English 628-001
Seminar in Literature by Women: The 19th-Century American Sentimental Novel
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
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 others 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 Assignments: Written discussion questions, two short critical essays, one longer critical essay with research component and regular attendance and participation in seminar discussion. All students will lead a class discussion and orally report on their research.
Required Texts: People's Books, 2122 E. Locust Ave (corner of Locust and Maryland):
Susanna Rowson. Charlotte Temple. Oxford UP
Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Hope Leslie. Rutgers UP
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 Stuart Phelps. The Silent Partner. Feminist Press
Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron Mills"
Also: 1) Two or three scholarly articles and "Life in the Iron Mills" will be placed at Clark Graphics soon after the semester begins.
