English 460-001
Major Figures in 19th Century American Literature: Hawthorne and Poe
Instr: Hamilton, Kristie
Office: CRT 478; 229-5959
e-mail: kgh2@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: TR; 12:30-1:45pm; BUS S241
Course Description
We will study the literary and critical works of Hawthorne and Poe in depth in their historical and cultural contexts. Our work will involve primarily the close reading of literary texts as a mode of investigation for determining the ways literary craft was shaped by, and the ways it shaped, early nineteenth-century American culture. We will analyze the representations in Poe and Hawthorne of: the relationship between the aesthetic and the economic, the function of gender, class, race and region in shaping selfhood and social relations, the emergent definition of human experience as an internal, "psychic" process, and the practicability and social ramifications of such widely debated concepts as self-reliance and utopian reform. Other major issues to be discussed will be these authors' conceptions of the role of history and art in the constitution of knowledge or as vehicles for seeing and being. We will be concerned with issues of genre (the tale, the sketch, the critical essay, the detective story, the novel, lyric and narrative poetry), mass culture, (magazine publication, the railway journey, popular spiritualism, and the theater) and popular philosophy (transcendentalism, republicanism, American Calvinism, mesmerism, communalism). Finally, we will assess the ways these authors' works have been used to insist upon certain twentieth-century assumptions about the "nature" of literature, selfhood, and modernity.
Student Work: Two sets of discussion questions, two short critical essays and one longer critical essay. All required reading must be completed, and class participation is required.
Required Texts: (Available at Peoples' Books, 2122 E. Locust Street--at Maryland Avenue and Locust--, 962-0575):
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Tales and Sketches. Library of America.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Penguin Classics
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Oxford University Press.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales (Library of America)
