AMER LIT LATER 19C (American Literature: Later Nineteenth Century) | Abrams | MW 7:00-8:50p | 13313 |
(Evening Degree Program)
A study of representative American texts culled from the latter half of the nineteenth century and deliberately selected to span a gamut of genres: the novel, the short story, the extended verse form, the short lyric poem, autobiography and the essay. Students should expect that in taking this course, they will keep needing to re-test the aesthetic ground-rules, and to keep re-adopting to radically different varieties of voice, ranging from Huck Finn’s down-home utterances to Dickinson’s gnomic phraseology to Henry James’s elaborately woven syntax. Themes wil! l include race, immigration, industrial revolution, class, and the frontier—lots of long-familiar subjects. Even so, there’s no getting around the absence of a single perspective or voice through which to treat these themes. What is representative about the American texts selected, that is to say, is the fact that either individually, or sometimes in juxtaposition, they force one to think from several different standpoints all at once, to read different voices, and to span a gamut of worlds. Throughout this course the threshold between differences will often prove more important than whatever that threshold seems to separate and divide.
Provisional Reading List:
Course Pack (Whitman’s poems and “The Yellow Wallpaper”); The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson; Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories; Stephen Crane, The Portable Stephen Crane; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk! ; Henry James, The Portable Henry James; Kate Chopin, The Awak! ening and Selected Stories