The American Literature of the Fringe: Exploring the Aesthetics of the Grotesque, the Freakish, and the Abnormal in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.

The phrase “all-American,” as in the “all-American boy” or the “all-American family,” generally summons up wholesome, stereotypic images of national culture and life, providing an ostensible looking-glass within which Americans (or at least many Americans) have sometimes chosen to behold their shared values and norms. Norman Rockwell’s old Saturday Evening Post covers are a case in point: they are meant to be provide a charming, endearing portrait of American life, in which every family seems to have a loyal dog, eyes are blue, father is taller than mother, freckled-faced boys like to play baseball, and picket fences are appropriately white. This avid pursuit of an artificially normalized, standardized America of course overlays an underlying reality of mixed cultural backgrounds, diversity of human faces and features, and shifting ways of speaking and behaving, along with the weird proclivities and strange dreams in the night that sometimes haunt even freckle-faced, “all-American” boys and girls. As Walt Whitman writes: “No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,/ Another self . . . Skulking and hiding it goes/ Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and bland in the parlors.” On the one hand, American literary critic Philip Fisher raises a valid point in suggesting that one way in which the American cultural industry has attempt to “solve the problem” of U.S. diversity is through the banalization of imagery and language claiming to represent an “all-American way”; the avid promulgation of mainstream standards based upon the “subtraction of differences,” and the flattening of human potential into stereotypes, becomes for Fisher a major tactic in the establishment of an American cultural identity. In early portions of this course, we’ll explore the way this flattened sense of national identity is asserted in the nineteenth-century U.S. through the stereotypically “anywhere in America” look of Currier and Ives engravings, the rise of national magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, and other cultural forms attempting to invoke and codify an American cultural mainstream. But most of this course will focus on the way nineteenth-century American writers were already busily at work exploring a more comprehensive, generously envisaged, quirkier, and less easily normalized reality, if sometimes against the grain of culturally inculcated allegiances and shames. Our literary readings will be supplemented by a number of theorists and cultural commentators who will provide us with some useful concepts and terms as we explore the collision of the normalized with what it excludes.

Reading List: Whittier, Snowbound; Moore “A Visit from St. Nicholas”; Poe, selected tales and sketches; Dickinson, selected poetry; Hawthorne, selected fiction; Melville, selected fiction; Whitman, selected poetry; Margaret Fuller, selected prose; Rebecca Harding Davis, “Blind Tom,” “Life in the Iron Mills”; Crane, “The Monster”; Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; James, selections from The American Scene and “The Jolly Corner.”