76 315 - 19th Century American Literature

Institution:

Carnegie Mellon University

Subject:

Description:

These days, it's pretty easy to get to Walden Pond. It's right off route 126 South (not too far from Concord) and there is a nice little farm stand there called the Farm at Walden Woods, where you can get corn and raspberries and freshly baked bread. It's a lot more crowded, now, especially in the summer, when families bring their kids for swimming and picnicking on the sandy shores of the pond, underneath the summer-sweet smell of pine trees and juniper berries. In this class we'll go back in time to the Walden Pond of Thoreau's time, with a unit on the "Green Nineteen" -writers and thinkers who considered the relationship between human civilization and the American wilderness (Thoreau, Emerson, Poe and Hawthorne). In our next unit, "Scribbling Women," we'll take up the most popular literature of the century, which was virtually all written by women (Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Warner, Wide, Wide World, Alcott, Little Women). In our third unit, "Slavery and Freedom," we will read slave narratives as well as those folk tales that constructed slavery as a nostalgic, almost mythical past (Douglas, The Slave Narrative of Frederick Douglas, Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Chesnutt, The Conjure Tales.) Finally we will read the two most important poets of the 19th century, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

Credits:

9.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.cmu.edu/

Phone Number:

(412) 268-2000

Regional Accreditation:

Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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