Dissertation
The documentary turn: U.S. literature in the Age of Compromise, 1850-1877
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Summer 2020
DOI: 10.17077/etd.005623
Abstract
This dissertation argues that the documentary literature of the twentieth century emerged from a literary landscape rooted in slavery and geopolitical compromise. Focusing on texts from the antebellum, Reconstruction, and Post-Reconstruction eras, The Documentary Turn interrogates the origins of a poetics of witness and memorialization as it emerged in mid-nineteenth-century U.S. literature. I consider how authors and photographers deployed non- or extraliterary texts in order to articulate changing conceptions of race, gender, and class at a time when such categories were undergoing profound transformations. Produced in the extended aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the hybrid and multimedia literature of the nineteenth century developed a “compromised” aesthetic that reflected the nation’s own social and political divisions.
The Introduction, “Fearful Witness: The Documentary Turn in U.S. Literature during the Age of Compromise, 1850-1877,” foregrounds Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a foundational text responsible for catalyzing the emergence of documentary literature in the United States. In presenting to readers the material and cultural traces of slavery, this supplementary volume extends the sentimental abolitionism of Stowe’s fictional novel to include records, graphs, testimonies, and other data. The Key insists that documents are not only worthy of sentimental response, but that intimate reactions to the material and evidentiary “truths” of slavery create the conditions necessary for social transformation and political advocacy.
Chapter One, “Mixed Media and the Aesthetics of Passing in William Wells Brown’s Clotel,” argues that textual and generic hybridity were strategies that early African American writers deployed in order to disrupt social and political arenas. In the antebellum and Civil War years, Brown appropriated sources as a means of critiquing sexual violence, the “amalgamated” text serving as a material metaphor for the forced and coerced sexual labor inherent to the slave experience. During Reconstruction, this “passing” aesthetic could be mobilized toward different ends. Rather than operate solely as a mode of critique and desacralization, it could be used to imagine new social, political, and commercial relationships between blacks and whites.
Chapter Two, “The Bonds that Draw the Cause: Photography and Sketch in Alexander Gardner’s Domesticated Documents,” looks at how photographs and their engraved reproductions in illustrated periodicals memorialized different “causes.” Gardner’s own appropriation of the genre of the sketch, as it was manifested in both verbal and visual media, suggests that any act of memory involves a tension between objective fact and subjective expression, both of which were profoundly “staged.” The chapter explores how such contradictions are negotiated through the album’s citational apparatus, namely, the “positive” and “negative” aspects of photographic representation.
Chapter Three, “Fugitive Pieces: Herman Melville’s Reconstructive Poetics,” reevaluates Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War as a Reconstruction text that imagines political reunification as a process of confronting without resolving contradiction. The three major sections of the book—poetry, footnotes, and supplement—challenge notions of poetic coherence and self-sufficiency. Like the Union victors who were tasked with reintegrating former Confederates and a newly enfranchised population of African Americans, Battle-Pieces demands that readers confront textual “others” in the service of reunifying the nation.
In asking their readers to go beyond the “primary” text to directly engage the material and technological traces of literature, many of these writers used records, archives, and cultural artifacts as a means of encouraging more direct social and political action. Utilizing an extraordinary range of documentary strategies, writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Alexander Gardner, and Herman Melville inaugurated a threshold literature that asked readers to negotiate the supplementary materials from which novels, poetry, and phototexts were composed. Drawing on the work of scholars in media and visual studies, paratextual analysis, and material textuality, this dissertation examines the document as a nexus which links fiction and fact, poem and footnote, prose and photograph. In complicating material, technological, and generic binaries, nineteenth-century writers cultivated an aesthetic sensibility that recognized the sociopolitical and artistic value of documentary representation.
Finally, the Conclusion considers the ways in which documents could be used to silence, marginalize, and disenfranchise. Typically, documentary literatures are analyzed from a position of social and political liberation, where media and technology could be mobilized to enlist political advocates, critique dehumanizing socioeconomic practices, and cultivate a public capable of memorializing or reunifying the nation. This section reveals the repressive power of “the document” as it was manifested in the Compromise of 1877. In doing so, it calls attention to fundamental principles of documentary literature, namely, the cultivation of readerships vigilant to the ways in which documents are framed.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The documentary turn: U.S. literature in the Age of Compromise, 1850-1877
- Creators
- Alexander J. Ashland
- Contributors
- Kathleen Diffley (Advisor)Stephen Voyce (Advisor)Ed Folsom (Committee Member)Matthew Brown (Committee Member)Phillip Round (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- English
- Date degree season
- Summer 2020
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.005623
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- xi, 298 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2020 Alexander J. Ashland
- Language
- English
- Description illustrations
- color illustrations
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (page 271-286).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
This dissertation argues that the documentary literature of the twentieth century emerged from a literary landscape rooted in slavery and geopolitical compromise. Focusing on texts from the antebellum, Reconstruction, and Post-Reconstruction eras, The Documentary Turn interrogates the origins of a poetics of witness and memorialization as it emerged in mid-nineteenth-century U.S. literature. I consider how authors and photographers deployed non- or extraliterary texts in order to articulate changing conceptions of race, gender, and class at a time when such categories were undergoing profound transformations. Produced in the extended aftermath of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, the hybrid and multimedia literature of the nineteenth century developed a “compromised” aesthetic that reflected the nation’s own social and political divisions. In asking their readers to go beyond the “primary” text to directly engage the material and technological traces of literature, many of these writers used records, archives, and cultural artifacts as a means of encouraging more direct social and political action. Utilizing an extraordinary range of documentary strategies, writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Alexander Gardner, and Herman Melville inaugurated a threshold literature that asked readers to negotiate the supplementary materials from which their novels, poetry, and phototexts were composed. Drawing on the work of scholars in media and visual studies, paratextual analysis, and material textuality, this dissertation examines the document as a nexus which links fiction and fact, poem and footnote, prose and photograph. In complicating material, technological, and generic binaries, nineteenth-century writers cultivated an aesthetic sensibility that recognized the sociopolitical and artistic value of documentary representation.
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9983988198002771
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