ENGL 345 American Literature Before 1900

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 19thcenturies. 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. Major requirement met: Group II