English 233 - Spring, 2011

Problems in American Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Diehl, Joanne Feit
CRN: 53202
Time: CANCELLED
Location: CANCELLED

Description

This course investigates the various ways that psychoanalytic and neurocognitive approaches illuminate
early American fictional and poetic narration “to reuse what we already know about a representative
classic text in the service of what we are just beginning to learn about the parallels of mind-making and
narrative process.” Through close readings of works from Charles Brockden Brown to Henry James
alongside theoretical works that emphasize the creation of “self” and “memory,” we will examine how,
as Antonio Damasio remarks, “memory is best understood in terms of narrative process….” We will also
explore the implications of the assertion “that narrative construction (is) the very basis of
autobiographical memory” and vice versa. Finally, we will consider how mind-meaning and narrative
creation result both in a sense of imaginative autobiography and national as well as communal identity.

Requirements:

One in-class oral report
Final Essay (16-20 pp.)

Reading List:

Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or the Transformation and Memoirs of Carwin, The Biloquist (Oxford)
Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (Pantheon)
Dickinson, Emily, The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition (Franklin) (Belknap Press of Harvard
U.P.)
Douglas, Frederick, Harriet Jacobs: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas an American Slave &
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Modern Library Mass Market Paperbacks)
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance, (Oxford World’s Classics, paper).
Irving, Washington, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
James, Henry, The Turn of The Screw and Other Short Novels (Signet Classics, paper).

(In addition, there will be a class reader that will include Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” a
selection from Giorgio Agamben’s Stanzas, and recent articles relating to memory, neurocognitive
advances, and narrative imagination.)

*Please purchase the specific editions cited in the bibliography.

Should you have questions about the seminar, feel free to contact me: jfdiehl@ucdavis.edu.

*For our first session, read Damasio’s book, especially his discussion of memory and its relation to the

construction of the “self.”