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 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 will include race, gender, 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.

Reading List:

E-Reserve (Writings by Dickinson, James, Gilman, Melville); Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams; 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 Turn of the Screw; Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories