ENGL 338(F) Literature of the American Renaissance (Same as American Studies 338)
The 1840s and 50s are known as "the American Renaissance," a watershed in American literary history which includes Thoreau's Walden and Melville's Moby-Dick, Emerson's essays and Hawthorne's fiction. It also includes major abolitionist writings by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Poe's grotesque tales, and the groundbreaking poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Thus, to study the American Renaissance is to have the pleasure of exploring an inordinately rich period of literary history, and the challenge of negotiating and explaining the links between works that have importantly distinct relationships to the literary culture and national politics of the time. These writers do, however, share more broadly in a historical shift in the construction of private life: the nuclear family, the discipline of psychology, and the idea that one's emotions are a form of essential personal property all emerged into their modern form in the nineteenth century. As part of this historical shift, literature of the American Renaissance constitutes 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 homosexual. 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, three short papers and a 10 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)
Hour: T. DAVIS