AMST 338
The American Renaissance
Spring 2014
Division II
Cross-listed
ENGL 338
This is not the current course catalog
Class Details
The 1840s and 50s are known as “the American Renaissance,” a watershed in American literary history which includes Thoreau’s Walden and Melville’s Moby-Dick, Emerson’s essays and Hawthorne’s fiction. It also includes major abolitionist writings by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe and the groundbreaking poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We will read through this essential period of American literature by asking how key authors figure intimacy, emotion, and experience. That inquiry, in turn, will help us explore the formations of literary work and its interventions into the culture of a nation heading toward Civil War and conscious of its fractures. How did these authors imagine the gulf between self and not-self, and the potential to bridge that gulf? Did the written word have the power to make readers “feel right,” as Stowe hoped, or to correct them when they felt wrong, as Douglass attempts to do when he tells his audience that slave songs express sorrow, not joy? As we move through a rich variety of texts, we will explore how authors try to move their readers, and how they conceive of emotion’s relationship to the individual person and to the culture at large.
The Class:
Format: seminar
Limit: 25
Expected: 20
Class#: 3755
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Limit: 25
Expected: 20
Class#: 3755
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation:
active class participation and about 20 pages of writing divided across 2 or 3 essays
Prerequisites:
a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam
Enrollment Preferences:
English majors
Distributions:
Division II
Notes:
meets Division 1 requirement if registration is under ENGL; meets Division 2 requirement if registration is under AMST
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ENGL 338 Division I AMST 338 Division II
This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ENGL 338 Division I AMST 338 Division II
Attributes:
AMST Arts in Context Electives
ENGL Literary Histories B
ENGL Literary Histories B
Class Grid
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AMST 338 - 01 (S) SEM The American Renaissance
AMST 338 - 01 (S) SEM The American RenaissanceDivision IIAshley C. BarnesMR 1:10 pm - 2:25 pm
Hopkins Hall 1053755
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