| Professor Robert
Dunne
318 Willard Hall 832-2756 dunne@ccsu.edu |
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Required Texts:
Dickens, American Notes (Penguin)
Douglass, Narrative (Dover)
Emerson, Selected Essays (Bantam)
Fern, Ruth Hall (Rutgers UP)
Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
(Penguin)
Melville, Moby-Dick (Norton)
Paskoff & Wilson, ed.,
The Cause of the South (essays from De Bow’s Review) (Louisiana State UP)
Poe, Fall of the House of Usher
and Other Tales (Signet)
Thoreau, Walden (Penguin)
Recommended Secondary Readings
(on Reserve):
Susan Harris, 19th-Century
American Women’s Novels
F. O. Matthiessen, American
Renaissance
David Reynolds, Beneath the
American Renaissance
Eric Sundquist, To Wake the
Nations
COURSE OBJECTIVES
In this course you will be
exposed to some of the key writers of the American Renaissance, that period
named by the scholar F. O. Matthiessen which covers the first half of the
nineteenth century. In his influential work American Renaissance
(1941), Matthiessen singled out five American writers—Emerson, Whitman,
Melville, Hawthorne, and Thoreau—whom he thought best celebrated the "possibilities
of democracy." Matthiessen was writing during a time when a nationalistic
spirit was pervasive throughout American culture. Immersed in his
time and place, he nearly single-handedly established the canonical American
writers from the antebellum period. As a consequence, many writers
whose works did not accord with Matthiessen's thesis were deemed secondary
or forgotten by scholars. In this course, we will visit most of Matthiessen's
celebrated writers; however, we will study them in their historical context,
which will allow us to examine other writers whose works did not neatly
coincide with his thesis—such as works that touch upon issues like slavery
and the women's rights movement. Thus this course will provide you
with a deeper understanding of the key writers of the period as well as
the social and philosophical context in which they wrote.
Assignments:
There will be two 8-page critical
papers on any of the texts read in class; outside research is not required
or encouraged for these papers. I will expect you to follow the MLA
Guide for Writers of Research Papers, 4th ed., for typing and documentation
format. The topic of these papers, which I hope will reflect your
own problems/questions about the readings or about issues raised in class,
will be chosen by you, although I will furnish you with suggested topics
for at least the first paper. Please pay careful attention to the
mechanics of writing and to supporting your opinions of the texts.
I encourage you to consult with me about paper topics or to hand in drafts
of your work. You will pretty much determine the "due" dates for
the papers: I have listed in the syllabus the final due date for
each paper, but you may submit them at any time up to that date.
Only under extraordinary circumstances will rewrites be accepted.
I will expect you to be prepared
to talk about the readings on the day they are scheduled in the syllabus.
There will also be a midterm and a final, both in take-home essay format.
There will be no make-ups given for exams, except in rare circumstances.
There may be surprise quizzes on the readings to ensure that you keep up
with the assignments.