01 MW5 CAC 13282 EVANS MU-115
Ostensibly a survey of writing by Americans between 1865 and 1915, this class will examine the diffusion of literary culture beyond national borders and across temporal periods. Our focus will be on tracing the transnational routes of the period’s art and ideas, with an emphasis on the significance of both art criticism and philosophy on the period’s literature.
As marked most prominently by the end of slavery, the conceptual frameworks by which American society had understood itself in the antebellum period were fundamentally disrupted during this period. Most notably, the categories of “slave” and “master” no longer delimited the imaginative border between whites and blacks, leading to an intense political and cultural battle to redefine the concept of race and the relations between races within the nation. But other changes were equally significant, and they gave rise to what can be understood as a new kind of global aesthetic public sphere. The frontier, which had stood as an imaginative border between the Indian “savage” and white “civilization,” was figuratively redistributed oversees as America moved to establish a military presence in the Pacific. Gender roles shifted, pressured by the increase of working women in the cities and the emergence of the “New Woman” in politics and high cultural settings. National character was increasingly difficult to locate with massive waves of immigration. And as American writing shifted to take account of these changes, it did so under the influence of new media technologies--new engraving processes making illustration in newspapers and magazines plentiful, mass-circulation of dime-novels and magazines, new international copyright laws, the development of photography and motion pictures--that were changing the very nature of what one thought “literature” to be. It was a period whose literature has come to be known for its attempt to define “the real” as the “normal,” a last gasp of Victorian literary decorum before the onset of modernism. But at the same time, it was a period that celebrated the exotic and the transnational. Regional and foreign dialect became constitutive of novels published in New York and Boston. Japanese screens and Negro minstrelsy made their way into the cultivated salons and drawing rooms of Gilded-Age capitalists. And artistic vogues, imported from Parisian cabarets and enacted on American shores by Japanese writers, found their way with more and more frequency into the aesthetic networks of the avant-garde.
The class will begin by tracing the circulation of Balzac in America by way of Henry James, and end with a look at Ezra Pound’s reading of Yone Noguchi. We will read standard works of American realism and naturalism, including Howells, Jewett, Norris, Dreiser, Chesnutt, Chopin and Wharton; sample philosophical writing by William James and W. E. B. Du Bois; review the period’s magazine cultures; screen a number of early motion pictures and photography collections; and spend at least one day working with French graphic art materials held at the Zimmerli Museum.
The class will require active reading and participation. There will be three essays, frequent quizzes, and a class presentation. |
