American Literature 1830-1929

FALL SEMESTER: Beginning roughly in the 1830s, a number of American authors set out to “invent” American literature as a distinctively national literature rather than merely an English literature written elsewhere. Thoreau began his experiment living at Walden Pond exactly on the 4th of July. Walt Whitman, in his “Song of Myself,” refers to himself as “Walt Whitman, American.” And Emerson wrote about the “American Scholar.” It was also the case, however, that the country founded upon the proposition that “all men are created equal” had to deal with its Constitution’s provision that some men—slaves—were to count as only 3/5ths of a man, while others—Indians—were not to be counted at all. The land of liberty was also a land of slavery and colonial conquest. This course examines the invention of American literature from roughly the 1830s to 1890, the year Sioux Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee and the year when the Bureau of the Census announced the “closing” of the American frontier. In addition to those named above, our other authors include Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, William Apess, Herman Melville, Margaret Fuller, and Mark Twain.

SPRING SEMESTER: The Closed Frontier to the Great Depression, 1890-1929: With the “closing” of the frontier in 1890, America had “manifested” its “destiny” from “sea to shining sea.” But as the century turned, America was a very different place from what it had been before. The years 1880-1924 were the great age of immigration; more than three million people from China, Southern and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and elsewhere arrived here. In those years, Americans were also still coming to terms with the implications of Darwin’s theories—only to discover the new intellectual challenges of relativity and psychoanalytic theory. If Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman struggled to invent a distinctive literature for America, many of the writers of this period had to figure out just what America was before they could produce its literature. This question became even more complicated after 1917, when young Americans found themselves abroad—fighting in World War I.