John Howell, PhD Student in Religion and Literature, Divinity School
“None can narrate that strife”: The American Civil War as Narrative Limit
Time: Noon, Thursday, January 21, 2010
Place: Swift Hall, Room 403
Food: Snacks provided, feel free to bring your lunch
Paper: Copies available in Prof. Brekus’s outbox in Swift 204 or by emailing kwagner@uchicago.edu
Heath will be presenting his dissertation proposal. A short precis follows:
My dissertation proposes a reappraisal of the engagement with the American Civil War in late nineteenth-century American literature. Daniel Aaron asserts, in The Unwritten War, that there was no great, representative treatment of the Civil War during the postwar epoch, roughly 1865 to 1930. I argue that both the capacity to identify and to understand the great works of the earlier half of this period requires a reconfiguration of literary-critical expectations regarding what is narratively possible or desirable in Civil War literature. As an historical evil, the war constitutes a lacuna in American experience—if we understand evil in the Augustinian vein as a privation of the good—so the principal literary figures of the period are not concerned with creating a seamless account of the Civil War’s meaning in, and continuity with, any framing national narrative, but with voicing the impossibility of such an account. Their far-ranging and robust experimentation with voice and perspective when treating the war bespeaks the concern to narrate—and perhaps also a nervousness about identifying—the presence and contours of the lacuna and to interrogate thereby the foundational assumptions of the ‘great American novel’ discourse, which emerges at the war’s close and indicates anxiety about the conflict’s success at reunifying the national body.