ENGL 7190 Survey of American Literature to 1900
American Beauty
9:30?12:10 T
James Ryan
Beginning with Columbus’s voyages, American colonization by European settlers and their African slaves devoted much energy to practical matters such as exploration, commerce, church-building, farming, community development, and eventually---after the American Revolution---the invention of distinctly new laws and political arrangements. Consequently, Early America has been best known not so much for its arts and literature, but for its revolutionary politics, democratic institutions, and steadily increasing imperial power: in short as a country whose early history is apparently more important than its early literature. It is equally well known, however, that the century after the American Revolution produced some of the most important prose and poetry in the nation’s history. In this course, we will survey some of the major creative and aesthetic directions taken by important eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American writers, even as we bear in mind the ways that a complex national literature emerged from a culture concerned deeply with imperialism, encounters with diverse landscapes and regions, “racial” differences, gender and sexual discourses, and political ideologies.
Tentative reading list:
Jonathan Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light (1734)
J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, East and West
Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges,
or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws (1791)
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855-1891)
Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1843)
Herman Melville, Typee, or, A Peep at Polysesian Life (1846)
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1885)
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (1999)
Requirements:
reading journal, oral presentations, article-length seminar paper