Spring 2006 Courses

English 374: The American Novel (Tobeck)

W 7:00-10:00 pm, Old Main 111

DISCONTENTS AND THEIR CIVILIZATION

This course will cover a historically-expansive range of novels that engage the idea of the U.S. on its core principles of freedom and democracy by expressing dissatisfaction with their organization and/or implementation. Many of the authors are expatriates, who nevertheless display a kind of compulsion to talk about the country they left, while still others present themselves as strangers in their own land.  Through their novels, we will interrogate the uses and limitations of thinking of art as political, and of politics as aesthetic.  Topics for discussion will likely include: various forms and understandings of satire; the rise and development of the concept of “nationalism”; constructions and uses of “other” races and/or cultures; and possibilities and definitions of ethical citizenship.

Tentative reading list:

• Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette
• Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Henry James, Daisy Miller
• Edith Wharton, Madame de Treymes
• Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
• Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
• Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• Paul Bowles, The Spider’s House
• Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless
• William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Spring 2006 Course Listings