ENGL 90606 - Forms of Democracy in Nineteenth-century U.S. Literature

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

This course will explore two central concerns in American literary studies: what is "democratic" about literature written in the United States? And how does the problem of representative politics influence literary and textual representation? From F.O. Matthiessen's definition of a canon of five authors who shared a "devotion to the possibilities of democracy" in American Renaissance (1941); to the efforts to broaden that Cold War canon to be more democratically representative in the anthology projects and multicultural criticism of the 1980s; to the New Americanist project of decoupling "democracy" and "America" in order to critique U.S. imperial hegemony in the 1990s, democracy has been a central concept in the study of U.S. literature. One emphasis of this course will be on historical and contemporary theories of democracy as they relate to literary texts. A second emphasis will be on textual forms as they figure in democratic theory. The possibilities of democracy today are frequently tied to new media, notably the Internet, which for some promises to realize ideals of participation and transparency. New media enthusiasts of the 19th C saw similar democratic possibilities for immediacy and the diffusion of knowledge in the electric telegraph. An older tradition dating at least to the Reformation, with important exponents in the antebellum U.S., identifies democracy with print culture and literacy. Yet another view saw the "logocracy" of public speech and the emergent popular, participatory forms of the drama and the spectacle as essentially democratic. Specific literary genres - the novel; free verse - have also been characterized as "democratic," while critics have vigorously debated the political effects of particular literary styles, notably sentimentality.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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