The Hawthorne Project Paper
The "data" for this assignment's papers will derive from two short stories published in the early and middle stages of Nathaniel Hawthorne's career. We will initially approach each story the way majors are taught to do it in the Modern Language and English Departments. Modern interpretive practices are informed by a wide variety of interdisciplinary methods, borrowing tools from history, political science, sociology, psychology, art history, and even natural sciences for bibliographic study of contemporary (i.e., C19) print editions and manuscripts. I will encourage all of you to perform at least an accurate reading of the stories for plot, character, and common thematic (repetitive) features. This will include some attempt to say "what each story means," while keeping in mind that Hawthorne, like many of his contemporaries, liked to put readers into deeply ambiguous situations to make them more self-aware of certain important ambiguities and paradoxes in real life.
Sample Disciplinary Approaches to Your Hawthorne Project Paper
| Disciplines that could guide a paper's development | Some of the Kinds and Patterns of Data the discipline looks for in the stories or objects in which the stories are found | Theories of interpretation and theoretical issues guiding the analysis |
| Biographical Writing: Hawthorne's Career as an Author | Comparative reading of both stories for common features; comparison of the stories with Hawthorne's manuscript notebook sketches and other "rough draft" clues to his stories development | cultural history; author's characteristic style |
| English and Modern Languages | character, plot, images, deliberate ambiguity and paradox, patterns of unusual word choice etc., gender construction, social ideologies that induce false consciousness, the origins of "science fiction" and the roman á clef, psychological realism | Stylistics, Structuralism, Feminism, Marxism, Deconstruction, etc. |
| History | New England colonial culture, pre-Revolutionary unrest, C19 science vs. religion, cultural constructions of class and gender, parenthood and childhood, commerce in Colonial America, history of the book in C19 America, European wars of religion and the American colonies as "ports of refuge" for dissenters; the history of science and medicine; Italian regional politics | material culture, economic and demographic history, history of the family, history of faith, history of science, the "American Scholar" (Emerson) and American intellectual identity vs. European culture |
| Economics/Management | New England colonial economy, slavery and child-labor, the "Triangular Trade," English-American import-export trade, science and technology as economic engines of change; economics of C19 book production and publication, C19 author-publisher-reader relations; experimental science and technology; mentorship and influence as management issues | qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, colonial and post-colonial trade studies, book history |
| Political Science | New England colonial culture, pre-Revolutionary unrest, C19 science vs. religion, cultural constructions of class and gender, parenthood and childhood, commerce in Colonial America, history of the book in C19 America, European wars of religion and the American colonies as "ports of refuge" for dissenters, C19 America as a "post-colonial" culture, American anxieties about our relations with European arts and sciences | Marxism, American Studies, colonial and monarchic politics, popular insurrections and radical power |
| Sociology and Anthropology | Circulation of licit and illicit power in Colonial and Revolutionary America, personal responsibility vs. duties to the community, marriage and courtship customs as political events, parenthood and childhood in C19 America and Italy | hierarchical vs. horizontal social relations, gender construction and gender relations, courtship rituals, friendship rituals, science and religion as cultures |
| Psychology, Biology and Chemistry | perception, hallucination, amnesia, and reliability of eye-witness testimony; poisons and immunity; plant science (botany) and pre-genetic plant breeding in the C19; C19 paper manufacture and forensic study of paper damage; C19 binding materials and their resistance to or susceptibility to damage from various sources | psychology of perception and memory, immunology and toxicology, plant breeding and plant-human interactions, materials science |
| Art and Art History | Italian garden design, Colonial New England costume, ekphrasis or the art of description of architecture, sculpture, or other works of art in a literature. | colonial American and Italian architecture, landscape design, costume history |