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Instructors: Dr. Damien Schlarb
Event type:
Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.866.313
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
8,0
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 30
Registration group: AS 313
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
I will assume a basic familiarity with the techniques of literary analysis and academic writing on your part (content of Written English I and Proseminar I).
Credit Requirements
- regular
- weekly online responses
- final paper proposal with annotated bibliography
- final argumentative research paper
Intended Learning Outcomes
At the end of the course, students will be able to…
- name pertinent works and authors of the American Renaissance
- 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
In order to reach these goals, students are required to…
- 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
Contents:
2017, 2018, and 2019 mark the bicentennials of four major authors in classic American Literature, or the so-called American Renaissance: Henry David Thoreau (*1817), Frederick Douglass (*1818), Herman Melville (*1819), and Walt Whitman (*1819). This course takes this occasion as incentive to introduce students to the three major works in American Literature: Moby-Dick by Melville, Walden by Thoreau, and Leaves of Grass by Whitman. Our focus will be on engaging these three texts in their generic and formal specificity via close reading. In doing so, we will pursue both formal and political questions: How do these texts shape their respective literary genres? How do they engage the projects of literary romanticism and realism? How do they represent and interact with the social phenomena of their time, such as religion, race, gender, expansionism, nationalism, technology, etc? On a secondary level, we will also review the state of scholarship on these pieces by discussing classical critical readings by F.O. Matthiessen (The American Renaissance) and Leo Marx (The Machine in the Garden) alongside more recent approaches from the perspectives of eco-criticism, new materialism, as well as various postcritique approaches (e.g. affect studies).
Required Readings
- Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Hershel Parker. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 2017.
- Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings. Ed. William Rossi. 3rd Revised edition. New York: Norton, 2008.
- Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Ed. Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002.
- Supplementary readings will be provided on ILIAS. Please be sure to log on at the beginning of the semester using the password melville1819.
Students interested in Frederick Douglass are encouraged to audit Dr. Nele Sawallisch’s AS 313 course on Black Intellectuals in the 19th Century (Mo. 12:00 p.m.-1:45 p.m., BKM, 00-025, SR 3). If you plan to attend, please contact Dr. Sawallisch ahead of time via email. Paper topics connecting Douglass and any of the three course authors listed above can be discussed with me.
Recommended reading list:
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP, 1941.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London, UK: Oxford UP, 1964.
Phillips, Christopher N., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance. Cambridge New York: Cambridge UP, 2018.
Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.
Additional information:
GUEST LECTURE
Russ Castronovo (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
on
"Whitman’s Sexual Politics"
28 November 2018, Philosophicum, P 103, 4-6 p.m.
Everybody welcome!
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