ENGL 345 American Literature Before 1900

The subject of this course varies year to year. Major Requirement Met: Group II

Dickinson and Her Circle

Emily Dickinson is one of the most distinctive, original, and provocative poets ever produced by the United States. Her short lyrics present the reader with challenges of concept and comprehension rarely matched. This course will attempt to meet these challenges with extremely focused readings of a fairly small number of her poems placed within the context of those other American authors who were her creative companions. In addition to this central endeavor, the class will address those philosophical and linguistic issues that are explicit or implicit in her literary performances.

The American Renaissance

The tumultuous pre-Civil War period from 1850 to 1855 saw the creation of a number of works that were and are thought by many to be among the most brilliant, important, and influential for American and global culture. Such an assessment, while it must be, itself, constantly weighed and re-evaluated in regard to broader historical developments and criteria, suggests the desirability of critically encountering these works in the attempt to understand the complex evolution of our national self-image. This class will study both the radical shifts in literary practice engendered at the time, and the intersection of these presentational innovations, with a growing emphasis on issues of race, class, sexual orientation, environmentalism, and the concept of the self. In addition to the authors traditionally associated with this period - Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman - this class will consider a slight precursor, Edgar Allan Poe, and a trailing figure, Emily Dickinson.

The Literature of Non-Representation

The Literature of Non-Representation: In the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions literature is usually understood as an untrue copy of the "real." As such it has often been devalued as morally suspect and materially empty. However this perspective was itself inverted by some American literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. In this contrarian view literature is the activity of realization itself and the literal and scientific modalities are fictions lost in their habitual misunderstandings. For these opposing writers the poetic process constitutes the reader's dissolving emersion in the real without need of conceptual replica. This class will try to understand this non-representational view with primary concentration on the poems of Whitman and Dickinson bracketed by the previous practices of Bradstreet Wheatley Emerson and Poe.