Corporeality and Ideology: Representations of the Body in 19th Century American Art and Writing

A study of how the body as represented in nineteenth-century American writing and visual culture is often fraught with ideological presupposition, while sometimes emerging more provocatively as a site of challenged representational codes. Issues addressed through specific case studies of bodily representation and display will include race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship and class. Materials explored will include prose fiction (for example, weird mutations in standardized , white male physiognomy in Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” or body and gender in “Life in the Iron Mills,” The Awakening, and “The Yellow Wallpaper”); poetry (especially selected poetry by Walt Whitman ); Currier and Ives lithography; photography; and painting (with emphasis on bodies and faces in selected works by Eastman Johnson, Lilly Martin Spencer, David Gilmour Blythe, Elihu Vedder, and Mary Cassatt). To supplement our study of the body in nineteenth-century American writing and visual culture, we’ll address theoretical and critical works by Henri Bergson, Elaine Scarry, Mary Russo, Mikhail Bakhtin, and others.