History and Literature 97: Sophomore Tutorial

History and Literature 97: Sophomore Tutorial

Spring 2007

Harvard University

Wednesdays noon-2 pm

Dr. Robin BernsteinDr. Amy Kittelstrom

Warren 111; 495-9634Robinson M03; 496-3699

Office Hours: Thursdays 1-3Office Hours: Weds 2-4

The American Century?

Thespring semester of our sophomore tutorial focuses on the United States in the world during the twentieth century. During those hundred years, many scholars and writers argued—in different ways—that the United States occupied a unique place in world history and culture. Henry Luce famously described this century as the “American century,” while W. E. B. Du Bois declared, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” The rise of the department store and U.S. commercial culturestructured the imagination of L. Frank Baum, whose1900 novel,The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was hailed as the first American fairy tale. Immigration changed the nation’s composition in terms of race, ethnicity, and religion. Meanwhile, new forms of scholarship reconfigured the study of American literature and history, adding phrases such as “American Studies” and “the American Renaissance” to academic vocabularies. And at the close of the twentieth century, the looming millenniuminfused elements of U.S. culture and politics with new visions—both hopeful and alarming—for the future. If the twentieth century was the American Century, what could follow it? A post-American Century? Or, in the phrase of one right-wing think-tank, a New American Century? Or something else entirely?

Assignments and Grading:

This semester, we undertake a major writing project: the sophomore essay (3000-4000 words, due 4 pm on Wednesday, March 21). This essay will receive formal evaluations by an outside reader as well as your tutors. These evaluations and the essay itself will become a permanent part of your file in History and Literature.

You will consciously develop your oral communication skills by participating in each week’s conversation and also by leading one classroom discussion. These verbal skills, as well as your engagement with the course content, will be tested in a half-hour final Oral Exam. The exam involvesquestions about your sophomore essay as well as a small group of texts that you select from our fall and spring readings. To prepare for this exam, you will create an Orals List in which you will thoughtfully organize your readings around specific themes or questions. Members of your Oral Exam Committee will consider these themes and questions as they craft questions for you.

Grading:

Participation20%

Prospectus (Due February 14)5%

Working Bibliography (Due February 21)5%

Rough Draft (Due March 7)5%

Sophomore Essay (Due March 21)30%

Discussion Leadership10%

Orals List (due date to be determined)5%

Oral Exam (dates to be determined)20%

Required books:

L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Part One: Millennium Approaches (1991)

William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993)

Recommended book:

Michael Patrick Hearn, The Annotated Wizard of Oz

Course Policies:

Because this semester’s schedule is structured by History and Literature deadlines for the essay and the oral exam, students have no room to fall behind on assignments. Therefore, no extensionson any assignments will be given unless a student has a dean’s excuse.

All written work must be submitted in duplicate.

The Prospectus, Working Bibliography, Rough Draft, and Orals List are graded full credit/no credit.

Failure to complete any assignment can lower your grade in excess of the stated percentage.

All required and recommended books are on reserve at Lamont Library and available for purchase at the Harvard Coop. Required films are on reserve at Lamont.

Class Participation: Students will take collective responsibility for the success of every discussion. This responsibility involves three components. First, you are required to arrive in class having read and thought about all the reading. In other words, merely gulping down the reading is inadequate. You should come to class having chewed and digested the material thoroughly. You are expected to prepare your own thoughts, opinions, and questions before every class. Second, you must listen actively to your classmates. Your contributions to our discussion should productively engage with your colleagues’ ideas. Third, you must express your thoughts in a respectful manner that advances our conversation. Practices that disrespect your colleagues (for example, interrupting, hogging the floor, launching personal attacks, or answering cell phones) will hinder conversation; such practices, therefore, are unacceptable.

Course Schedule

January 31. The American Century

Henry Luce, “The American Century” (Life, 1941; reprinted in Michael J. Hogan, ed., The Ambiguous Legacy: U.S. Foreign Relations in the “American Century” [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999])

Read the Guidelines for the Sophomore Essay <

Please come to class prepared to discuss yourideas for your sophomore essay.

Each student will sign up to lead one discussion during the semester.

Each returning student will sign up for a meeting to discuss the final paper from last semester.

