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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
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.
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3.00 Credits
The relation between private and public spheres in American fiction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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3.00 Credits
By using the concept of phantasmagoria as warrant, this graduate seminar traces the permutations of boundaries as they emerge in a number of domains--the codes of respectability, the corpus of the body, and the intersection of contact zones--that regulate various modes of sociality in the U.S. More specifically, the course will examine these permutations as articulations of three forms of subjectivity--the liminal or transcendent, the hybrid, and the excessive--throughout nineteenth-century U.S. literature. Texts may include Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, Robert Montgomery Bird's Sheppard Lee, Julia Ward Howe's The Hermaphrodite, Herman Melville's Pierre, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, Martin Delany's Blake, Lydia Maria Child's "A Romance of the Republic," Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby," Charles Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars, and Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, among others. Course requirements include one presentation and 25-page research paper.
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine American literature in the context of the western hemisphere, notably the Caribbean and Latin America.
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3.00 Credits
This course will examine urban literatures written by and depicting American women during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through selected readings we will investigate intersections between race, gender, sexuality and nation during the end of WWII and early cold war period. Of key interest will be the place of American women within the concurrent political discourses of containment and expansionism. We will investigate the types of cold war "warriors" American women were ideally expected to be and the ways American women writers responded to these models. Taking as a point of departure the standard account of this period, which focuses primarily on the re-domestication of the archetypical white American woman after WWII, this class will relocate discussions of the homebound American woman to the international arena. We will consider cold war ideas about American women's proper "place" in the context of the global imaginary propounded by anti-communist U.S. foreign policies. Paradigms such as motherhood, domesticity, and the idea of the "dutiful daughter" might have been restrictive for American women, but they simultaneously functioned as expansionist discourses by assigning women key roles in a global dissemination of American power. We will investigate how the need to form bonds with other nations in order to define the "free world" as an entity worth defending not only fostered anti-communism, but also nurtured a notion of mutual obligation between the U.S. and its dependent nations. Incorporating readings of literature, Hollywood film, television, and popular magazines, we will investigate how discourses developed to constrain women's roles also reveal how female agency was implicitly racialized. Authors may include Mine Okubo, Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Thompson Patterson, Sylvia Plath, Jean Stafford, Marguerite Oswald, Lorraine Hansberry, Betty Friedan, Ann Petry, Margaret Walker, Elizabeth Bishop, Olive Higgins Prouty, and Shirley Graham. Possible films include So Proudly We Hail, The Red Menace, Imitation of Life, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, South Pacific, The Ugly American, The King and I, and Never Let Me Go.
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3.00 Credits
A study of American fiction during the decades after World War II.
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3.00 Credits
The legacy of Wallace Stevens on Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich.
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3.00 Credits
In the 1930s a small group of American poets, following the lead of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, launched a movement called "Objectivism," which concretized one of the major strains that runs through the entire history of American poetry. This Objectivist strain values facts over myths, Imagist precision over rhetorical sublimity, the vernacular over traditional poetic diction, an investigation of language over an adherence to traditional poetic forms, social and historical subject matter over lyric introspection. In its initial form, Objectivism was also a potent speaker on issues of class and ethnicity, informed most particularly by the Jewish secularism that defined its early immigrant practitioners. Although it would be difficult to locate more than a handful of "pure" Objectivists, the Objectivist strain exerts a powerful influence upon a vast range of poets and poetries. This semester we will investigate the contribution of Objectivism to the poetry and poetics of Pound, Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe
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3.00 Credits
Beyond the best-seller lists, there's a wild west of writing out there where anything goes. In fact, judging by the variety of contemporary writing practices and materials, the use of language as an art medium parallels visual art where the mainstream is conceptual and can just as easily be video as it can be made of tennis shoes or DNA. In this class we will be reading works that play with language, as indie music plays with sound, rather than closing it down to commercial conventions: fiction, poems, electronic and other hybrids whose authors have adopted much of the idioms or rhetorical strategies of earlier conceptual, modern and postmodern work as they engage with contemporary thought and contexts that have emerged alongside the maturation of global networks, the biotech revolution, and social formations that make our world what it is today. Variously called experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, postmodern, innovative, extreme, alternative, e-, anti-, or new literature, our readings will include works from the collaborative flash poems of Heavy Industry, to the visual-text hybrids of Johanna Drucker, to the reworking of pulp "Nurse Betty" novels by Stacey Levine. Tentative reading list: The People of Paper (by Salvador Plascencia); Electronic Literature Collection (Katherine Hayles, et al eds.); Love in a Dead Language (Lee Siegel); Frances Johnson (Stacey Levine); Wittgenstein's Mistress (David Markson); City of Glass (Paul Auster); Notable American Women (Ben Marcus); Altmann's Tongue (Brian Evenson); Camera (Jean-Philippe Toussaint); Vacation (Deb Olin Unferth); Europeana: A Brief History Of The Twentieth Century (Patrik Ourednik); The Blue Guide to Indiana (Michael Martone); 2666 (Roberto Bolaño). Course pack of short fiction and poetry. Course requirements: 2 short papers, 1 long. Short quizzes. Midterm, final.
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3.00 Credits
Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson and ending with Harold Bloom, how Christianity has been refigured in America.
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