On the one hand, we’ll study the way sense of space in nineteenth-century America is conceived through the lens of maps and paintings, aesthetic conventions and discourses fraught with latent cultural bias. This portion of the course will explore the would-be assertion of cultural control over landscape and space in the era of Manifest Destiny, when the nationalization of an alien continent, and the so-called spread of “civilization” into “wilderness,” were considered to be nothing less than God-ordained projects The more interesting portion of this course, however, will address the way certain American writers develop a counter-sensitivity to the way sense of landscape and space actually remains unsettled: in the play of maps, paintings, images, and deeply rooted assumptions that can contradict one another, somewhat the way shifting images, based on alternative perspectives, can be projected into an Escher etching or a splatter of spilt milk. Thoreau, for example, discovers that as he learns native tribal languages, he actually learns to see the same forest in an entirely different manner from the way that it is seen through a gaze rooted, so to speak, in Western European cultural assumptions and science. Let me add that I’ve reserved a portion of this course for the study of architecturally organized space and how it is also challenged and subverted by certain authors. That is say, houses as well landscapes can become haunted by the ghost of an elusive, mysterious reality that escapes cultural frameworks and visual illusions. Even as an alien continent seems on the verge of becoming “settled” in the nineteenth-century U.S., a number of American writers suggest the underlying mystery and openness of the here and now, and that’s basically what we’ll explore in literary texts, supplemented a bit by maps, paintings, and other visual materials. Readings in Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Chief Seattle, Whitman, Melville, Henry James, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman; in a number of cases we’ll be exploring texts (such as Thoreau’s Cape Cod) not normally assigned in nineteenth-century American literature classes, but quite interesting in the way that they challenge the culturally biased gaze. As Thoreau writes: “Not till we are lost do we realize where we are.”

I will be using a course pack to supplement course readings.

Available at the UW Bookstore: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Portable Hawthorne; Henry D. Thoreau, The Portable Thoreau, Cape Cod; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson; Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick and Billy Budd and Other Stories; Edgar Allen Poe, Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe.