English 882-001
Seminar in 19th-Century American Literature: Fictions of Disorderly Conduct
Instr: Hamilton, Kristie
Office: CRT 478; 229-5959
e-mail: kgh2@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: W; 4:30-7:10pm; CRT 286
Course Description
Over the last sixty years, all of the literary works we will read have been recommended as evidence of the self-conscious disorderliness of literary conduct in the nineteenth-century United States. Alternatively, most have been characterized most recently as capitulating to or actively sustaining the dominant bourgeois social order. In this course, we will sort out the complex and contradictory operations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary texts and the critical narratives that have sought to explain them.
Within the contexts provided by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century advice literature and the recent work of social historians and literary critics, we will study American authors who variously embraced, rejected, transformed, and vigorously struggled with discourses of conduct. We will analyze, for example, evolving and competing reconstructions of womanhood and manhood, the powers and debilitations produced by the "spermatic economy" and sentimentalized asceticism; ritualized violence and familial responsibility as competing models of community; the uses and limits of sympathy; the cultural imposition of compulsory heterosexuality; and the discordant imperatives of moral and entrepreneurial individualism. Whether in allegory, melodrama, or satire, models of gendered, racialized, and classed behavior occupied the passions and imaginations of a variety of American authors in surprising ways. Our goal will be to discover where, why, and how these authors reproduced and complicated, in literature, the mandates, effects and implications of codes of conduct that were organizing nineteenth-century bodies, actions, feelings, and thought.
Tentative List of Required Texts:
Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales & Poems
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Selected Tales and Sketches
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Georgia Scenes
Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World [Not yet in the bookstore]
Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall
Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
Benita Eisler, ed., Lowell Mill Writings
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Required Critical and Historical Readings: Readings will be made available in packets at Clark Graphics on Oakland Avenue.
Course Requirements: Two short papers (2 1/2 pages each), one brief report (1 page single-spaced) on a conduct book or magazine of the period, one research and criticism paper (15-20 pages), due at the end of the semester.
