Hauptseminar Into the American Century From the Gilded Age to the End of World War I

The 20th century is often considered -the American century” when the United States developed from a global player to a superpower. But prior to World War I, most contemporaries did not perceive the United States to be rising to global power after the devastations of the Civil War in a period many sneeringly referred to as -The Gilded Age.” This seminar, then, looks at the cultural development of a period that begins with the attempt to reconstruct an economically devastated and politically ruined country and ends with the United States emerging as a global superpower after the annihilation of Europe in World War I. Often shaped by and shaping new scientific theories (Darwinism), technological inventions (the railroad and telegraph), geographical expansions, military interventions (Cuba, the Philippines), and economic cycles of boom and bust, literary texts, visual art, and performative culture blossomed in previously unexpected fashions within this fifty-year span. As authors, artists, and performers engaged with their social context, political ideas and movements came to further shape cultural and literary productions from first wave feminism to African American hopes for emancipation and the desire for social equality manifested in the Progressive movement. To provide insights into the diversity and complexity of the late 19th and early 20th century, this seminar will engage with novels, short stories, poetry, and articles by Ida B. Wells, William Dean Howell, Sarah Orne Jewett, Stephen Crane, Booker T. Washington, Theodor Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Uptown Sinclair, or W.E.B. DuBois. In addition, the seminar will look at paintings by Homer Winslow and Thomas Eakins and consider the emergence of two novel art forms: photography and silent film. This seminar, then, aims to introduce students to the abundant plurality of literary and cultural texts of a historical period which for many laid the foundation for the American century and for others meant exclusion from prosperity and political participation. Anglistik Universität Duisburg-Essen SoSe 2016 Dr. Meinel Dietmar