Pre-Civil War American Literature: Creativity, Imagination, Renaissance
This course will use a cultural-studies framework to ask some non-cultural-studies questions. We will read the reading-list canon -- Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Douglass, Dickinson, and Whitman. We will fetishize this canon by buying only Library of America copies of their work. All volumes will contain many other great works you don't want to read (and we'll talk about why). (Cheap substitutes for these editions are widely available.) We will consider socio-cultural framing issues: how the writing invents a national identity, influences gender roles, explains widespread social anxiety, registers problems of law and domination, notes shifts from father to mother in household influence, tames the "democratic" individual, copes with industrialization, and responds to racial subjection. And yet we will pay special attention to what these fairly amazing pieces of writing tell us about imagination, about being creative, and about what it might mean to have a collective renaissance instead (or on top) of a revolution. What does it take to leave this world? What does it take to imagine another one? We will look at the arc of romantic theories of creation as they develop from Coleridge on and then unwind and recombine with Nietzsche and his 20th century successors. We'll write together, talk together, blog together. You will pass your exams. You may also get a new angle on why you like literature and what kind of power - is that the right word? - it has in the world, and has for you. |
