Faculty Course Description
ENG 333A(I): American Romanticism and Transcendentalism (Spring 2004)
Class: Evans 123, MWF 10-10:50
Instructor: Chris Diller
Office: Evans 214
Office phone: 238-5877 ; Home phone: 235-3511
E-mail: cdiller@berry.edu
Office hours: M/T/F 2-3:30; and by appointment
Course Description
Devoted to the extraordinary development of American literature circa 1820-1865, this course will investigate a wide array of intellectual projects, literary forms, and social issues that comprised the Romantic movement in American letters. We will actually begin with the first gothic (or gothic influenced) novel published in America —Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798)—a text that explores the limits of rationality and anticipates the symbolic, psychological, and metaphysical concerns of such later writers as Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. We will then explore the development of literary Romanticism across multiple genres—travel writing, Indian captivity narratives, poetry, tales and sketches, romances and novels, essays and sermons—as we work our way through the racial conflicts, religious controversies, and communal living experiments that informed this time period. Finally, we will examine that compelling body of romantic literature produced in the early 1850's, now known as the “American Renaissance,” much of which constitutes an engagement with the darkest issue of the day: the evil of slavery. Throughout the semester, we also will work together to bring literary and historical scholarship to bear upon our readings and, as the designation of the course as “writing intensive” suggests, we will use writing extensively to help us develop and share our ideas.
Required Texts
- Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (ed. Jay Fliegelman; Penguin 0140390790 )
- James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans (Penguin 0140390243)
- Transcendentalism: A Reader (ed. Joel Myerson; Oxford UP 0195122135)
- Hawthorne : The Blithedale Romance (Penguin 0-14-039028-6)
- Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin (ed. Ann Douglas; Penguin 0-14-039003-0)
- Nineteenth Century American Poetry (ed. Spengemann; Penguin 0140435875)
Web Resources (among many others)