7:15p-8:30p TR (30) 3 cr.
OPEN TO MAJORS ONLY. DECLARED MINORS OBTAIN AUTHORIZATION FROM
BH442.
The American nineteenth century was an era of Westward expansion, high
idealism, and
national coming-to-consciousness, in the joint contexts of rampant
racism and triumphant
materialism. Across the Atlantic, the century witnessed both the
apogee of British Imperial
and industrial power and world's first and most resonating eruptions
of urban squalor,
gender tyranny, religious doubt, and scientific disturbance. This
course will weave back
and forth between the two countries to explore such major themes as:
super-nature and the
sublime self in the Romantic Revolution; American self-making and the
abyss of race; sex,
class, and British identity; democracy and individualism; the city,
the machine, and the
coming of mass entertainment; landscape, nature, and destiny in the
myth of the American
West; faith, doubt, and Victorian uncertainty; and dark history and
Imperial gothic at the
transatlantic “fin de siecle”.
Our texts include complete novels by Charlotte Bronte (Jane
Eyre), Charles Dickens
(Hard Times), Robert Louis Stevenson Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde), Hermann
Melville (Billy Budd), and Joseph Conrad (Heart of
Darkness), together with
the autobiographical Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave and Francis
Parkman's travelogue The Oregon Trail, as well as poems or
substantial selections
from prose works by: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron,
Thomas Carlyle, Emerson,
Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane,
Browning, Tennyson,
Matthew Arnold, G.M. Hopkins, and E.A. Poe.
Classes will alternate between formal lectures (some multi-media) and
open discussion--to
which end every class member is required to post a discussion question
to the class e-mail
list every week. Two mid-terms (short questions and passage for
analysis); two papers (one
short, one long); cumulative final exam (short questions, passage,
comparative essay).