1. Common Sense and Revolution

Russ Castronovo

2. Literature and the Art of Social Government

Russ Castronovo

3. Lynching and Aesthetics

Russ Castronovo

4. Anarchy, Internationalism, and American Literature

Russ Castronovo

5. Globalization and American Literature

Russ Castronovo

1. U.S. Writers in Oceania

Paul Lyons

Art, Violence, & Literature in the United States
by Russ Castronovo

Defined as a specialized discourse about art and beauty as well as the general processes through which people as collective beings respond to sensation and form judgments, aesthetics occupy a zone of division and uncertainty. Such elusiveness has been and continues to be prime territory for conflicting agendas in the United States and its literary history. This forum probes the interconnections among aesthetics, violence, and literature. By looking at political writings from the American Revolutionary era, slave narratives of the antebellum period, realist fiction of the early 1900s, and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, we will explore literature’s role in shaping civic behavior and democratic consciousness. Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Phyllis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Claude McKay, and W.E.B. Du Bois are among the writers we will examine.

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1. Common Sense and Revolution
by Russ Castronovo

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson and his rebel compatriots famously declared, “We hold these truths to be self evident….” This statement presents revolution as an obvious fact that every person can perceive and understand immediately. Tom Paine gave fuller expression to this sentiment in his pamphlet, Common Sense, which, through a mixture of logic and sentiment, stirred support for American independence. This session probes the link between such demonstrations of “common sense” and revolutionary consciousness. It is a link that takes us to the ground of aesthetic judgment, a zone of feeling and supposedly universal sensibility. But civic feelings can become overexcited and popular sensibilities can become inflamed. The result is mob rule, what Paine called the “popular rage.” How did American revolutionaries—and how can we—distinguish between popular democracy and “popular rage,” between the rule of the people and the rule of the mob? In addition to turning to Jefferson and Paine as we seek answers to these questions, we will also consider Hannah Foster’s epistolary novel of 1797, The Coquette, and Hawthorne’s short story published in 1832, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.”

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2. Literature and the Art of Social Government
by Russ Castronovo

“I have seen an armful of daisies keep the peace of a block better than a policeman and his club,” wrote the pioneering urban reformer and photographer Jacob Riis. His statement connects tenement reform to the deployment of aesthetic resources, suggesting that we might well wonder about the ways in which American literature has been charged with a moral mission. Slum novels, documentary photography, and reports from charities such as the Flower Mission reveal that Riis was not alone in the belief that beauty could turn the urban herd into disciplined citizens. This faith found its theoretical complement in academic research, much of it disseminated through the university extension movement, which argued for the existence of a species-wide “art instinct” that strives for harmony and perfection. At the same time, though, reformers observed that magic lantern shows created unruly crowds, flowers bedecked prostitutes, and nickelodeons encouraged larceny. This session examines the transformative powers of aesthetics that create law-abiding citizens as well as lawbreakers. Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Dewey will inform our conversation.

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3. Lynching and Aesthetics
by Russ Castronovo

The ritualistic and spectacular nature of lynching reveals the murderous dimensions of aesthetics. Many whites looked on the killing of a black person as public entertainment and tourist spectacle. Photographs often commemorated the grisly event. Against this aestheticization of violence, black writers and intellectuals sought to combat injustice by turning beauty into a zone of political combat. For W.E.B. Du Bois, this strategy famously entailed the conflation of art and propaganda. While African American poets of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Claude McKay rejected Du Bois’s formula for political art, they nonetheless made lynching and racial violence a poetic subject. This tension feeds into a larger debate about the political uses of art: when does art cease being art and when does it become propaganda?

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4. Anarchy, Internationalism, and American Literature
by Russ Castronovo

At the end of A Hazard of New Fortunes, the character Basil March doubts that “something cataclysmal” can produce social “change.” But the author of Hazard, William Dean Howells, along with his contemporaries, wondered whether the everyday stuff of culture packed the charge of social reform. Howells’s literary criticism, especially when considered in light of contemporary socialist texts and the Haymarket Bombing, suggests that ordinary artifacts and common speech are laden with revolutionary potential. Looking at anarchist “how-to” manuals on bomb making and works on international socialism published in the U.S., this session explores how foreign ideas about strikes and social change lost their strangeness to become part of the familiar landscape of U.S. cultural discourse. We will examine the circulation of Karl Marx’s ideas in the United States, Walt Whitman’s poetic visions of the French Commune, and Howells’s visions of striking workers; in short, we will explore the international dimensions of nineteenth-century American literature. These dimensions often involve terrorism, suggesting a point of comparison to U.S. responses to terrorism in the twenty-first century.

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5. Globalization and American Literature
by Russ Castronovo
This session asks: What role does American Studies play in globalization? Since the 1960s critics of American higher education have acknowledged the ties between college curricula (especially the teaching of literature) and the nation-state. But in the wake of the so-called demise of the nation-state, universities and colleges have now set about educating students as citizens of a global economy. This session investigates the potential effects of this new global citizenship, particularly its dominant versions produced in American universities. But there is also the risk of seeing globalization as a wholly recent phenomenon. We will put into context global formations occurring now at the start of the twenty-first century by looking at American writers of the late-19th century, such as Walt Whitman and Frank Norris. We will pay special attention to U.S. military, economic, and literary interests in Asia and the Pacific Rim in the 1890s and early 1900s. Given the perspective provided by this dual historical focus on past and present, what does it mean to speak of “America” as opposed to “the United States”?

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6. Racial Interstitiality and the Jim Crow Era
by Leslie Bow

This seminar explores race relations in the U.S. by casting a new lens on the Jim Crow era in the American South. In focusing on the schematic imposed by segregation, we will look at those individuals and communities who came to represent a third caste within a caste system predicated on the distinction between “colored” and “white.” In exploring the ways in which Asians, Latinos, and Indians became understood within the racial logic of the South, we will investigate the making of social status within literature, sociology, history, and personal narrative. In analyzing how color lines became drawn and what racial identity segregation demanded of those who seemed to stand outside—or rather, between—its structural logics, we will explore the ways in which status arises out of multiple and intersecting axes of differentiation: concepts of class, foreignness, sexuality, and gender in addition to race. In looking at “other colored people,” what appears to be unaccommodated within a system of relations may serve to unveil the structures and interests that support it. Thus, we will situate these racially interstitial populations not as aberrations to Jim Crow, but as productive sites for understanding white supremacy and its investments.

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1. U.S. Writers in Oceania
by Paul Lyons

This talk considers the imaginative responses of U.S. writers to the peoples of Oceania from the time of early explorers through the present. This talk will highlight in particular the ways in which the works of Richard Henry Dana, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Jack London, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Willowdean Handy represented Island cultures and intercultural exchange, and commented on U.S. politics in the region. Dr. Lyons will also briefly look at interactions and collaborations between Natives and U.S. settlers.

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2. The Contest for Hearts and Minds: Will the Political Center Hold in American Politics?
by Deane Neubauer

"American politics is often characterized within the United States in terms of a politics of 'right' and 'left'. Yet from outside the United States its politics does not seem to embody the extremes of other countries. In this lecture we will explore the historical meaning of left, right, and center in American politics in the light of recent elections. In particular we will discuss the challenges of maintaining a "politics of the center."

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