English 258 - Fall, 2013

American Literature: 1800 to the Civil War

Class Information

Instructor: Freeman, Elizabeth
CRN: 53754
Time: T 12:10-3:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Earlier American
Focus: Interdiscipline, Theory

Description

Before Sexuality

Before the hardening of the categories homosexual/heterosexual, the antebellum United States saw a plethora of gendered and sexualized social forms, some more legible than others. This course will follow the vagaries of bachelorhood, manly dietetics, celestial marriage, adhesiveness, phalanxes, spermatic economies, and other formations of the period, inquiring into the ways that literature, and sometimes literary form, limns sociability and eroticism “otherwise” than the way we know them now. We will be reading, I hope, counterintuitively: for example, tracking the sonic elements of Walden yields a very different Thoreauvian erotics than the familiar story of his celibacy; the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith can look a lot like Walt Whitman; the sensualities of spiritualism in The Bostonians are actually more interesting than the Boston marriage, and so on. Theoretically, this course will introduce students to some aspects of queer studies; methodologically, we will drag the brush of close reading against the grain of Foucault, which might involve some not-so-new and some inventively new historicisms.

Grading

TBA

*marks texts that may be on reserve, in photocopy, or available otherwise than for purchase

Texts

Walden, Henry David Thoreau
The Bostonians, Henry James
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ethel\'s Love-Life: A Novel*, Margaret Sweat
A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making*, Sylvester Graham
Reveries of a Bachelor*, Ik Marvel
Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints* , Joseph Smith
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
Poems*, Emily Dickinson