Michael Drexler

Bucknell University

My class, an upper-level undergraduate and master’s seminar, read Constantius & Pulchera in the second week of the semester. In the course, entitled US: Fever Fantasy Desire, we had already read a Charles Brockden Brown story, which I affectionately call “Pig! Pig! Pig!,” but more properly is Letter IX from Series of Original Letters published in the Weekly Magazine on May 26, 1798. The readings for week 2 included Peter Brooks’ “The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 13.2 (1987): 334-348, and selections from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  “Pig! Pig! Pig!” is an intense three page anecdote in which a mischievous childhood game turns deadly when repeated in the present.  (more…)