Department: English
Description: Figures, movements, and/or genres of the long nineteenth century in the US and the Americas, mainly focusing on writings from mid-century.
Credit Hours: 3
Graduate Level Course: This course is approved for graduate credit
Dates: 08/19/2024 - 12/07/2024
Location: Adlai E. Stevenson Hall 410 (STV 410)
Instructor: Susan Kalter
Class Notes: We will be looking at recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies of nineteenth-century North America to ask how successful the efforts of the 1990s New Americanist movement have been in breaking across national and nationalist boundaries to understand the continent as a whole and the United States within it. We will also be proceeding decade by decade in general through shorter (and often lesser known) writings of the mid-century period (about 1825 through 1870) and examining often-used classroom anthologies to get a sense of how the canon of American literature has been constructed, revised, reconstructed, and exploded. This is not your grandmother's nineteenth century. Does teaching works from this century matter, and if so, why does it matter? Particularly as statues to rejected deeds and ideologies fall around the country and new narratives are produced. Does it matter how teachers of the literary and cultural artifacts of this century imagine their interrelations as coherent wholes, in the present-day national sphere and in scholarship produced and exported around the globe?
Class Notes: Textbooks for the semester are still to be determined; as many readings as possible will be delivered electronically through Milner digital reserves or online links.
Textbooks have not been finalized for section.