasure, power, bliss. These reconsiderations of the sentimental mode of aesthetic expression and the sentimental texts themselves will help us understand how and why the sentimental has survived so long after its disavowal by proponents of realism, modernism, and postmodernism.
Along with reading these novels for the pleasure of it, we will focus upon the operations of the sentimental in these texts as an aesthetic mode (with a history), an ideology, an epistemology, a productively imperfect disciplinary apparatus, and, of course, an emergent commercial commodity and source of cultural capital. We will be asking whether and how 19th-century texts are sentimental and examining the force and the limits of sentimentality in articulating desire, female or otherwise, in constituting subjectivity, and in either effecting social change or instituting white, middle-class patriarchal dominance. Be prepared to overindulge, to enjoy, to think, to feel, to analyze.
Course Requirements: Discussion questions at regularly scheduled intervals, two shorter critical essays (3-5pages), and one longer essay including research (6-8 pages).Graduate students will write a longer final essay (12-15 pages).
