05.866.122 Proseminar 122 American Studies: Realism and Naturalism

Lehrende/r: Dr. Damien Schlarb

Veranstaltungsart: Proseminar

Anzeige im Stundenplan: 05.866.122

Semesterwochenstunden: 2

Unterrichtssprache: Englisch

Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 45

Anmeldegruppe: AS 122

Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie
Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007.

Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie

Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches:
Required Materials

Levine, Robert, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1865-1914. 9th ed. Vol. C. New York: Norton, 2016.

Further readings will be provided on ILIAS. 

Requirements

• online responses
  
• 1 thesis-driven short presentation on readings
  
• proposal assignment
  
• final argumentative research paper (page requirements in Prüfungsordnung)
  

• ·       name pertinent works and authors of American literary realism and naturalism
  
• ·       identify and name characteristic formal properties and techniques for this period
  
• ·       identify and name relevant literary themes, stylistic devices, and motifs
  
• ·       compare and contrasts texts based on their treatment of said themes, devices, and motifs
  

• ·       review analytical reading strategies, critical theories, and compositional strategies
  
• ·       review socio-historical, philosophical, economical, and religious ideas that underpin the literature of the period
  
• ·       relate these contexts to critical readings of primary texts
  
• ·       explore their own thinking on these text through writing
  
• ·       articulate relevant research questions, based on historical and literary analyses
  
• ·       conceptualize an original research project that addresses those questions
  
• ·       perform independent research into primary and secondary sources
  
• ·       compose an original argumentative research essay that answers said questions
  
• ·       perform critical literary analyses of primary literary texts and secondary criticism, based on pertinent critical theories, historical context, and hermeneutical strategies hypothesize textual meaning, based on textual evidence garnered by applying those strategies to primary texts
  

Inhalt:
This proseminar introduces students to American literary realism and naturalism (ca. 1865-1914). The course surveys the works of authors and poets including William Dean Howells, Charles W. Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Hamlin Garland, Cate Chopin, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser. We will be interested in the way these authors contend with formal issues of representation, particularly verisimilitude, as well as other literary periods. We will discuss characteristic literary subgenres and phenomena of nineteenth-century American literature after 1865, including competing forms of literary realism, the rise of African American literature, Southern literature, as well as women’s and workers’ fiction.

Empfohlene Literatur:
Barrish, Phillip J. The Cambridge Introduction to American Literary Realism. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

*Bell, Michael Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

*Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884-1919. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

*Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Claybaugh, Amanda. The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. *Dudley, John. “Realism and Naturalim.” Oxford Bibliographies, 2012. http:/www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199827251/obo-9780199827251-0059.xml

*Fetterley, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.

Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London, U.K.: Verso, 2013.

Kaplan, Amy. “‘The Knowledge of the Line’: Realism and the City in Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes.” PMLA 101, no. 1 (1986): 69–81.*- - -. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988.