United States Literature and the Public Sphere
Christopher Looby profile
F 9-12
The concept of the "public sphere," as articulated by Jurgen Habermas, denotes both a political-moral principle (open public debate of cultural and political issues) and a set of institutions that supports that principle (newspapers and magazines, radio and television, public gathering places like coffeehouses and taverns, the internet). What this course proposes to do is investigate the tangled relationships between literature and the public sphere at several crucial historical moments from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. In doing so, it will be a course in American literature, a course in the practical use of a particular theoretical approach, and a course on research methods (combining interpretation, historical/archival work, and the material history of publication). We may look at the inventive gothic novelist (and Philadelphian) Charles Brockden Brown, a leading literary figure of the 1790s, who was also a magazine editor and political pamphleteer: perhaps the first professional writer to fully inhabit the critical spaces of the literary public sphere in its first period. Somewhat later (1840s), another Philadelphian, George Lippard, an immensely popular and gorgeously strange novelist, took the fullest advantage of the new conditions of the emerging mass public sphere: fictionist, dramatist, journalist, social revolutionary, and conspicuously performative personality, he used the new technologies of publicity to contest moral hypocrisy and social inequality. Later again, we will look at the *Century Magazine*, the largest mass-circulation periodical of the era, which sponsored for several years in the 1880s a celebrated national discussion on the Civil War, race relations, and sectional conflict. Several novels were serialized (in part or in full) as part of this magazine forum, namely Henry James' *The Bostonians* and Mark Twain's *Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*. Moving into the twentieth century, we will read Richard Wright's *Native Son* (1940), both for its fictionalized depiction of a young black man's ambivalent relationship to a multi-media public sphere (books, newspapers, pulp magazines, movies, radio) that harmed him, and also for the novel's own critical fate in the actual public sphere of the time (its reviews, Wright's many radio interviews, the novel's eventual filming). Throughout, our concern will be to examine critically the ideology of the liberal public sphere, its democratic potential and its real limitations.
updated 2006-11-01
