English 260 - Spring, 2012

American Literature: Civil War to 1914

Class Information

Instructor: Freeman, Elizabeth
CRN: 94230
Time: M 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Earlier American
Focus: Interdiscipline

Description

Kinship and US Empire,

Dominant antebellum Anglo-American culture was shaped by the seemingly smooth fit of the middle-class family, a liberal-democratic polis, and the novel as a genre that bound these things together. Yet during the rise of a United States empire after the Civil War, this alignment was troubled. On the one hand, kinship law helped imperialist projects remake the subjects of the territories they conquered. On the other, exploration, occupation, and annexation of territories exposed Anglo-Americans to kinship norms that threatened to denaturalize their own. While the kinship practices of Native Americans and the experiments of the Second Great Awakening had certainly outraged many Anglos, new postbellum developments such as the Westward movement, Reconstruction, the annexation of Hawaii, Chinese immigration, and the Spanish-American war exposed them to even more kinship forms that rendered their own families merely “relative.” And meanwhile, by about 1870, the discipline of anthropology had found its home in the U.S., such that educated Americans were aware that kinship itself was an object of study, while fictional genres such as local color and naturalism emerged as a kind of lay anthropology. This course, then, will explore U.S. literature through the lens of kinship studies, asking how, in the years 1865-1900, encounters with new forms of family threatened Anglo-Americans, offered them possibilities, and triggered remakings of both American and New World cultures. What effect might these encounters with New World kinship have had on literary genre and form? What role might literature have had as a successful or failed part of any particular imperialist remaking of kinship?


Text below, plus readings by Lewis Henry Morgan, Charles Darwin, Claude Levi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud, Gayle Rubin, Hortense Spillers, Marc Shell, Nancy Bentley, Judith Butler, and other luminaries.

Grading

In-class presentation: 25%
Class participation: 25%
Final paper: 50%

Texts

The Making of Americans, selections, Gertrude Stein
Six Weeks in the Sioux Teepees, Sarah Wakefield
A Modern Instance, William Dean Howells
Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey
Of One Blood, Pauline Hopkins
Puddn’head Wilson and “Those Extraordinary Twins”, Mark Twain
The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett
Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Imperium in Imperio, Sutton E. Griggs