February 7. “The Problem of the Twentieth Century”

W. E. B. Du Bois, excerpts from The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Angelina Weld Grimké, Rachel (1916) Available online through Hollis at <

D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation (1915) (film is on reserve at Lamont Library)

February 14. Research Workshop

Class meetswith librarian Joe Bourneuf in the Seminar Room of Widener Library

Prospectus for Sophomore Essay due!

February 21. Common Curriculum: Selecting and Interpreting Evidence

James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle, “Introduction” and “Serving Time in Virginia: The Perspectives of Evidence in Social History,” from After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection (1982)

Thomas L. Haskell, “Objectivity is not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream,” History and Theory (1990)

Stephen Greenblatt, “Speaking with the Dead,” from Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004)

February 28. Common Curriculum: The Practice of Close Reading

Cleanth Brooks, “Keats's Sylvan Historian: History Without Footnotes,” from The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947)

Ariel Dorfman, “Of Elephants and Ducks” in The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to our Minds (1983)

Robert Darnton, “The Great Cat Massacre,” from The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984)

March 7. Commercial Desires

William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), Introduction, Chapter 1, 2, 3, 8

Kate Chopin, “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (Vogue, 16 September 1897) <

March 14. American Fairylands

L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED EVENTS:

March 14, 6 pm, Thompson Room (Barker 110): Caroline Elkins, a Pulitzer prize-winning author, will give a public lecture for History and Literature. More information about Professor Elkins is available online at < All concentrators are encouraged to attend this event!

Friday, March 16, 2 pm, location TBA: Caroline Elkins will talk with History and Literature Concentrators. This is an extraordinary opportunity for you to have close contact with a scholar of Elkins’s stature.

March 21. Heating Up the Melting Pot

Randolph Bourne, “Transnational America” (1916) Available online at <

Anzia Yezierska, “Soap and Water” (1920) Available online at < >

Langston Hughes, “Let America be America Again” (1938) Available online at
<

March 21. SOPHOMORE ESSAY DUE 4 pm

March 28. SPRING BREAK

April 4. Americans Abroad

Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903) This book is available online through Hollis.

April 11. “The American Mind”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837) <

Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day (1926), Introduction to the 1957 edition
and “Envoi”

April 18. American Renaissance?

F. O. Matthiessen, brief excerpts from American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941)

Henry Abelove, excerpts from Deep Gossip (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)

Donald E. Pease, “Introduction” to Walter Benn Michaels and Pease, eds., The American Renaissance Reconsidered (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

Recommended: Michael J. Colacurcio, “The American-Renaissance Renaissance,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3. (Sep., 1991), pp. 445-493 (available online through JSTOR)

Recommended: Jay Grossman, “The Canon in the Closet: Matthiessen’s Whitman, Whitman’s Matthiessen,” American Literature Vol. 70, No. 4 (December, 1998), pp. 799-832 (available online through JSTOR)

April 25. The Invention of American Studies

Henry Nash Smith, “Can ‘American Studies’ Develop a Method?” (1957), with commentary by Lawrence Buell, in Lucy Maddox, ed., Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 1-16.

Bruce Kuklick, “Myth and Symbol in American Studies” (1972), with commentary by Howard P. Segal, in Maddox, pp. 71-90 OR Roger E. Chapman, “Retrospective Review of Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth,” H-Ideas, H-Net Reviews, July, 2000. (access through

Amy Kaplan, “‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 1-21.

John Carlos Rowe, Introduction and “Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies,” in Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 1-40

Donald E. Pease and Robyn Weigman, “Futures,” introduction toThe Futures of American Studies(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

May 2. The New American Century? The Millennium Approaches

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Part One: Millennium Approaches (1991)

Angels in America Part One: Millennium Approaches (directed by Mike Nichols, screenplay by Tony Kushner, starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker, 2004) (film on reserve at Lamont)

Peruse the website of the think tank, “Project for the New American Century” < Be sure to read the “Statement of Principles” at <

May 23. Each sophomore must submit a request for junior tutorial, a Plan of Concentration, a cumulative bibliography, and a Choice of Field form to the History and Literature Office.

May 23, 5 pm, Thompson Room (Barker 110): History and Literature end-of-year party!

1