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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
"To make much so much money that you won't, that you don't mind, don't mind anything--that is absolutely, I think, the main American formula." Henry James, The American Scene, 1907. "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good, is right, it works...and it will save that malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.," Gordon Gecko, Wall Street, 1987. After a 20-year absence, Henry James returned to America to examine the country of his birth. His tour brought him to the above quoted and dismaying conclusion. This course tries to contextualize and understand James's remark by placing it within a broader atmosphere of late 19th- and early 20th-century American culture. We'll look at works that predate, are contemporary with, and follow James's American tour. We'll look at works of literature and biography, of politics and philosophy, and of theology and economics. Throughout, we will keep circling around and back to James's notion of "The Main American Formula" and asking not only what exactly he meant, but how other major thinkers of the age understood or conceived of an "American Formula," and how that formula could be measured at the level of the individual, the corporation, the country, and, with Conrad's Nostromo, the world. Readings will include works of the following authors: Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreissner, Henry Ford, Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, Thorstein Veblen, and Edith Wharton. In addition, we will view several movies whose focus is directly related to the course's central questions.
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3.00 Credits
A study of Twain's life and writings in light of the history of ideas and the literary, political, philosophical, and religious currents of nineteenth-century American culture. We will also consider such figures as Harte, Stowe, Douglass, and Lincoln, who illuminate Twain's style and social and moral preoccupations. Special concerns: Twain's place in the tensions between conventional literary forms and the emerging American vernacular; his vision and critique of American democracy, slavery, "exceptionalism," and later geopolitical expansionism; his medievalism, including Joan of Arc, and larger interpretations of history; his treatment of women, individualism, and the family; and the later Gnosticism of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. We will also address the current (and perennial) discussions of unity and pluralism in American culture, as in Garry Wills's delineation of an underlying American identity in Under God, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s fear of "balkanization" in The Disuniting of America. Readings: selected shorter works, including Diary of Adam and Eve; Innocents Abroad; Life on the Mississippi; Tom Sawyer; Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee; Pudd'nhead Wilson; No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger; and selections from the Autobiography. Students will be expected to write a series of brief, incisive papers and a longer critical paper.
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3.00 Credits
Close readings of selected 17th and 18th-century American literature.
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will undertake a comparative survey of twentieth-century American naturalist novels, tracing a trajectory from turn-of-the-century texts by Norris, Chesnutt, and Dreiser, to the neo-naturalist fiction of a few decades later that operated alongside developments in modernist literary form (Stein, Wright), and concluding with a look at its postwar resurgence in the novels of authors such as Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy. We will also discuss the return to these novels in recent films including There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men. Students will be asked to write one short formal analysis and two mid-length papers, in addition to regular discussion assignments.
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3.00 Credits
Special topics in the history of American literature.
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3.00 Credits
A survey of 19th-century American literature, emphasing the efforts of American writers to identify and define "democracy" and the "democratic citizen."
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will read, discuss, and study selected American novels of significant importance within the 19th century, a time when the questions of what constitutes an authentically 'American' literature preoccupied many authors seeking to fashion and interrogate a specifically 'American' tradition. As we situate these novels within their historical and cultural contexts, we will consider the various reasons for their place within the canon of American literature, with an eye toward understanding better the works themselves and exploring several recurring themes of particular concern for American writers (freedom, democracy, American identity and national destiny, slavery and the problem of race, to name a few). At the same time, we will scrutinize the very nature of the literary canon and reflect on the nature and significance of this, or any, reading list. Even so, we will see that these authors share deep engagement with ideas and themes common to American literature and do so, through their art, in ways that seek both to teach and to delight. Authors we will study include Sedgwick (Hope Leslie), Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave), Melville (Moby-Dick), Stowe (Uncle Tom's Cabin), Twain (Huckleberry Finn), and Chopin (The Awakening).
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will consider the place of American literature in global society. Our readings will span from the Puritans through the present, and we will focus our interpretations around the theme of conversation.
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3.00 Credits
In this course we will read a number of works, by both women and men, which may be described as feminist fiction. In so doing, we will raise issues about the relation of aesthetics to politics, about the process of canonization, and about aesthetic integrity. Ultimately, we will also be examining the place of women within American culture during the twentieth century - how it has changed, how it has remained the same. At the end of the course, students should feel that they have discovered a new body of exciting literature, as well as new ways of reading some of our best-known literature. Texts: Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Alice Walker, The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar; Toni Morrison, Sula and Song of Solomon ; possibly Elizabeth Dewberry Vaughn, Many Things Have Happened Since He Died. Requirements: Two papers, a mid-term, and a final examination (25% each).
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3.00 Credits
What do we mean when we say that something is "in the air"? Are we referring to messages transmitted over a broadcast network, the foment of revolution, the shifting winds of fashion, or a powerful critical trend? In this course, we will take up the atmospheric quality of each of these forms of cultural transmission as they appear in American fiction. In doing so, we will ask how they provide models of reading, receiving messages, and decoding information. Surveying a broad range of twentieth-century fiction through to contemporary digital narratives, we will discuss both technologies and techniques for "tuning in" to broadcast media, mass movements, and ideologies. What happens to the persons populating fictional narratives when they participate in, or are even constituted by, their relations to these communication networks? This course will survey a series of prose works from the American twentieth century, beginning with turn-of-the-century spiritualism and broadcast aesthetics (DuBois, Adams, Hopkins), moving to the realm of fashion, contagion and the zeitgeist (West, Porter, Cather), taking up the spirit of revolution in the sixties (Didion, Pynchon, rock), then discussing the idea of the "turn" in academic study through re-readings of James' The Turn of the Screw, and finishing with the future of the broadcast in what is sometimes referred to as "liquid modernity" (Markson, Baker). Short readings from media and cultural theory will accompany each topic. Students will be asked to put pressure on their conceptions of how the interaction styles that accompany media in the twentieth century and beyond might influence, derive from, or appear in the particular medium of literature across multiple flashpoints in the histories of technology and literary innovation. They will develop critical frameworks for analyzing media and narrative forms together, and use this attention to form to ask questions about the boundaries of modern selfhood and the consequences of information movement throughout the twentieth century and through to our contemporary moment.
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