Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne redefined literary fiction in mid-nineteenth century America: this course will go deep into some major works of both writers, their odd relationship with each other, and the conflicted world of pre-Civil War America, when everything was about ready to fall apart and both writers produced their most important works. We will of course be spending time with Melville's Moby Dick, the weirdest American novel of the nineteenth century, and with Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter and House of the Seven Gables, in which he turned his obsession with his witch-hunting Puritan forebears into literary art. Also included will be Typee, Melville's popular adventure novel about ship-jumping sailors in Polynesia and The Confidence Man, his satire featuring a con-man on a Mississippi riverboat, as well as Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne's novel of a failed utopian experiment and his strange Rome-set last work about murder and art, The Marble Faun. Assignments will include a critical research paper, shorter module papers, and brief weekly assignments.