Department of English

This course considers the significance of the color red in a group of Western novels with titles colored red. Among the nineteenth-century works--Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, and Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet--the hue invokes the military, blood, passion, and shame. Twentieth-century selections--such as Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, James Jones's The Thin Red Line, and Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse--explore the thin red line between the sane and the mad in a world of violence. Requirements: class attendance and participation; a combination of 3 short papers or tests; and a final paper.