Graduate Course Description

Anthropology and American Literature

Evans, Brad

A survey in three parts:

1) of the development American literature from the 1860s to 1930s understood alongside disciplinary developments in cultural anthropology, and so, for example, of the coterminous development of cultural pluralism as an idea explored in artistic movements (from nineteenth-century local color fiction to the Harlem Renaissance), academic disciplines (founding decades for the MLA, AAA, and AFS), and political platforms (i.e. pluralism versus the melting pot);

2) of the disciplinary confluence of anthropology and literary studies that emerged in the 1970s around the so-called “critique of anthropology” and a shared sense of the culture concept’s centrality to both literary and anthropological theory (such that when Clifford Geertz encouraged anthropologists to think of culture as text, Stephen Greenblatt could follow with text as culture, and both could be usefully deployed in historical projects of ideology critique);

3) and of contemporary theoretical reconsiderations of that disciplinary confluence—and, in particular of pluralism and the culture concept, that continue to turn back to the formative moment from the late nineteenth century (often by way of William James instead of Franz Boas)—as in Bruno Latour, Eduardo Kohn, Donna Haraway, Marilyn Strathern, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and others.

Students can expect a broad survey of primary and secondary materials and the standard workload for a 600-level seminar, including several class-presentations and a final paper.