English 190

Other Readings and Media

Readings will include works by Henry James, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, and James Weldon Johnson.

Description

Our readings will focus on major American writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century whose works helped to define the literary modes of realism and naturalism. We will be asking questions about how literature responds to new ways of representing the world that emerge with technologies such as photography and the phonograph that challenge what it means to capture and document “reality” itself. We will also investigate how writers understood the social and political mission of literary expression at a time of rapid change in the years after the Civil War, and trace the resonance of this period for later authors who locate their texts in a realist or naturalist tradition. Our discussions will explore the formal elements that distinguished realism and naturalism from other styles of American writing, and also look at some of the dominant themes--from economic anxiety and evolutionary decline to sexual exploitation and criminal violence—that have long defined these genres for readers and critics.

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