12/29/2023 0 Comments Bartleby the scrivener themes![]() Importantly, these notions are intimately tied to aesthetics: Usher and the narrator spend their time painting, listening to and creating music, and reading, highlighting the central role Art play in this text, and the ways in which form reveal content. The narrative describes the house’s oppressive atmosphere(45) in conjunction with Usher’s excessive and strange disease (48), demonstrating anxieties about the inability of family lineages being continued in the landed gentry. Many students expounded on the story’s publication date (1839) and the U.S.’s nascent stages, which perhaps reveal anxieties about the country’s future. As the last of his name, the story focuses on his ties to the land and the house. I was greatly impressed with how students responded to these questions by pointing out how the story demonstrates deep anxieties about Usher’s inability to reproduce. We asked of the narrative: Who is speaking in the epigraph? Who’s heart is floating in the midst of this dark landscape? In conjunction with these questions, I asked students to consider what the house was doing in this story: What does a house usually represent (domesticity, familial relationships, comfort, homeliness) and how does “Usher” capsize these conventions? How does this story demonstrated larger anxieties (through the symbol of the house) about property/ownership, nationhood and citizenship, identity in relation to wealth and property, and stagnation? Moreover, students made the wonderful connection between the dark imagery (and the soundscape these words create) and the deep isolation “Usher” explores. We discussed how the opening scene’s use of specific words such as “dull,” “dark,” “soundless,” “dreary,” “melancholy,” “bleak,” “rank,” and “decayed” creates an ominous setting and tells us what to expect in the rest of the narrative. ![]() I encouraged students to think about how the short story in fact has two beginnings: 1) the changed epigraph (“His heart is a floating lute/at the slightest touch it resonates”) and 2) the narrator’s description of his arrival at Usher’s house. As such, nature and scenery are spaces of fear and terror. Poe’s depiction of nature is also crucial in this short story: the mental and moral disintegration we see in Usher is analogous to the crumbling of the landscape itself. We began our conversation about Poe’s short story, and I contextualized his place in the literary canon by highlighting how his work overturns the concerns of the Romantic period by underscoring human fallibility and man’s expansive capacity for sin. ![]() Students astutely spoke to issues of isolation, physical and mental decay, creations of knowledge/possibilities of knowing, and structural enclosures as predominant themes in both narratives. However, in Tuesday’s discussion students were asked to consider the similarities between these stories, at the level of form (how it informs content and/or creates textual hauntings) and thematic similarities. While “The Fall of the House of Usher” has long been recognized as an established and influential ghost story in American letters, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is typically read as a “realist” story with anti-establishment and anti-capitalist critiques. Our first unit, “The Haunted House,” begins with readings by Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville.
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