Fall 2006 Courses

English 371-01: Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Place of Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Hurley)

M/W/F 10:50-11:50am, CAR 304

By the end of the nineteenth-century, place had come to preoccupy many American writers. Understanding this preoccupation will, in turn, become our preoccupation in this class as we study (a) the ways place has traditionally been thought to inform American literature and (b) attempt to press on and even resist some of those traditional understandings. As the story goes, in the wake of the Civil War, the significance of place for the American literary imagination had become particularly acute, making itself manifest in the emergence of a number of overlapping literary traditions that we will examine: dialect writing (Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Joel Chandler Harris), local color writing (Bret Harte, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett), and naturalism (Stephen Crane, Jack London). This preoccupation also infused the transatlantic focus and narrative experimentation of writers like Henry James.

But this post-bellum interest in place and its literary form has a longer history, which we will also consider through works including William Cullen Bryant's The Prairies, Nathaniel Hawthorne's preface to House of the Seven Gables, and Thoreau's Walden. It would seem that for a long time, place had been part of the central idiom for understanding what we, in the twentieth century, might understand as identity categories like citizenship race, class, and sexuality. We tend to think of these identities as properties of individuals, things we have, not characteristics of the contexts in which we are situated. Throughout this course, we will consider how this body of literature depicts literary worlds and offers us language - both familiar and foreign (sometimes literally) - that invites to reconsider what we know about the origins of social selfhood, agency, belonging, and interaction. Our joint project - out of which your own research projects will emerge - is to chart the ways in which the place of and within this literature shapes, even as it confounds, the terms on which we come to think about nineteenth-century American literature.

Of primary interest to us will be the literary form that place takes. Place descriptions, for instance, invite us to think about voice (who describes the environment of a piece of writing and to whom); questions of narration (the differences, often difficult to discern, between telling a story and describing a scene); and tone (ironic, sentimental, sardonic). You will be expected to pay close attention to the textual strategies at play in the text in your class participation and preparation as well as in the assignments you generate for this class. These assignments include one short paper, an oral presentation, one longer research assignment, and a take-home examination.

Fall 2006 Course Listings