Charles Brockden Brown

I just got an Amazon alert that a new book by Charles Brockden Brown has been published. They think I might be interested because I bought a book by Brockden Brown nine years ago. From this I learn that Amazon never forgets.

The book I bought nine years ago was for a graduate seminar in 19th Century American literature, one of the great disappointments of my academic career. I loved the seminar, loved the prof and wanted him to think well of me, and took the damn class during the last half of the pregnancy from hell; by the time the semester started, I had pretty much lost the capacity for sustained coherent thought. I sat dully through the class meetings, nibbling saltines to keep from heaving, and the papers I wrote--well, I just hope I destroyed all copies. I don't even want to talk about the time this same professor came to observe the creative writing class I was teaching--the day I forgot my book and had to leave the room to throw up halfway through (my students were used to it by then but he seemed a bit taken aback).

Anyway, I loved the class except for the prof's insistence that we read not just one but three novels by Brockden Brown, the worst novelist in American history. This is something I wrote about it at the time:

The novelist I am writing on, Charles Brockden Brown, writes (or rather wrote, two hundred years ago) these long rambling gothic novels full of red herrings, structural breakdowns, introductions of new characters hundreds of pages in, unresolved plot elements, unresolvable contradictions. For 180 years, scholars pretty much had a consensus that he was just a bad writer. But now he's been rehabilitated, and we recognize that he knew exactly what he was doing, which, depending on what critic you read, is either critiquing the new republic (the family whose father spontaneously combusts while in a religious frenzy is a metonymy for America); anticipating Freud by inventing the unconscious; anticipating future novelists by inventing the unreliable narrator; anticipating Derrida by inventing "multivocality" and writing a text which, in its own incomprehensibility, comments on the failure of all texts to communicate or to be controlled; or anticipating feminism by creating a female protagonist whose incoherent narrative represents the struggle between her assigned female role and her desire to take her place in the rational Enlightened male world of the new republic. There we are back at the republic--I'll stop there. These readings are all ways of saying he meant the narrative to be murky, unstructured, and full of internal contradictions.

And I think, "What if he's just a bad writer? Won't we all look silly."