SEMINAR PROFILE

H08 -
Dissent in American Fiction: Benito Cereno and The Awakening

There is an ineradicable resistance in American literature to America's oppressive social and economic practices. The resistance grows out of and enacts a tradition of religious, ethical, and economic dissent against violation of the dignity of individual people. Race and gender, which have provoked much dissent recently, drive two of 19th Century America's most famous resistance fictions, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. How Melville anxiously presents the conflicted meanings of "black" and "white" in his tale of a slave revolt at sea, and how Chopin presents the lethal power social conditioning has over women in her acute domestic tragedy, instruct us in how fiction in America dissents from the violence the country does to itself and its own.

Scholar:

Theo Theoharis

Location:

Harvard Hillel

Dates:

12/2/2016, 12/9/2016

H08 -	Dissent in American Fiction: Benito Cereno and The Awakening

	There is an ineradicable resistance in American literature to America's oppressive social and economic practices. The resistance grows out of and enacts a tradition of religious, ethical, and economic dissent against violation of the dignity of individual people. Race and gender, which have provoked much dissent recently, drive two of 19th Century America's most famous resistance fictions, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. How Melville anxiously presents the conflicted meanings of "black" and "white" in his tale of a slave revolt at sea, and how Chopin presents the lethal power social conditioning has over women in her acute domestic tragedy, instruct us in how fiction in America dissents from the violence the country does to itself and its own.

		Scholar:	Theo Theoharis
		Location:	Harvard Hillel
		Dates:	12/2/2016, 12/9/2016