8:55a-10:10a D (30) 3 cr.
An English magazine critic, writing skeptically in 1820 about the ambitious national experiment being undertaken by those former English colonists across the Atlantic, put his disdain for the possibility of significant American achievement in the form of a series of questions: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?” American critics of the period were asking themselves the same question. Increasingly, American writers supplied the answer with their pens, creating works of substance and influence. This course will focus on some of the more important writers– Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville–and read selected works to get a sense of their distinctive contributions to literature and thought. But the course will also introduce writers of less significance to literature but essential to the development of a fuller, freer, more completely democratic American nation: Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, whose accounts of their lives as slaves contributed to the growing anti-slavery movement that culminated in the Civil War; and Fanny Fern, whose novels and essays about women’s issues helped to advance women’s rights.
The chief work of the course will be reading, mostly short stories, poems, and essays, but also several longer items–Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. Class meetings will emphasize discussion rather than lecturing. Participants will write one or two short “reflections” on the reading each week (submitted online through Oncourse) and four shorter (2-3 pages) essays, and they will do a group teaching assignment. No exams. Rigorous attendance.