11:45a-1:00p D (30) 3 cr.
TOPIC: REVOLUTION AND THE EXPLORATION OF THE NEW SELF
This course samples the literary cultures of Great Britain and America
in the 19th century.
The period featured dramatic changes in the ways people thought and
lived, prompted in part
by changes in the shape of the physical universe they inhabited. The
United States exploded
from a colonial dependency hemmed in on its western boundary by the
Appalachian Mountains to
a continental power barely confined by two oceans. Great Britain grew
both outward beyond
its island shores toward empire and inward beyond its deeply caste-
and property-bound
hierarchy of nobility toward the possibilities of the common man
and--more
slowly--woman.
A complete combined history of the times and literatures of these two
powers would be
impossible. So we will examine authors and works representative of
the age, following a
roughly chronological sequence that will provide a conception of the
scope and direction of
the development of the two bodies of literature over the century. And
rather than rushing
over the array of vital issues arising in this age of physical and
intellectual expansion,
we will focus on two essential and related ones: the democratic
revolution and the creation
of the new person. Political and social systems changed, but so did
the very idea of what a
human being was. Jane Austen’s world of men and women obeying the
fixed laws of their
inevitable natures within a rigid system of estate-based worth and
marriage contract gave
way to Dickens’s enterprising self-made boys who became socially
responsible men, the Brontë
sisters’ destructively passionate women, Henry James’s emphatically
unrestrained American
girl. Primitives, country people, and urchins replaced drawing-room
dandies. Sexual
energy, violent passions, and inexpressible desire displaced cool
logic and witty repartee.
Walt Whitman could boast immodestly that “I am larger, better than I
thought, / I did not
know I held so much goodness.”
Readings--a mixture of poetry and short fiction, excerpts from longer works, and at least four complete novels--will includes selections from poets and philosophers (including Blake, Wordsworth, and Bryant, Carlyle and Whitman, Tennyson and Emily Dickinson) and from fiction writers (Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy among the British, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Horatio Alger, and Stephen Crane among the Americans). The class will proceed by discussion. Assignments will include small-group presentations, short in-class and out-of-class responses to discussion questions, a short essay (5-7 pages), and two exams.