AMST 338 - The American Renaissance

Institution:

Williams College

Subject:

American Studies

Description:

The 1840s and 50s are known as "the American Renaissance," a watershed in American literary history which includes Thoreau's Walden and Melville's Moby-Dick, Emerson's essays and Hawthorne's fiction. It also includes major abolitionist writings by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe and the groundbreaking poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We will read through this essential period of American literature by asking how key authors figure intimacy, emotion, and experience. That inquiry, in turn, will help us explore the formations of literary work and its interventions into the culture of a nation heading toward Civil War and conscious of its fractures. How did these authors imagine the gulf between self and not-self, and the potential to bridge that gulf? Did the written word have the power to make readers "feel right," as Stowe hoped, or to correct them when they felt wrong, as Douglass attempts to do when he tells his audience that slave songs express sorrow, not joy? As we move through a rich variety of texts, we will explore how authors try to move their readers, and how they conceive of emotion's relationship to the individual person and to the culture at large.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the AP Exam in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Seminar

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.williams.edu

Phone Number:

(413) 597-3131

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Four-one-four plan

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