09:30A-10:45A TR (30) 3 cr.
The historical period covered by this course is bracketed by two cataclysmic events, one national--the Civil War and one international–World War I. Curiously, the concerns of the literature produced between 1865 and 1914 are mostly silent on these events, slow to acknowledge the fact of the Civil War and the massive social and human dislocations it had inflicted, oblivious to alterations on the world political stage that would bring chaos to Europe. Instead, writers of fiction and poetry focused as they invariably must, as we as readers look to them to do, on the individuated human condition, on people facing their world day to day and addressing the effects of its changes on them. What Americans knew they were experiencing, what American writers increasingly articulated, were the transformation of working life from farm and country to factory and city, the growing dominance of laws of finance and system over personal possibility, a radical reconception of life itself from a God-centered universe to a system of abstract laws of change and chance.
This course will concentrate on the three principal kinds of literary responses to these issues: regionalism--mostly short stories and mostly by women, depicting the environments and customs of specific communities and emphasizing the emotional importance of tradition and community as a means of coping with change; realism--creating new narrative forms to reflect authentic rather than storybook human behavior and authentic human psychology; and naturalism--examining the human condition from the perspective of new scientific and philosophical theories. We will pay particular attention to the mechanisms for survival, how writers imagine for their characters and their readers means of coping; and to the increasing incorporation of violence and disaster and the utterly inexplicable into these narratives. The Civil War, for example, is a significant material for writers of the 1890s who use its impossibilities to highlight ironic contrasts of cosmic meaninglessness and human nobility. We'll pay particular attention to such regionalists as Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mary Noailles Murfree, and Grace King; to the realists Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Hamlin Garland; and to naturalists Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser.
Texts will include Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, eds., American Women Regionalists, 1850-1910; James Nagel and Tom Quirk, eds., The Portable American Realism Reader; Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee and Pudd'nhead Wilson; Howells's A Hazard of New Fortunes; stories from Hamlin Garland's Main-Travelled Roads; stories from Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians; Crane's Maggie, Red Badge of Courage, and selected stories; Jack London's Martin Eden; Frank Norris's The Octopus; and Dreiser's The Financier. Course activity will proceed primarily by discussion, with class sessions organized around sets of questions. These same questions will also serve from time to time as the basis for in-class writing and out-of-class responses. Each student will participate as part of a small group in leading class discussion, and will write two longer essays (5-7 pages). No examinations.