We’re going to arrive on the scene right in the middle of the greatest century of progress that history has ever experienced: the nineteenth century, the century when the technology of reading changed within just eighty years from candles to whale oil to kerosene to gas to electricity. In the United States, the technology of writing was changing just as radically, thanks to some theory by Ralph Waldo Emerson and some experimental work by Walt Whitman.
The results of that creative turmoil are still with us, and still important. They keep showing us new ways of understanding who we are and what it is that we see as we pass through the world. In this semi-survey course, we’ll focus primarily on our chosen writers’ ways of using language. The course itself isn’t writing-focus, but you’ll see: after you’ve seen what an amazingly huge range of things can be accomplished in words by writers as different as Henry James and Ernest Hemingway or Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, your own language will grow bigger, stronger, more interesting, and prettier.
Texts, at the university bookstore:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” and Other Essays
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, eighth edition, volume C
American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, volume 1
Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
Four exams, midterm, and final.