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ENGL 532 A: Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The Role of Transgression in 19thc. American Lit

Meeting Time: 
MW 3:30pm - 5:20pm
Location: 
BAG 331A
SLN: 
14201
Instructor:
Bob Abrams
Robert Abrams

Additional Details:

The Role of Transgression in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

This course will be based on the premise that transgression—the ostensibly illegitimate crossing of a boundary—is a two-way activity. Whether entailing the invasion of--or the overflow from within—ostensible boundaries and horizons, the case studies we’ll explore situate the transgressive act as inevitably relative to a specific socio-cultural context. As Thoreau puts it, “it depends on how you are yarded.” In the nineteenth-century US, one is “yarded” (quite porously, as it turns out) within (or outside of) what we might term a white, Protestant, bourgeois circumference endlessly subject to contestation, invasion, or leakages. No doubt in a radically heterogeneous society of truly free exchange and reciprocal respect, much of what occurs in the nineteenth-century US as linguistic, aesthetic and moral transgression would assume a much different character. To call such activity transgressive is to acknowledge (if scarcely to accredit the legitimacy of) hegemonic limits and taboos. A supplementary issue in this course, however, will be whether some modes which seem transgressive from one perspective escape that label from another. To what degree does a text like “Bartleby” introduce a massively altered mode of measure into the status quo, in the light of which values are radically altered, the horizon of the normative potentially changes, and transgressive behavior potentially undermines the very framework of assumption in which it is seen as such.

Let me emphasize that, although it addresses a specific theme, this course is meant to cover a wide spectrum of nineteenth-century U.S. authors, and to study nineteenth-century cultural conditions in sufficient depth to provide students with a solid introduction to this historical period, contestatory, complex and variegated as this “period” no doubt is. Linkages back at least as far British Romanticism, and forward at least as far as postmodernism, will be encouraged. Background theorists will include Raymond Williams on hegemony, Bakhtin and Geoffrey Harpham on the grotesque, Mary Douglas on filth, dirt, and waste, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White on the meaning of transgression from the medieval fair down through the Victorian horror of and yet fascination with the body, Witold Gombrowicz on the aesthetic subversion of mediating codes and norms, and Virgil Nemoinanu on theory of the secondary, with perhaps a bit of Foucault and a smidgeon of Freud. Primary readings will range across a spectrum nineteenth-century American texts; these will include readings in Poe, Frederick Douglass, Whittier, Clement Moore, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

GE Requirements: 
Other Requirements Met: 
Status: 
Active
Last updated: 
March 15, 2016 - 3:31pm
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