AFST 43216 - Between Nature and Culture: The Transformation of American Life

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

Africana Studies

Description:

All her life Edith Wharton sat on the edge of change. All her life she had one foot in the past and one firmly in the present. Her vision looked ahead to America's trans-national and cosmopolitan future as much as it found comforts and recognitions in the country's more provincial past. In her autobiography A Backward Glance (1934), Wharton suggested that the "small society into which [she] was born was 'good' in the most prosaic sense of the term, and its only interest, for the generality of readers, lies in the fact of its total extinction, and for the imaginative few, in the recognition of the moral treasures that went with it." A rather ambiguous statement to be sure. Wharton's elegiac lament for the past is always conflicted, both in her fiction and in how she lived her own life-like her friend Henry James and a number of her other acquaintances, Wharton became one of those transnational, cosmopolitan, expatriates who helped shape twentieth-century America. She sat in the midst of a broad and influential group of cultural and intellectual figures whose works addressed, contested, fomented, resisted, and embraced the sweeping social changes America underwent in the period following the conclusion of the Civil War and leading up to the onset of World War I. Topics for discussion will include the idea of cosmopolitanism; constructions of citizenship, of race, of nation; the notion of home and exile; emerging trans-nationalism--both individual and national; and political imperialism, particularly through the "new" politics of Theodore Roosevelt. This is not a course on Edith Wharton, but an investigation which will use Wharton's writings as a medium through which we will examine some of those cultural changes that revolutionized modern America and changed the world. Readings: selected novels, short stories, and writings of Edith Wharton; selected works of Henry James; selections from Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, John Dewey, William James, Theodore Roosevelt, Randolf Bourne, George Santayana, Paul Bourget, T. Jackson Lears, E.B. Taylor, Pierre Bourdieu, Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, Ruth Benedict, James Clifford, Alan Trachtenberg, Richard Bushman, and Rebecca Edwards. Requirements: Tentative: participation in class discussions 20%; series of one-page textual analyses 20%; oral presentation 15%; final research essay 45%.

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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