American Anti-Worlds: The Aesthetics of Transgression in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

The clean, wholesome world assumed to set the nineteenth-century national standard in Currier and Ives engravings and Godey’s Lady’s Book notwithstanding, a dark American aesthetic exerts a power of its own, soliciting disgust, arousing fascination, summoning up repressive mechanisms, and throwing otherwise excluded possibilities into relief. Lots of rich issues are at stake in exploring such an aesthetic. To what degree does any would-be norm actually entail a reciprocal and interdependent system of differences, to the degree that a tale such as Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” becomes inseparable, at the bottom, from contemporary pamphlets on good, Christian housekeeping such that both sorts of texts at bottom require one another for their deceptively fractured modes of power. To what degree does system itself set the rules and boundaries which can then be violated by anti-system, repression invoke the carnivalesque, and normalization give rise to a reactive counter-world of the abnormal, the excluded, and the anomalous? Conversely, do specific modes of regulation and control actually derive their legitimacy, mission and structure from various forms of criminality and transgression? Or can this binary be transcended? That is to say, do ostensibly queer, freakish phenomena--which scramble and mongrelize assumed categories, blur taken-for-granted boundaries, mark epistemic limitations, and shatter parochial frames of reference--manage to preserve, in the process, a critical and skeptical openness in the depth of which radically different cultural alternatives might be created and spawned? Finally, do certain cultural forms move upon threateningly deviant, transgressive tendencies by absorbing them into the cultural mainstream, if in blunted, diminished, cosmetic ways? Background theorists will include Raymond Williams on the nature of culture, Bakhtin and Geoffrey Harpham on the grotesque, Mary Douglas on filth as epistemic disruption, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White on transgression, Witold Gombrowicz on the willed aesthetic degradation of mediating codes and norms, and Virgil Nemoinanu on theory of the secondary, with perhaps a bit of Foucault and a smidgeon of Freud. In a course that will focus primarily on the close, intensive reading of literary texts, these theoretical readings will supply us with helpful critical vocabularies and conceptual tools. Themes and issues foregrounded in contemporary scholarship--gender, class, race, sexuality and ethnicity—will all be addressed as we explore the way norms are established only to invite their disruption, transgression and critique. Readings in Whittier, Clement Moore, Poe, Dickinson, Catharine Beecher, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Margaret Fuller, Rebecca Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, and Henry James, perhaps supplemented by a bit of visual art: Blythe’s weird paintings, for example, and the luridly racist “Dark Town” series published by Currier and Ives.