This seminar will take us back to the first half of the nineteenth century, the notorious “Age of Jackson,” when American Romanticists and Transcendentalists sought to participate in the formation of a national culture and a bustling society of the newly independent United States. Among the prominent authors at the time were Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose writings will be at the center of our interest in this course. We will trace their ancestries, learn about the artistic and intellectual underpinnings of their work, and undertake close readings of (selected) short stories and novels. Our aim will be to examine Hawthorne’s oeuvre in relation to America’s past and present, and Melville’s literary attempts to flee the confines of post-Puritan America by repeatedly setting his narratives in faraway places. Given the widely different literary aims and styles of the texts we will study, our main task will be to determine what is distinctively “American” about them and how they represent or express the social realities and cultural aspirations of the new nation.
Students should purchase the following novels:
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Norton Edition
---. Blithedale Romance, Bedford/St. Martin Edition
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Norton Edition
A selection of short stories will be distributed in class. |
