350-779-001
American Literature, 1830-1900: Theorizing Regionalism: Genre, Gender, Culture
R 5:00-7:40
K. Hamilton

REQUIRED TEXTS (Tentative list):
Caroline Kirkland, *A New Home--Who'll Follow?*
Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, *Georgia Scenes*
Fetterley, Judith and Marjorie Pryse, *American Women Regionalists,
1850-1930*
Bret Harte, *Selected Stories and Sketches*
Mark Twain, *The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*
Chesnutt, Charles, *Collected Stories of Charles W. Chesnutt*
Cather, Willa, *My Antonia*
Hurston, Zora Neale, *Their Eyes Were Watching God*
Crane, Stephen, *Maggie: A Girl of the Streets*
O'Connor, Flannery, *Three by Flannery O'Connor*
--Other materials on reserve.
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
   In part, this course is a survey of exquisite 19th- and 20th-century
literary texts (short stories, sketches, and novels) that may be grouped
together because they share an interest in regional specificity.  These
texts will teach us readerly attentiveness and sensitivity as they
explode our accumulated expectations of how stories are told and how
they should be read.  This course is also about genre: what genre is and
what it is not; how and why genres emerge; how genre comes to be defined
and redefined; how genre operates within local cultures and within a
national culture.
    Taking as our object of study a body of literature that has been
defined for a century or so as a recognizable genre--regionalist
literature--we will think hard about the grounds on which different
literary critics and historians, feminist and otherwise, have named or
resisted such a literary category (Claude Simpson, Fetterley and Pryse,
William Andrews, Richard Brodhead, Amy Kaplan, and Raymond Williams).
Literary regionalism will be, for us, a complex venue for examining how
it is that a culture produces and endorses its aesthetic forms and the
way literary scholars and theorists map out and struggle over literary
history and values. To this end, in conjunction with literary texts, we
will read essays on genre by the likes of Lukacs, W. Benjamin, Alastair
Fowler, Adena Rosmarin, Jane Tompkins, and Philip Fisher).
     Together we will explore the inroads and outskirts of literatures
traditionally identified with different geographic regions of the United
States (New England, the Midwest, the West, the South, the Plains).  We
will discuss the ways regionally identified literature served local
communities, and, also, the interests of American nationalism, the way
it argues with modernism, the way it helps and resists a national, urban
culture, and the way it invites a diversity of authors to express
themselves in literary form.  We will ask how regionalist literature is
differently useful and differently crafted by writers whose identities
are shaped not only by place, but also by the designations of class,
race, gender, and ethnic/immigrant history.  We will study and challenge
certain recurrent dualisms associated with the analysis of this
literature: empathy vs. voyeuristic tourism, the rural vs. the urban,
the communal vs. the individual, wilderness vs. settlement, regionalism
vs. realism and modernism.  Ultimately, with our authors, we will savor
and probe the anecdotes and epics of place, history and identity that
constitute regionalism.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS:  2 or 3 very short position papers (two pages),
presented orally in class, 1 one-page report, 1 fifteen- to twenty-page
paper.