English 190

Book List

Brown, William Hill: The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette; Douglass, Frederick and Jacobs, Harriet: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Harper, Frances E. E.: Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted; Howells, William Dean: An Imperative Duty; Hurst, Fannie: Imitation of Life; Stowe, Harriet Beecher: Uncle Tom's Cabin; Wilson, Harriet: Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black

Description

In this seminar, we will examine the place of sentimentality in American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considering works of fiction, poetry, and performance, we will ask how and why certain kinds of feeling—and suffering in particular—have become central to the articulation of American national identity. By way of introduction, our readings will survey the migration of sentimental fiction to the United States in the 1780s, the rise of abolitionist and indigenous rights discourse in the 1830s, and the genre’s subsequent entwinement with the nascent consumer cultures and commodity forms of the early twentieth century. Our focus will then be on how sentimentality develops as an identifiable set of formal conventions, rhetorical poses, and political strategies from the mid-nineteenth century onward. We will pay particular attention to how sentimental literature, in its various guises, seeks to enable identification across boundaries of race, gender, and class. What kinds of politics do spectacles of emotion enable? What kinds of politics do they foreclose? Other topics of concern will include sympathy, mourning, nostalgia, melodrama, the cultural logic of separate spheres, religion, protest, and historical memory. 

Over the course of the semester, students will learn hands-on research methodology, complete an annotated bibliography, and write a substantial research paper. Authors to be read may include Catherine Maria Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W.E.B. Du Bois, Hart Crane, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and others. We will also be reading broadly in the fields of gender and sexuality, critical race, disability, and affect studies.

Please read the paragraph on page 2 of the instructions area of this Announcement of Classes for more details about enrolling in or wait-listing for this course.