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Einführende Veranstaltung zu Semesterbeginn: Einzeltermin - 24.10.2012, 10-12 Uhr Blockseminar Januar/Februar Romance as a genre and as mode has a long and ambiguous history, but to negotiate difference and to (de)construct "Other(s)" as a means to consolidate the "Self" has always been its central symbolic function, as Fredric Jameson contends. This holds true, too, for the broad variety of 19th-century American romances, from canonized fiction to popular culture. Emily Miller Buddick, in fact, argues that romance can be understood as literary formula to portray and to "encode within language" the new American realities of the time. In this seminar, we will discuss how an emphasis on "medicine" allows 19th-century texts to articulate different sensibilities and to critically reflect upon a variety of issues linked to an American self-fashioning. Perceiving of "romance" as a mode rather than a clear-cut genre, we will analyze a range of texts, which include Nathaniel Hawhtorne's "The Birthmark," Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches, Silas Weir Mitchell's "The Case of George Dedlow," and Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition. In these texts, the emerging professional authority of medicine is sometimes questioned and often appropriated to negotiate different subject positions. We will discuss how normative positions are interrogated or confirmed, and we will focus on how the categories of masculinity, femininity, and whiteness are evoked and used. We will explore the conventions and narrative strategies of romance, and its relation to the modes of realism, to be able to consider in more depth the significance and the symbolic work of romance as a project within American culture. This seminar will be taught as block seminar predominantly in the second half of the semester. The final schedule will be discussed in our first session on October 24. Please register for the seminar by sending an email to antje.dallmann@staff.hu-berlin.de |
