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Lehrende/r: Dr. Damien Schlarb
Veranstaltungsart:
Seminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan:
05.866.313
Semesterwochenstunden:
2
Credits:
8,0
Unterrichtssprache:
Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl:
- | 30
Anmeldegruppe: AS 313
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:
Active Participation Requirements
- weekly reading responses
- response paper
- final paper proposal & presentation
Prüfungsleistung
- final argumentative research paper
Anwesenheitspflicht:
Attendance is not mandatory but strongly encouraged.
Inhalt:
This literary studies seminar surveys select prose and poetry of nineteenth-century American literature. We will engage with select, representative writers and texts of American romanticism (ca. 1820-1865) as well as Realism and Naturalism (approx. 1865 – 1900). We will learn how to read critically and analyze these texts, how to situate them in longer cultural-historical narratives, and to read them through recent critical theory and lenses. All this will form the basis for developing our own arguments about textual meaning (final paper). The texts canonized (and sometimes ostracized) under the label “American Renaissance,” or romanticism, sought to announce to the world a national literature, while realist literature looked inward to determine which boons or ills the American social, political, and economic experiments had wrought. Writers of both periods, while following distinct aesthetic projects, consider cultural ambivalences of the “American experiment” that we may well recognize in our own day and age: America’s liberatory, often rhetorically verbose, promise of an enlightened democratic republic of laws and the seedy underbelly of that promise, embodied by the institution of African chattel slavery; the liberal unease with wage labor and the social division produced by financial speculation. The authors and texts we discover in this course ponder America’s multivalent origins, from indigenous life to European settler-colonial imaginary, from the idealist imaginary of its drawing rooms to the material reality of its factory floors, from its cities to its untrammeled biospheres.
Empfohlene Literatur:
Please buy The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vols B & C. 9th ed. New York: Norton, 2017. OR newer. You may use older editions, but you will be responsible for obtaining authoritative, critical versions of all assigned texts as well as the critical introductions.
Further readings will be provided through Moodle.
Zusätzliche Informationen:
Please note that this is a reading-intesive, literary studies course. You will be required to read (approx. 30 pages per week) and write (min. 250 words per week) continously throughout the semester. Please plan your semester accordingly.
Digitale Lehre:
Supplementary materials like videos, podcasts, etc., that help you prepare for our class discussions will be provided via Moodle.
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