Stry of higher and secondary specialized education of the republic of uzbekistan state university of world languages

Chapter II How the Civil War transformed American literature
2.1 A talk by Randall Fuller
Randall Fuller is the Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of Nineteenth-Century American Literature at the University of Kansas and the author of Emerson's Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists; From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature; and The Book that Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. Currently he is working on a book about Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and the treacherous world of London theater. His articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature have appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, Early American Literature, New England Quarterly, and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He received his PhD from Washington University. (Updated April 2020)
Dr. Fuller gave this lecture during our "American Writing on the Civil War" teacher workshop on February 3, 2012. A video of Dr. Fuller’s lecture is available in our digital repository.
I am going to talk in somewhat general terms about the overarching idea of American literature in the Civil War, but I think we need to acknowledge up front that there are always two difficulties for us as teachers—whether junior high, high school, or college—to begin with. The first difficulty, it seems to me, is how to get students interested in the past, in history. As we all know, in our culture now, especially through the internet, it seems like everything is in the compelling, urgent, hyper-important present. So, for my students, if you want to talk about history, you talk about a movie made in 2003. If you are interested in ancient history, you talk about the 1990s. You know what I am talking about. So one of the things that is really difficult but incredibly important whenever we discuss literature or history in the past is to somehow convey to students that these folks that we are looking at were not some exotic species from another world or planet; they were people like us, and they, in many ways, had the same kinds of concerns and troubles and issues that we have. If you can get them to think a little bit like that, then you can begin to imagine just how traumatic, how devastating, how monumental the Civil War would have been in their lives. A wonderful scholar, who is now the president of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust, wrote a book about death and the Civil War. One of the things she points out that I think is really worth considering and bringing up for your students is that over six hundred thousand Americans died in the Civil War, which is more than any war in the United States, and which is more than all of the wars combined. But if you were to extrapolate that into today’s numbers, if you were to say the United States would have a Civil War right now based upon the population, the equivalent of six million people would die, given how much the population has grown. You could almost have your students look around the classroom and say, if you guys were fighting for the Union at least one out of ten of you would die. If you were fighting for the Confederacy, somewhere between one out of three or four would die. So there is a way in which the Civil War—and it’s hard for us to get our minds around—affected everybody in the nation at the time. It was impossible not to know somebody, at least in the more populated areas from probably Kansas to the East, who was not wounded, maimed, or killed in the war. In many cases, that person was also a member of the family. So the first difficulty is just getting students’ heads around the fact that this war happened on a devastating scale amongst people just like them.
The second thing, which is a little more difficult, it seems to me, is to try to convey why literature might have seemed so important to these people. The thing I want to talk about today is a) how literature helped spark the Civil War and then b) how the Civil War changed that very literature. But it is important to realize how significant American literature was in the first place to the majority of Americans in the antebellum period, in the nineteenth century. Ask your students sometime: if they traveled to another country, how would they feel if that country did not have its own television stations, did not have an internet presence, did not have its own movies, that everything it got culturally came from another country. I am guessing that they would in some ways subtly consider that country to be a little inferior, at least culturally. That was the case of America in the nineteenth century. There is a great essay that was published thirty-three years before the Civil War by a guy named Sir Sydney Smith . . . called “Who Reads an American Book?” What Smith wanted to say—he was writing this in an English literary journal at the time, with a lot of cultural snobbism and chauvinism—he said, America is kind of interesting. It is doing something worth remarking on in its political system. They are experimenting with this thing called democracy. It may or may not work out, but they have no culture whatsoever. Whenever a writer in America tries to write a novel, he is essentially copying Sir Walter Scott. Whenever a poet in the United States tries to publish a poem, he or she is essentially copying—name your favorite British poet. The idea was that Americans do not have their own culture. They are a people devoid of literary culture. Therefore, they are really not quite up to the standards of civilization as understood by English and European folks.⁶
The reason Emerson’s theorizing about American literature is important is because it sparked, especially in New England and New York, a wave of disciples and imitators and people who tried to live up to Emerson’s ideals. I am not going to talk about people like Harriet Beecher Stowe or Emily Dickinson or Nathaniel Hawthorne . . . but all of them were influenced by Emerson to varying degrees. The most interesting fellow, I think, who is inspired by Emerson and whose career takes a radical turn in the Civil War is Walt Whitman. . . . [Whitman’s poetry] does not look like any other poetry I am aware of. It is conversational. There is not a kind of rhythmic meter going on. In fact, Whitman writes these extraordinarily long poetic lines. They seem to go off the page. They just go on and on and on. They catalog endless activities and objects in the American world. Where that is coming from is Emerson. Whitman said famously, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil.” What he meant is: he knew he wanted to do something with poetry; he considered himself a kind of artistic figure, but it was when he read Emerson’s “The Poet” and other essays that he began to see what he might be able to do. What he wants to do, following Emerson’s advice in “The Poet,” he wants to become the poet of America. Now, I know I looked pretty carefully at your teaching standards, and I know that, alas, poetry is ranked below fiction, and I am aware of that, and when I meet with you in our smaller groups we will focus on fiction. The reason I am looking at poetry now is not so much for you to take that into the classroom as to give you an example in a very compact way of how the Civil War changed the language. I think we can do that really nicely with Whitman’s language. So that is why I am going to look at poetry.
Before I do, I would like to suggest that another difference between United States literature and a lot of literature that was in Europe (and another person who was behind this difference was Emerson) was that American writers felt like they wanted to change their readers. They wanted a moral revolution to happen inside the readers. They did not just want you to read one of their books and to be entertained by it—although every author wants to entertain a reader to some extent—they wanted you to read their work—whether it was Emerson, whether it was Thoreau’s Walden, whether it was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—they wanted you to read those things and have a conversion inside yourself that would make you behave in a different way when you had finished. At the end of “The American Scholar,” Emerson, in fact, says that the role of the American scholar, and by that he just meant anyone who thinks or writes, the role of that person is to convert the world. That desire to convert the world fit very nicely into a pressing ethical, moral dilemma that the United States was confronted with: the problem of slavery.