Spring 2006 Courses

English 137-03: The American Novel (Dawes)

T/TH 10:10-11:40 am, OLRI 243

This course will examine several landmark novels in the American literary canon.  We will first examine these texts as aesthetic achievements with specific formal requirements.  What are the "hidden structures" that make up a novel?  How do authors produce beautiful effects at the level of line and paragraph?  How do they use these small beautiful effects (a phrase that jars the reader into seeing the world anew, a paragraph that has the delicate structure of a stanza) to develop the larger themes of the work as a whole?  We will also consider questions of cultural production and political and ethical consequence. How do codes of race, class, and gender function in these texts? How do social systems (manners, language, employment structures) detract from or contribute to the promotion of human dignity? How is the reader changed by the act of reading? Is art beyond politics and moral judgement? Or is art a form of politics?  We will they special attention to questions of beauty, humor, cognition, power, epistemology, the grotesque, narrative theory, ideology, urbanization, aesthetics, and ethics. The class will engage in intensive readings of individual texts, but will also seek to examine the larger backgrounds of American literary and cultural history.  Texts will be drawn from the literature of modernism (Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time, William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night), its antecedents (Edith Wharton, House of Mirth, Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, Henry James, The Bostonians, Mark Twain,  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), and its legacy (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, and Toni Morrison, Beloved).  To more fully understand the novel as a form, we will have a few brief cross-genre interludes, including film, theater, and poetry.

Spring 2006 Course Listings