American Renaissance Re Considered

The so-called -American Renaissance” (ca. 1830-1865) traditionally stretches from Edgar Allan Poe to Herman Melville, including among many others Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and contains some of the richest and most influential texts in canonized American literature. This seminar will present a sampling of these literary works, BUT it will also show that these works, produced mainly by East Coast (mainly New England, Puritan-influenced) male, white authors, encode a much wider notion of 19th-century American identity than is generally associated with -American Renaissance.” Crossing racial, class, and gender lines, many non-canonical texts are now dealt with by leading American Renaissance scholars; Timothy B. Powell summarizes this well in his ground-breaking Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance (2000), which -radically dislodges the discursive foundations of received notions of the American Renaissance” (52). This -dislodging” will prove exciting for the seminar participants! Not only will we look at new ethnic/immigrant/female voices in the American Renaissance, but we will also investigate the new interest which has arisen in some of the canonized authors such as Poe, who is a current cult figure, and Melville, who is having his own renaissance right now in American Studies. In addition to texts (including literary history and some theory) in our semester reader, we will read the three full works listed in the -Literatur- section of this LSF entry (below). Other works will include Poe's -The Fall of the House of Usher- (1839) and -The Gold Bug- (1843); Hawthorne's -The Minister's Black Veil- (1836) and excerpts from -Young Goodman Brown- (1835) and The Scarlet Letter (1850); texts by the Transcendentalist thinkers Emerson and Thoreau; Melville's novella -Benito Cereno- (1855) as well as poems by Melville and Whitman. These -white male- mainstreamed works will be interlaced with texts (or text excerpts) by women, African Americans, Native Americans, Southwest vernacular humorists, including the slave narratives by Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Jacobs (1861); activist and former slave Sojourner Truth's influential speech, -Ain't I a Woman?- (1851); the first African American novel, Clotel; or the President's Daughter (1853) by William Wells Brown; Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852); the westering woman Caroline Kirkland's accounts (1839); Fanny Fern's newspaper columns; and some poems by Emily Dickinson. This might be your -cheapest- seminar this semester! The full works which we will read are available online. I'll try to supply pdfs in case you want to print them out. The novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of The Seven Gables (written in 1851), is quite long, however, and you might prefer to order an economical edition via amazon or MankelMuth. Please make sure the edition you order is unabridged, NOT a shortened school version! this is the online text: http://www.online-literature.com/hawthorne/seven_gables/0/ Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself (1845): http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/DouNarr.html John Rollin -Yellow Bird- Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854): http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=wright2;idno=wright2-2039 All other works (short stories, excerpts from novels, literary history, and theory) will be available in the semester reader. Anglistik - Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft Universität Siegen SoSe 2012 Ph.D. Waegner Cathy Ph.D