Ralph Ellison, the celebrated African-American novelist, writes that “perhaps we” as Americans “shy from confronting our cultural wholeness because it offers no easily recognized points of rest, no facile certainties to who, what, or where (culturally or historically) we are. Instead the whole is always in cacophonic motion. . . . It appears as a vortex of discordant ways of living and tastes, values and traditions. . . . In our intergroup familiarity there is a brooding strangeness, and in our underlying alienation a poignant—although distrusted—sense of fraternity.” No doubt when many people think of “fraternity,” “cultural wholeness,” and other such concepts of social unity, they think of values in common, a shared way of speaking, a flag for all to salute, and monuments and symbols that firmly register a collective identity and coherent sense of mission. But Ellison suggests that the United States of America adds up, at bottom, not to anything dependably stable, standardized and fixed but to a whirling “vortex of discordant” vocabularies, traditions, and values, and that if a genuine sense of “fraternity” or “wholeness” lies anywhere in such society, it lies precisely in “confronting”—rather than in masking over—such a dissonant, tumultuous whole. In this course we will explore a multitude of nineteenth-century American texts in which cosmetic, fundamentally unconvincing pretenses at expressing social unity are interrogated, critiqued, and found wanting, and in which what Ellison terms an “intergroup” sense of incongruity and dissonance rises to surface. Is it true that this specter of “intergroup” incongruity inevitably spells social disaster? Or does hope lie in a cluster of strategies and attitudes that potentially permit negotiation of a troubled social middle: a capacity to accept and even relish paradox; openness to oddity, surprise and shockingly alien perspectives as the avenue to adventure; an ability to see something (as in the case of an Escher etching) in several different ways all at once? From Hawthorne’s irremediably ambiguous fiction to Henry James’s The American Scene, we will explore these possibilities of tolerance, openness, and negotiation as the avenue to a sense of the social whole.


Books in Reading List:

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne
Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Photocopied Course Packet with the following readings: Whittier, Snowbound; Chief Seattle’s Speech; excerpts from Moby-Dick; Emerson, “Circles”; Gilman, ”The Yellow Wallpaper”; Crane, “The Monster”; James, excerpts from The American Scene