ENGL 050F. Old Friends

In literature as in life, friendship can fade into the background behind the showier attachments of sex, romance, and family. This class aims to bring it into the foreground by studying the politics of friendship in nineteenth-century U.S. literature, from guides explaining how to write letters to friends to novels like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, and Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio. There we find friendship as the basis for utopian experiments in communal living, as the glue and the undoing of capitalist production, as a tool of both abolitionist organizing and racist violence, and as the material of revolutionary uprisings. Together, these works ask how we are bound to one another, and what other bonds we could forge.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Fall 2025. Cohen.
Catalog chapter: English Literature
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature

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