Topics in 19th Century American Literature: 1870-1920 Cultural Geographies of American Realism, Naturalism, & Regionalism
Eric Anderson profile
TR 3-4:30
Envisioned for years as a turn-of-the-century literary badland, an awkward space bthese features as possible, primarliy by reading an ambitious amount of fiction in an equally ambitious range of cultural contexts. As we meet Frank Norris's "straight naturalism with all the guts in it," Henry James's "hovering prowling blighted presences," Mary Austin's Death Valley "country of lost borders," and Stephen Crane's "whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb," we will have to ask ourselves how the many excesses, preoccupations, and eccentricities of the writers variously called "realists," "naturalists," and "regionalists" reflect larger, national concerns. How, in other words, do narrative forms and styles represent and map new cultural geographies? And what do conjure women, naturalist werewolves, maniacal governesses, nouveau riche provincials, brooding expatriates, "unreprentant sensualists," Paiute basket makers, and a host of others tell us about the problems and possibilities of cultural exchange as one century turns into another?
Readings for the couo include: Norris, McTeague; Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Wharton, The House of Mirth; Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham or A Hazard of New Fortunes; James, "The Turn of the Screw" and The Bostonians; Chopin, The Awakening; Crane, The Red Badge of Courage and selected short fiction; London, John Barleycorn, or Alcoholic Memoirs; Chesnutt, selected stories; selections by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sui Sin Far, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Austin, and other American women regionalists; and one representative modernist work, possibly In Our Time or My Antonia. In addition, if time, availability, and inclinations permit, I would happiwill examine works by American authors who directly or indirectly invoke anthropological ideas of culture. We will explore self-conscious
attempts to narrate urban and regional subcultures, racial identity and rituals, ethnic an immigrant experience, an expatriate culture. Special attention will be devoted to the tensions between modernism and the idea of culture, and to complications from American nationalism and imperialism. Readings will include works by Wharton, DuBois, James, Stein, Dos Passos, Yezierska, Cather, Wright, Hurston, West, and Petry.
updated 2006-02-20
