How does literature disclose the dynamics that structure our attraction to things? And how does it disclose or disguise the mutual constitution of human subject and inanimate object? To begin answering such questions, this course will focus on three objectives: we will develop a working familiarity with major accounts of the fetishistic relation to inanimate objects (Comte, Spencer, Freud, Marx) and with the history of the concept (William Pietz); we will examine the role that objects play in some of the major genres of antebellum literature (novel, romance. memoir, lyric, essay); and we will assess whether "fetishism" -- which describes a mechanism that integrates thingness and spirit, occults history, and precipitates 'overvaluation' -- has some explanatory power to account for the subject/object relation in these texts. We will also be asking how these texts might revise our understanding of fetishism or help us to understand the current critical fascination with it. If there is a romantic fetishism that lurks within the so-called American Renaissance, it is no doubt a fetishism that consciously or unconsciously seeks to interrupt the dictates of Enlightenment reason. Does the current fetishization of fetishism simply repeat that romantic gesture?

Although the "theory" for the course will be front-loaded, we will continue to read recent refinements of the concept of fetishism (by Laura Mulvey and Naomi Schor, for instance) as we turn to the literary texts, which will be accompanied by critical analyses that themselves foreground the question of objects. We will need to schedule additional meetings during the quarter so please be prepared for that commitment. Participants will be asked to write (in addition to the final paper) occasional one-page excurses for the reading. Although the emphasis in the course is conceptual, not historical, we may spend one week doing some collective research on the material history of the period (and, depending on the group's interest, I will put some material/cultural history on reserve). The closing weeks of the quarter will be devoted to presentations. All participants must attend these presentations. Books for the course may be purchased at the Seminary Co-op: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Poems; Caroline Kirkland, A New Home, Who'll Follow?; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale; Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord, &c.; Marx, Capital, vol. 1; Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality; Emily Apter and William Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse; Patricia Spyer, Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Space. There will also be a large number of xeroxed readings (including Catherine Sedwick, Home) to be purchased in Classics 11.