The below is a course sketch, not a fully realized syllabus. It provides information about the pedagogical approach and primary texts the course would propose to cover.
This approach to a wide-ranging survey introduces students to a wide array of major literary and cultural trends of the period, with the idea that such a survey is a sketch that should introduce students to the basic literary topography of a historical period; that map is then drawn into relief by later, more focused, coursework. In the case of this course, we will move students through the key literary developments in poetry and fiction, while at the same time foregrounding various literary responses to racism, changing immigration patterns, women’s rights and industrialization, which I take to be the key social changes in U.S. culture during this period.
Weeks 1-3: Regional Realisms
Week 1-2: The “Reconstructed” South
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson
Week 2: The Cosmopolitan Scene
Edith Wharton, “The Muse’s Tragedy”
Week 3: Myths of Westward Expansion
Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel”
Charlot (Bear Claw) “He has filled graves with our bones”
Weeks 4-5: New Lyric Voices
Week 4: Containing Multitudes
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Week 5: Radical Individualism
Emily Dickinson, selected poems
Weeks 6-8: Transitions to Modernity
Week 6: A Rapidly Changing World
Henry Adams, Education of Henry Adams (”Quincy” and “Nunc Age”)
Week 7: Women On the March
Kate Chopin, “At the ‘Cadian Ball,” “The Storm”
Week 8: The Color Line
Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition
Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (”Atlanta Exposition Address”)
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (”Of Our Spiritual Strivings,”
“Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others”)
Weeks 9-16: Modernisms
Week 9-10: New American Vernaculars
William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All
Hart Crane, selections from The Bridge
Hemingway “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
Fitzgerald “Winter Dreams”
Week 11-13: New Narrative Forms and the Burden of History
Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Week 14-15: The Harlem Renaissance and Inherited Form
Langston Hughes, Selections from The Weary Blues
Countee Cullen, Selections from The Black Christ
Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”
Week 16: Poverty, Labor, and Literary Form
Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
Steinbeck, Selections from Grapes of Wrath