Spring 2004 Courses

English 403: Seminar in American Authors (Dawes)

In the middle of the 19th century, as the country tottered on the brink of a murderous civil war, a group of strange, passionate, and visionary artists set out to discover the soul of America. From 1850 to 1855, in one of the most astonishing creative convergences in literary history, they produced a canon of literature that revealed both the demons and angels of our nature, inventing a uniquely American spiritual movement of unprecedented optimism at the same time that they damned it all to hell. The works of what would come to be known as the American Renaissance were spiritual and blasphemous, elegant and profane, beatific and pornographic, irreverently comic and heartwrenchingly sentimental. Everything that was written in America after this period would, in one way or another, have to come to terms with the brilliant and disturbing achievements of this small cluster of artists. In this course we will read the landmark texts of this era from literary, historical, and philosophical perspectives.

Spring 2004 Course Listings