Prof. Nancy Ruttenburg
418 Margaret Jacks Hall
Office hours by appt.
English 265F: Literature of the American Renaissance: 1850-1855
Winter 2016, Wed 1:30 – 4:20
Bldg 160,Rm 322
Between 1850 and 1855, some of the most influential works of 19th-century American literature were published: Melville’s Moby-Dick, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thoreau’s Walden, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. These works culminate three decades of attempts to realize an “American” authorship, productive of a genuinely “American” literature commensurate with persons,places, events, and histories thathad remained resistant to conventional forms of representation. Under increasing pressure to bare the elusive American referent, writers in this five-year period achieved an astonishing degree of formal novelty. We will look closely at the ensuing difficulties of interpretation and their significance as precursors of literary modernism.
Required reading:
Herman Melville, Moby Dick.Longman Critical Edition, eds. Bryant and Springer.
Nathaniel Hawthorne,The Scarlet Letter. Norton Critical Ed. 4th ed. Ed. Person.
Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings, 3rd ed. Ed. William Rossi
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.Norton Critical Ed., 2nd ed. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons
Walt Whitman,Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Norton Critical Ed., Ed. Michael Moon.
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom. Ed. David W. Blight Yale U Pr 2014.
Schedule of Primary Readings (secondary texts tba):
Wk. 1. Jan 6. Melville,“Hawthorne and his Mosses” and Emerson’s letter to Whitman of 21 July 1855 which Whitman appended to the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. Both available on Coursework.
Wk 2. Jan 13.Melville, Moby-Dick
Wk. 3 Jan 20. Melville, continue Moby-Dick
Wk 4. Jan 27. Melville, continue Moby-Dick. [Said, Heimert]
Wk. 5. Feb. 3. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Wk. 6. Feb. 10 Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Wk. 7. Feb. 17.Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
Wk. 8. Feb. 24.Whitman, “Preface” to 1855 Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself,”
“I Sing the Body Electric” (both 1855), Letter to Whitman from Emerson, 21
July 1855, Appendix to LG (1856), Whitman’s reply to Emerson, August 1856; “Crossing Brooklyn Fairy” (1856); “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1859).
Wk. 9. Mar 2. Thoreau, Walden
Wk. 10. Mar 9. NO CLASS—FOCUS ON PAPERS
Course Requirements TBA when enrollment is established.