Unit name | New England's Dreaming: American Literature from Emerson to James |
---|---|
Unit code | ENGL29025 |
Credit points | 20 |
Level of study | I/5 |
Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
Unit director | Professor. Karlin |
Open unit status | Not open |
Pre-requisites |
None. |
Co-requisites |
None. |
School/department | Department of English |
Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
The ‘idea of America’ is a motivating force, and animating presence, in American literature from its earliest period. This unit concentrates on how the answer to Crevecoeur’s famous question, in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), ‘What then is the American, this new man?’ shapes the literature produced in New York and New England during the nineteenth century by a group of exceptional writers and thinkers, beginning with Washington Irving and concluding with Henry James. The literary and cultural ferment of American Transcendentalism, the Abolitionist Movement, the reaction to ‘progress’ and the expansion of the frontier, the trauma of the Civil War, and the disenchantment of post-Civil War society, all feature in the unit as significant contexts, but the focus will be on detailed readings of novels, poems, essays, and works of criticism by the primary authors.
Aims:
One x 2 hour seminar per week.
Both summative essays map onto ILOs 1-4.
Reading for the unit is based on the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th edition, volume B (1820-1865) which contains the set reading for most of the primary texts.
Primary texts:
Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (‘The Author’s Account of Himself’, ‘Rip Van Winkle’) (1819)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1851)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1856)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855) and selections from Drum-Taps (1865)
Emily Dickinson, selected poems