English 144 - Spring, 2014

Post Civil-War American Literature

Class Information

Instructor: Vernon, Matthew
CRN: 42902
Time: TR 1:40-3:00
Location: 118 Olson

Description

The Civil War is often discussed as the re-founding of the country. When one considers the films Lincoln and Django Unchained or the enduring questions we have around race and the role of government, one has to ask if that founding was ever completed. Part of the argument of this course is that the nation has not fully reconciled the problems that undergirded and emerged from the war. To study this, we will undertake a broad survey of the literature antecedent and subsequent to the Civil War. We will begin with the parallel writings of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville about the nation on the verge of war, continue through Edith Wharton’s nostalgic reconstruction of the nineteenth-century, and end with Toni Morrison’s meditation on the haunting presence the Civil War continues to have on the American psyche. Along the way, there will be plenty of ghosts and detectives and pirates and sex. An exploration of the material culture of the nineteenth-century, particularly the explosion of military technology, of photography, and of print culture, will be a vital part of this course’s work.

Texts

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain
The House Behind the Cedars, Charles Chesnutt
My Bondage, My Freedom, Frederick Douglass
Israel Potter, Herman Melville
Old New York, Edith Wharton
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Detective Stories, Edgar Allen Poe
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The America Play, Suzan Lori-Parks
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain
The House Behind the Cedars, Charles Chesnutt
My Bondage, My Freedom, Frederick Douglass
Israel Potter, Herman Melville
Old New York, Edith Wharton
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Detective Stories, Edgar Allen Poe
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The America Play, Suzan Lori-Parks