ENGL 338(F) Literature of the American Renaissance (Same as American Studies 338)
In the United States, the 1840s and 1850s produced a clutch of writers-Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Poe, and Dickinson-whose works were
framed as the "American Renaissance," a watershed of American literary history. Controversially added to this canon-in a gesture that greatly expanded the
field, but which also had the effect of misrepresenting it as an era in which white
and African-American, and male and female shared a single literary field-were
major works by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. To undertake a
study of the American Renaissance is, then, to have the pleasure of exploring an
inordinately rich period of literary history, and the challenge of negotiating and
explaining the links of works that have dramatically distinct relationships to the
literary culture and to national politics. These writers share more broadly in a
historical shift in the construction of private life: historians and cultural theorists
explain that the rise of the nuclear family, the discipline of psychology, and the
idea that one's emotions are a form of personal property of the utmost importance, are recent formations, just taking shape in the nineteenth century. American authors in the antebellum era (the decades before the Civil War) all share a
complex investigation into the life of the emotions, the concept of personal experience, and the representation of intimate human relationships. As we move
through fiction by Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Harriet Wilson, the poetry
of Whitman and Dickinson, and the essay and autobiography of Emerson, Thoreau, and Douglass, we will explore throughout how these authors deploy emotion, how they conceive of emotion's relationship to the individual person and to
the culture at large, and how they variously dramatize the affective leverage of
relationships, including heterosexual romantic relationships, relationships of
slaves to their owners, and masculine relationships both homosocial and erotic.
We will explore this essential period of American literature, then, by inquiring
into the ways these authors figure intimacy, emotion, and experience, as a venue
to explore more broadly the formations of literary work and its interventions into
the culture of a nation heading toward Civil War.
Format: discussion/seminar. Requirements: class participation, email responses
to readings, two short papers and a longer (10-12 page) final paper.
Prerequisites: a 100-level English course, except 150. Enrollment limit: 25
(expected: 25). Preference given to English and American Studies majors.
(1700-1900)