thinkingwithliterature

For most of our history, Americans have been encouraged to think of themselves as a nation of self-made, “rugged individuals”—as a people who are defined by their strivings and inexorable success. But what about those who don’t succeed, or who disagree with its popular definition? In this class, we will be reading American literature against the grain, exploring the narrative of self-making against the categories of loss, of the loser, and of the stories Americans have woven out of these darker strands. Starting with a selection of classic fictions of success dating back to the 18^th century, we will look at a series of novels, poems, stories and films that build upon or challenge the narrative of economic individualism. To what degree has American success been defined by financial success or failure? What other measures of success are available? Who is a “loser,” and to what degree has America been defined by its losers? 

Dr. Christine Holbo, Fall 2014, Tu-Th 10:30 , LL 150

Description: For most of our history, Americans have been encouraged to think of themselves as a nation of self-made, "rugged individuals”--as a people who are defined by their strivings and inexorable success. But what about those who don't succeed, or who disagree with its popular definition? In this class, we will be reading American literature against the grain, exploring the narrative of self-making against the categories of loss, of the loser, and of the stories Americans have woven out of these darker strands. Starting with a selection of classic fictions of success dating back to the 18th century, we will look at a series of novels, poems, stories and films that build upon or challenge the narrative of economic individualism. To what degree has American success been defined by financial success or failure? What other measures of success are available? Who is a "loser,” and to what degree has America been defined by its losers? 

In the nineteenth century, the French novel above all others set the standard for the genre as high art and social critique. This course examines American writers’ self-definition in relation to the French novel, asking how Americans developed a novel of their own and what they learned from the naughty, refined, imperial, revolutionary, ironic and moralistic French. How did the French novel teach lessons in luxury and misery, social ambition and social solidarity to their sister republic? How did American writers map the landscape of French provincial and metropolitan life onto the spaces of American possibility—those of the frontier, the salon, the bedroom, the ocean voyage, and the newspaper? Comparing three classic French novels to three classic American novels, we will discuss the ways American writers imitated, challenged, recast or rejected the themes and narratives of the French tradition. We will also consider the ways French writers imagined their own national experience in relation to America and other “exotic” spaces. 

Literary realism, which dominated American literature between the Civil War and the First World War, was defined by the ambition to represent the realities of an increasingly complex economic and social order. But what does it mean to “represent reality” by means of fiction? In this course, we will consider how the challenge of translating “real life” into literature structured American realism from the antebellum triumph of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the experimental writings of Gertrude Stein. We will explore the different ways in which writers of the period defined “reality”  as well as the ways in which these visions of the real inspired new forms of literary art. Novelists sought the real in the harsh facts of an objective social order, in the depths of the individual psyche, in human relationships, in the differing worlds of work and home, of men and women, and in the experience of children. They imitated and drew upon the work of journalists, sociologists, and historians, but they also explored the idea that imaginative fiction was the most appropriate means of representing and understanding the complexity of modern society. An introduction to the major writers and texts of the late nineteenth century American literary canon, this course also introduces students to the documentary impulse that has remained a major wellspring of twentieth and twenty-first century fiction.