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, 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, individualism, and “self-reliance”; the city, the machine, and the coming of mass entertainment; landscape, nature, and destiny; national mythologies; faith, doubt, and Victorian uncertainty; science/evolution and fantasy/horror; and Imperial gothic at the “fin de sieclé”.
Our texts include complete novels by Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre ), Charles Dickens (Hard Times), Robert Louis Stevenson (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ), and Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness), together with the autobiographical Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and substantial sections of Francis Parkman's travelogue The Oregon Trail , as well as poems, stories, and philosophical and “prophetic” essays by (amongst others): Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Thomas Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, G.M. Hopkins, Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Classes will alternate between formal lectures 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).