American Romanticism—In Search of the Sublime
Bruce Harvey
SECOND THIRD OVERVIEW
With F. Douglass, we turn to the second broad arc of themes/authors we're covering this semester.
The first third of the course traces the rejection of bourgeois social values (history, conventionality,
family, etc.) in Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville's “Bartleby” (and Irving’s and Hawthorne’s stories)
for spontaneous insight, eccentricity, epiphany, and deep interiority: i.e., insight rather than
sight/imitation/routine.
That interiority--how to convey in narrative or poetry?--was further explored in Dickinson and Poe,
each of who create, if you think about it, a very individualistic style/set of narrative devices. You
should make links between Poe and Dickinson to Emerson-the-Transcendentalist, even though neither
Poe nor Dickinson were transcendentalists. The speed-up/tumult/climatic blank at the end of many of
Poe's stories may be considered what I call the "dark sublime." His sensation/Gothic stories, rather
than producing revelations/epiphanies of knowledge, must produce the opposite: he wants the
ummmph of a revelation, but it must be devoid of content. So rather than cosmic oversoul or eyeball
that expands into all space (Emerson) or seeing a world of eternal spring/freshness (Thoreau at the end
of Walden) you get the opposite . . . nothingness, a house collapsed in on itself (i.e, Poe’s “Fall of the
House of Usher”).
We now, in the second third of the course, turn to authors writing in the American Romantic period
who are not typically called "Romantic" writers (they might be called antebellum [i.e. before war,
before the Civil War] authors or American Renaissance authors). These authors, as it were,
reintroduce the social dimension/texture that a writer such as Poe largely walls out. That is, they are
very concerned with history and its all-too-material effects.
However, your heightened sensitivity to "Romantic" themes such as interiority/sublimity/issues of
representation (Poe) should lead you to read, for instance, Douglass in a fashion that extends beyond
his exemplary status as a slave narrative author (i.e. politically); just as, vice versa, you should reflect
back upon Poe and Dickinson for the potential political elements of their texts that I mostly ignored in
class. The culmination of social protest fiction or narrative (Douglass’s autobiography and Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and all the themes of Romanticism we’ve studies thus far will be in Melville's
difficult but intriguing "Benito Cereno." Which is, itself, just a prelude to the glories of Moby-Dick,
the most staggeringly comprehensive meditation on just about everything under the sun, ever written!
To put the above in dialectical form:
Emerson = rejection of history for the Ideal & interiority = thesis
Stowe = the return of history’s tensions/struggles as narrative = anthithesis
Melville = history and Ideal/interiority intermingled in amazingly complex ways = synthesis
The final third of the course covers Romanticism in what could be called the "epic" mode--Melville's
omnibus Moby-Dick and Whitman's epic lyric (get the paradox--epic, but lyric!) Song of Myself.
As we proceed through Douglass and Stowe, please ponder the above so that you will get a sense of
the logic of the syllabus and, by extension, the literary-cultural period we are studying.
The final take-home synthesis exam will ask you to trace an issue or theme through five or six of our
writers, and it is important that you begin to see connections and divergences among them.