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ENGL 235: |
Studies in American Literature
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Region, Nation, Empire |
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| Winter 2008 |
| Instructor: Stephanie LeMenager |
| Meets on: R 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM SH 2716 |
| Prerequisites: Graduate standing |
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Content of the course will vary from quarter to quarter and these courses may be repeated for credit with consent of the chair of the departmental graduate committee.
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| This course examines nineteenth-century U.S. literature after the Civil War through the territorial paradigms (region, nation, empire) commonly invoked to explain the era from Reconstruction through the turn of the century. One of the goals of the course is to question the integrity of these territorial paradigms, their distinctness from each other and their possible complicity with the exceptionalist rhetorics they have been deployed to critique. The course has the broader goal of offering graduate students a rigorous introduction to later nineteenth-century U.S. literature and cultural studies; we will touch upon the key critical questions that have been posed in the last twenty-five years about developments in genre (realism, regionalism, sentimentalism, naturalism), political economy (corporate liberalism, socialism, anarchism), legal theory (contract), and conceptions of race and gender. Each week we will read one essay by a prominent contemporary critic. Primary texts include Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams; William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes; Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars; Henry James, The Bostonians; Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk. |
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