AMST 342
Interior Lives: Ninteenth-Century American Literature and the Idea of Home Spring 2016
Division II Writing Skills
Cross-listed COMP 348 / ENGL 342
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

We often discuss US history in terms of leaving home: the escape from an old world and the discovery of a new one, the journey from a civilized east to a western frontier, the violent displacement of indigenous peoples and Africans from their native lands. In contrast to these narratives, this course is about staying home. It will explore houses as both actual structures and imaginary places in the work of several major nineteenth-century American writers. We will think about the home as a real space whose walls, windows, and doors organized domestic life– how and when individuals worked, ate, slept, had sex, were enslaved, raised children, cared for the sick, and died–and study the home’s functions as a metaphor for big, abstract ideas about privacy and politics, individualism and nationhood, escape and return, freedom and oppression. Through careful examination of fiction and personal narratives, as well as poetry, photographs, and domestic manuals, the class will consider what it meant to be “at home”, what it meant to be imprisoned there, and what it meant to run away. The syllabus will include writing by J.H. Banka, Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Jacobs, Herman Melville, Florence Nightingale, Edgar Allan Poe, Jacob Riis, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton, as well as secondary materials by Gaston Bachelard, Russ Castronovo, Michel Foucault, Diana Fuss, Caleb Smith, and Wharton (on decorating).
The Class: Format: tutorial
Limit: 10
Expected: 8
Class#: 3991
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: participation, 5-6 five-page tutorial papers, 5-6 two-page response papers
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis; not available for the fifth course option
Enrollment Preferences: Sophomore, Junior, or Senior standing and at least one previous class in American Studies, English, or Comparative literature, {or} permission of the instructor
Distributions: Division II Writing Skills
Notes: meets Division 2 requirement if registration is under AMST; meets Division 1 requirement if registration is under COMP or ENGL
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
AMST 342 Division II COMP 348 Division I ENGL 342 Division I
Attributes: AMST Arts in Context Electives

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