English 130B

Book List

Fern, Fanny: Ruth Hall; Jacobs, Harriet: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Levine, Robert S.: Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. B (8th ed.); Melville, Herman: Moby Dick; Thoreau, Henry David: Walden

Other Readings and Media

Photocopied reader (available at Copy Central, 2576 Bancroft Way)

Description

Reading Longfellow, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Jacobs, Fern, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, we will pay particular attention to literary form and technique, to social and political context, and to the ideological formations and transformations of the antebellum period.  We will be concerned with issues of "self" (the search for transcendence and the entanglement in relations); landscape; the Puritan legacy; the nature and role of the emotions; the efforts to reform the American character; the democratic experiment; and the struggles over the rights and roles of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in the expanding nation.  Two midterms and one final examination will be required.