Authorizing High and Low: Categorical
Collapse and/against Literature
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Session Chair: John Kerkering |
Session Coordinator: Brad Fruhauff |
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Dept. of English, |
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“Witnessing the Witness: The Civil War Poetry of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman”
Leif Eckstrom,
In their Civil War poetry, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman sought to represent the conflict to the American people. This paper compares their representations with respect to their personally felt and popularly perceived authority to bear witness to a national event. In particular, since Melville did not, like Whitman, have first-hand experience of military scenes, he had to negotiate the gap separating (high) art from a (low) historic subject, as well as the gap separating his (high) critical distance from the common soldier’s (low) immediate experience of the war.
“The Lost Work of Longfellow”
Brad Fruhauff,
This paper will examine Longfellow’s attempt to establish a
poetic identity that sought to simultaneously traverse and sustain the various
social classes to which he marketed his poems.
Comparing Longfellow’s figure of the “master” with the reception
history, this paper asks, in part, whether and to what extent Longfellow’s
poetry may have performed a social function, providing a model or template for
mediating class differences and thus helping
“Nature's Eccentricities and Possible Impossibilities: The Popularization of Science in the British Victorian Novel”
Kandice Gingrich
Advances in science offered new subjects and tropes to Victorian prose writers, but they also put pressure on the genre to descend from the heights of romance and commit itself finally to the “low” empiricism of the novel. This paper looks into the ways novelists adapted the universal concerns of high art to the particular findings of science, or vice versa, and with what consequences for genre and the literary construction of Victorian authors and readers.
“Racial and Sexual Fluidity in the Works of Sui Sin Far and Nella Larsen”
Emily Wiser
High and low culture can attach to majority and minority races as well as to gender patriarchy. This paper discusses the works of Sui Sin Far and Nella Larsen, demonstrating how the multiracial and sexually fluid identities they enable characters to choose have the effect of destabilizing social categories that otherwise anchor distinctions of high and low.