Reading and Writing in Antebellum America (Evelev)

The antebellum era (1825-1865) has long been acknowledged as the first to see the rise of a substantial national readership and a generation of successful American writers. But the acts of "reading" and "writing" resonated beyond the realm of literature in the period, becoming metaphoric or symbolic of new ways of understanding the self, others, and even the spaces of the American landscape. This course will use the themes of reading and writing to explore a range of topics in antebellum American literature and culture. Possible topics include:

• Literacy: the politics of inclusion and exclusion in reading (possible readings include Emerson, Douglass and selections from gift books and The Lowell Offering, the Lowell factory publication).
• Authorship: what does it mean to write and for whom? (possible readings include Poe, Lowell's Fable for Critics, Melville's "Hawthorne and His Mosses," Dickinson's poetry and correspondence and Fern's Ruth Hall).
• Reading the body: examining the newly popular sciences designed to make the body legible, including phrenology and craniology (possible readings include Poe's Pym, Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Melville's Moby-Dick)
• Writing on the body: studying the emergence of new institutions of incarceration, discipline and social control in the period (with possible readings of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government," city sketches by Lydia Maria Child and Margaret Fuller, and detective stories by Poe)

This course is designed to give students a strong background in the range of antebellum literature, canonical and non-canonical, while also engaging with issues and critical approaches that can be applied to British literature and other periods.

Colonialism in the U.S. to 1860 (Konkle)

This course surveys writing about and by Native people in North America from the beginnings of European colonization to the "removal" of Native people in the United States west of the Mississippi through the mid-nineteenth century. We will read this writing in light of recent works on the history of racial differentiation and the critique of culturalism in multicultural and postcolonial theory, as well as recent Native literary, political, and cultural criticism in order to define the peculiarities of modern European colonialism in North America and the United States. Particular attention will be paid to relation between universalist political theory and the practice of colonialism in North America; Indian treaties as a volatile disruption of European authority;the figure of the Indian in the rise of U.S. nationalism; "removal" as both historical event and psychological and ideological phenomenon; and the problem of writing the history of America in the antebellum U.S.

Periodicals and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Okker)

This course examines the relationship between American literature and the periodical industry in the nineteenth century. We'll begin the course with a brief history of 19th-century American periodicals and then study 19th-century literary texts in their periodical contexts. Though the course includes poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, special attention is given to the serial novel, a genre that flourished in the nineteenth century and was seen by many editors as a "prime necessity" to a magazine. Because this course brings together periodical and literary scholarship, it is appropriate for graduate students in a number of fields, including the English Department and the School of Journalism. Students will become familiar with a wide range of nineteenth-century periodicals, including the Dial, Galaxy, Anglo African Magazine, Putnam's Monthly, National Era, Atlantic Monthly, Godey's Lady's Book, Harper's Weekly, and Harper's Monthly. Authors studied include Stowe, Melville, Fern, Zitkala-Sa, Whitman, Fuller, Delany, Howells, and Harper.

Struggle and Counter-Struggle: Race in the Making of American Literature (Williams)

Does white culture exist apart from black culture in American literature, or is there a complex dialectic between “black” and “white” cultures at the foundation of some of the nation’s greatest literature? This course will assume the latter, and our goal this semester will be to come to a deeper and more complex understanding of how black and white writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries engaged in intertextual dialogues about “race.” Perhaps another question is what role does literature play in creating, revising, and debunking national myths and ideologies. We will examine the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period characterized by the systematic exclusion of blacks from the American body politic. Following the momentary gains of Reconstruction, the gradual dismantling of black participation in the larger civic affairs of local, state, and national governance marked the “nadir.” Eugenicists like Frederick L. Hoffman theorized that “disease, vice, and profound discouragement” had placed the black race at an evolutionary dead end, inherently incapable of assimilation into civilized society. A pervasive racial discourse, a curious amalgam of minstrelsy, scientific racism and literary narrative, called for the creation and maintenance of a racialized space of whiteness to protect the American body politic from a diseased black presence. Participants will examine the mythic narratives written by white nationalist writers like Thomas Dixon, Jr. alongside D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation. As narratives of racial danger, these texts warned the nation of the threat to white civilization posed by blackness. Linking the images of antebellum blackface minstrelsy and slavery with postbellum plantation legends, white supremacists sought to control black labor and to maintain black social space. We will examine the work of white writers like Mark Twain and George Washington Cable, whose novels can be seen as anti-racist works that sought to counteract white supremacist assumptions. We will finally examine the literary responses of black writers like Charles Chesnutt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frances Harper, and Pauline Hopkins, who sought to refute malignant images of black masculinity and to counter the denial of black domesticity. The notion of “struggle and counter-struggle,” however, suggests that these writers often employed tropes drawn from the very representations they sought to refute, resulting in an “ambivalent art.”