American Literature I: Literature to 1870
Session Chair:
Bonnie Carr
carrb@wfu.edu
“Visual Literacy” and
Abolitionist Fiction
Nicole Seymour
nicole.e.seymour@vanderbilt.edu
In the nineteenth century, as Susan Williams has noted, “the increasing availability of [daguerreotype] portraits to the middle class was paralleled by the increasing availability of printed texts.” Williams’ Confounding Images, Cathy N. Davidson’s “Photographs of the Dead,” and other studies have proposed a reciprocal relationship between the two media: understandings of the daguerreotype’s role were inflected by literary representations, and, conversely, the development of daguerreotypy influenced literature of the period.
While the aforementioned scholars have focused on writers like Melville and Hawthorne, little work has attended to abolitionist fiction. This paper takes on that task, arguing that daguerreotypy’s use in abolitionist fiction is unique to the genre – and, more specifically, to what the genre expected of readers. Focusing on Frederick Douglass’ The Heroic Slave, I outline the rhetorical moves performed by the novella’s daguerreian imagery: first, it models the circulatory operations of abolitionist print culture; and, second, it indexes the complexities of black abolitionism, a stance that required a level of remove from white audiences at the same time that it demanded passionate, personal immediacy.
While Douglass thus exemplifies how technology’s role in the nineteenth-century imagination informs abolitionist fiction, I argue that the (expected) success of that fiction was predicated on its audience being dually literate: able to comprehend the written word, but also capable of reading daguerreotypes as cultural objects promising both commodified distance and sentimental proximity. Slave thereby indicates that the daguerreotype in abolitionist literature functions as a crucial site for the interpellation of “properly” motivated individuals.
Enlisting Literacy: African-American Writing and Civic Identity
in the Occupied South, 1863-1865
Christopher Hager
Northwestern University
c-hager@northwestern.edu
For thousands of African Americans, especially those who enlisted in Union forces, the northern army’s advance into the Confederate South brought not only emancipation from slavery but also the promise of literacy. Legions of teachers, white and black, came in the wake of Union occupation to answer black soldiers’ and other newly freed people’s clamoring for education. What distinguishes the literary practices of those for whom literacy is an effect of military occupation? How must we rethink literacy’s association with liberal individualism in the case of those who acquired their literacy, as well as their freedom and their first legal identity, simultaneously with a place in the military’s hierarchical structure? This paper examines the work of African Americans, primarily soldiers, who put pen to paper in Union-controlled areas of the South between 1863 and 1865. Building on the work of scholars who have challenged the centrality of liberalism in the early republic, including sociologist Orlando Patterson and historian Laura Edwards, this paper argues that black writers enlisted their burgeoning literacy less to express themselves individually than to imagine freed people’s collective identity, to demonstrate textually the place they hoped to hold in civil structures. Relying for context on relatively well-known memoirs of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Susie King Taylor (the literate ex-slave who nursed and taught soldiers in Higginson’s African-American regiment), the paper focuses its analysis on the broadsides, letters, and diaries of newly-freed slaves in the occupied South.
The (Un)timely Technology of the Journal:
Edgar Poe and the Production of Literacy
Lope López de Miguel
llope@yahoo.com
This paper will explore Edgar Allan Poe’s work in the medium of magazines and journals as a way to trace the technological innovations that lead to changes in understandings of temporality, and therefore, new forms of literacy. For Poe, one of the hallmarks of journalistic production is speed, both in terms of production and dissemination of information and literature. For the writer, as well as for the reader, this changes the “moment” of thinking, where “moment” is to be understood in both its temporal and physical connotations. On the one hand, the writer faces smaller and smaller increments of “inspired” time, bringing him closer to the instrumental time of capitalist production and the machine. On the other hand, the reader faces a barrage of material, which begins to change the time of attention and the impact of readership. All of this begins to change the nature of artistic experience by “thinning” out the time of thinking, imagination and reflection. For Poe, the technology (both in the sense of its production, and in the sense of the development of a new literacy) of the journal and magazine didn’t so much decentralize the nation as it pre-disposed the emerging mass readership to a temporal and imaginative mechanization that would change the very nature of thinking and imagination.