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Solidarity Through Vacancy: Didactic Strategies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Luttrull, Daniel
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1586451075218142

Abstract Details

2020, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, English.
This dissertation describes an alternative to an especially influential understanding of how literature promotes social justice. According to this dominant paradigm, literature heightens our empathy through vivid depictions of suffering. Where this mode emphasizes stylistic vividness, I turn to works of fiction and autobiography from the years just before the Civil War to identify a wholly different didactic tradition—one that advances by means of what eighteenth-century critics derisively called vacuity or imaginative vacancy. Vacancy, I argue, is a tool for revealing networks of solidarity, distributed in time and space, and inaccessible by means of vivid description. Harriet Jacobs’s offers an example of this dynamic in her treatment of violence in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Many other famous ex-slave narrators, such as Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northrup, foreground scenes in which a master beats a slave until his whip drips with blood. Such scenes heighten the reader’s empathy through their excruciating level of detail, particularizing the narrated violence until it seems almost present. When Jacobs incorporates the trope, though, she transforms it through generalization, describing how in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s Rebellion “everywhere men, women, and children were whipped till the blood stood in puddles at their feet” and “the consternation was universal” (58). This scene is typical of Jacobs’s treatment of violence elsewhere in her narrative where punishments are not meted out to particular slaves but to groups. Because her writing frustrates visualization and the free play of empathy, Jacobs is able to prevent identification at the individual level and to depict slavery instead at the level of systems and groups. Like Jacobs, the other writers I examine in this dissertation—Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—use vacancy to create alternative didactic forms capable of imagining and promoting solidarity.
Michael Clune (Committee Chair)
Gary Stonum (Committee Member)
Athena Vrettos (Committee Member)
Timothy Beal (Committee Member)
147 p.
American Literature; Political Science
American literature; Rebecca Harding Davis; Harriet Jacobs; Herman Melville; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Orestes Brownson; solidarity; didacticism; political philosophy; moral philosophy

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Luttrull, D. (2020). Solidarity Through Vacancy: Didactic Strategies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1586451075218142

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Luttrull, Daniel. Solidarity Through Vacancy: Didactic Strategies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature . 2020. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1586451075218142.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Luttrull, Daniel. "Solidarity Through Vacancy: Didactic Strategies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature ." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1586451075218142

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

case1586451075218142
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This open access ETD is published by Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies and OhioLINK.