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Apr 29, 2024
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ENGL089S PO - American Literature and the 19th-Century Democratic ImaginaryWhen Offered: One-time only; fall 2015.
Instructor(s): B. Emerson
Credit: 1
In this seminar, we engage and evaluate the ways authors grappled with the values, oversights and paradoxes of ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and their descent from the Jacksonian era through Reconstruction (1830s to 1880s). People of these decades experienced a rapidly shifting socio-political world thanks to numerous material, ideological and historical developments: the transportation and communications revolutions; population growth and territorial expansion; the entrenchment of the market economy and the birth of the mass culture industry; international wars and sectional crisis; the abolition of slavery and the experimental failure of Reconstruction. Through it all, writers produced literary works that reflected, refracted and transformed the ways people and communities understood democracy–both good and bad–in an American context. Working through a variety of texts, we seek a better understanding of the 19th-century US democratic imaginary, the evolution of democratic forms and norms and the paradigms that have descended to our contemporary moment. Blending the texts of canonical authors like Melville and James with those from popular writers like Fern and Alcott, we seek to diversify our understanding of 19th century authors and reading communities as well as the various political discourses they encountered. To provide context, we also look at historical documents from the Revolutionary period as well as the mid-19th century-the observations of foreign visitors, political speeches, campaign biographies, Supreme Court decisions, legislative gag rules and compromises-to work through events and ideas making up this era’s democratic imaginary. Students demonstrate their learning through a variety of assignments, including bi-weekly think-pieces, contextual presentations, annotated bibliographies and final research papers.
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