11:15a-12:30p TR (30) 3 cr.
This course will attempt both to introduce students to a wide range of
American literature
during a period of immense social transformation and to investigate
with some intensity the
literary responses to particularly important issues of the period.
These issues include
industrialization and modern class formation; “Radical” Reconstruction
and then restoration
of racial tyranny; immigration; new scientific approaches to the
understanding of human
consciousness; and the rise of the “New Woman” (paralleled by fear
about “women adrift”).
These were crucial, interrelated subjects that taxed the imaginations
of writers and the
formal traditions of literary genres. In addition to having a partly
chronological
structure, this course will be organized into four units focusing on
particular issues
mentioned above. There will be a strong emphasis on racial formation
particularly, but
always in relation to the other issues. Each student will write two
exams and a research
paper, and will help with a group project involving coordinated
research and oral
presentation.
Texts will probably be drawn from the following: Mark Twain, The
Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson; Stephen Crane,
Maggie, A Girl of the
Streets; Henry James, Washington Square; Edith Wharton,
The House of
Mirth; poems by Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, and Paul Laurence
Dunbar; W. E. B. Du
Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Frances E. W. Harper, Iola
Leroy; Theodore
Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of
Tradition; William
Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham; short stories by Mary
Wilkins Freeman, Sarah
Orne Jewett, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Kate Chopin, The
Awakening; Henry Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams.