ENG 341 - Studies in American Literature

Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll
How do the central questions, topics, and methods of the blue humanities change our understanding of nineteenth-century U.S. fiction and its environmental legacy? This course engages with Melville’s construction of personhood, individual and collective, in Moby Dick (1851) and its wide-ranging intertexts, from Shakespearean tragedy to maritime adventure stories. We will read the novel both as a representation of the Yankee whaling industry and as a search for its broader moral, social, and spiritual meanings. Seeking “a marine tint to the imagination,” as Henry David Thoreau puts it, we will read lesser-known works of authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Stoddard, Walt Whitman, and Louisa May Alcott. Our final unit examines posthuman and interspecies frameworks in contemporary environmental activism, as advocates seek to expand definitions of legal personhood to extend rights to nonhuman entities. Topics include marine biology and animal studies, petrofiction and materialist ecocriticism, environmental justice and humanities.

Jewish American Graphic Novels
This course will consider the contribution of Jews to the historical development of the genre and techniques of the graphic novel in the United States. Our reading of the graphic novel will be contextualized within modernism and postmodernism and the changes in the notions of childhood, heroism, gender, and Jewishness in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American culture. Emphasis will be paid to close reading of the texts, including analysis of genre, panels, framing devices, layout, speech, plot, and characterization.

Literature of Reconstruction: “Postbellum - Pre-Harlem”
This course engages with the construction of race in Reconstruction-era literature, history, and law through the work of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). Born too late for the slave narrative and too early for the Harlem Renaissance, Chesnutt fell between two major African American literary movements: the nineteenth-century slave narrative and twentieth-century modernism. Examining storytelling and activism in his regionalist fiction, we trace the rise of Black print culture through the founding of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Methodologically, we will draw on recent work in Black Bibliography and archival recovery, examining the cultural politics of publication and canonization and the history of the regions in which Chesnutt used as settings of his fiction: North Carolina and Ohio. Fictional genres will include sentimentalism, realism, regionalism, and naturalism; the slave narrative and the social problem novel; journalism, legal writing, and essays. Authors may include Frederick Douglass, Albion Tourgée, Pauline Hopkins, Thomas Nelson Page, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Nature Writing, Ecocriticism, and the Problem of Social Justice
This course explores the relationship between idyllic fictions and concrete experience through two transformative centuries of American nature writing, from travel writing and transcendentalism to Cherokee protest poetry and regionalist short stories. We will use the paradigms we explore in the classroom-from evolving concepts of nature and wilderness to longstanding myths of agricultural improvement and property rights-to frame humanistic questions at stake in environmental and social justice initiatives. Fostering a more capacious understanding of social justice through the ecological imagination, this course acknowledges the role of storytelling in activism and advocacy, moving from models of individual rights to collective understandings of what is right for those who share a place. What can we learn about the origins of the Black freedom struggle from Charles Chesnutt’s fiction, which represents not only New Negro uplift in Northern cities, but also the leadership of disenfranchised storytellers in the rural South, who advocate for their communities by subverting the conventions of plantation pastoral and exposing the ecological and humanitarian costs of extractive capitalism? How might we deepen our understanding of U.S. cultural history by analyzing the linkage of environmental and social disruption in dystopian discourses, or by recovering the stories and perspectives of those excluded from citizenship and still largely overlooked by current models of social justice and environmental advocacy? How does writing, past and present, imagine alternatives to ecological crisis? In this upper-level course, we will reckon with the legacy of nature writing in American history and culture through ecocritical theory and criticism, current work on environmental justice and land rights, and in-depth analysis of primary sources in a range of genres. Some requirements for this course will involve community partnerships and field trips. As such, the course requires the willingness to spend some time off campus and outdoors, and to remain flexible and understanding if plans need to be adjusted.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s):

Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll: Two ENG courses at the 200 level or higher
Jewish American Graphic Novels: Two ENG or LIT courses at the 200 level or higher, or ART 251
Literature of Reconstruction: “Postbellum - Pre-Harlem”: Two ENG courses at the 200 level or higher
Nature Writing, Ecocriticism, and the Problem of Social Justice: Two ENG courses at the 200 level or higher, demonstrated interest in American studies or environmental studies

Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 3 times for credit if different topics.
Cross-listing(s): Literature of Reconstruction: “Postbellum - Pre-Harlem”: CRES 331
Notes:

Not all topics offered every year.
Review schedule of classes for availability.
Review specific descriptions for applicability to department requirements.
Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.
Literature of Reconstruction: “Postbellum - Pre-Harlem”: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.
Nature Writing, Ecocriticism, and the Problem of Social Justice: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.

Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.