E s372L • The American Renaissance
8:30 AM-10:00 AM
This course deals with a significant and formative US literary period that extends from the 1830s to the end of the Civil War in 1865. A number of major figures in American literature appeared and flourished in these years, including Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We will read significant works by each of these authors in terms of their artistic responses to critical and American aesthetic, religious and social issues of the period, and also in relation to each other.
One mid-term take home exam 40%
One take-home final exam 60%
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 2nd Edition (Norton Critical Edition)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (Norton Critical Edition)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government (Norton Critical Edition)
These books will be available at the University Co-op by the first week of class and perhaps before.
We will also read selections from Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, along with some critical essays by various scholars, in a course reader available at Jenn's Copiers, 2200 Guadalupe, on the lower level. This course reader will also be available by the first week of class and perhaps shortly before.