Reading the World in American Literature: From the Puritans to Contemporary Nature Writing 4219-RS275
1. Reading the World: An Introduction
2. Jonathan Edwards, Images or Shadows of Divine Things (selections)
Mason Lowance, “Jonathan Edwards and the Knowledge of God,” in: The Language of Canaan Metaphor and Symbol in New England from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 249-276. (ASC library)
3. William Bartram, Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, Part II, Chapter III
Hans Huth, “Scientists, Philosophers and Travelers,” in: Nature and the American. Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1972, 14-29. (ASC library)
Pamela Regis, “Description and Narration in Bartram’s Travels” in: Describing Early America. Bartram, Jefferson, Crèvecoeur and the Influence of Natural History. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999, 40-78.
4. Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, Chapters IV-IX
Peter Antelyes, Tales of Adventures Enterprise. Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion. New York: Columbia UP, 1990, 45-91.
5. Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery”
Rochelle L. Johnson, Passions for Nature. Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienaton. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009, 66-90.
6. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (I-IV), Journal (selections)
Kenneth Burke, “I, Eye, Ay – Emerson’s Early Essay on “Nature.” Thoughts on the Machinery of Transcendence,” in: Romanticism. Critical Essays on American Literature, eds James Barbour, Thomas Quirk. New York: Garland, 1986, 27-42.
Lee Rust Brown, The Emerson Museum. Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 59-128.
7. Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, Chapters I-III
Annette Kolodny, “Recovering Our Mother’s Garden, in: The Land Before Her. Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984, 112-130.
Michaela Bruckner Cooper, “Textual Wandering and Anxiety in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes,” in: Margaret Fuller’s Cultural Critique. Her Age and Legacy, ed. Fritz Fleischmann. New York: Peter Lang, 2000, 171-189.
8. Edgar Allan Poe, “Eleonora,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” “Landor’s Cottage”
Kent Ljungquist, “Picturesque Disorder: The Deceptive Dream Land of Poe’s Fictional ‘Landscapes,’” in: The Grand and the Fair. Poe’s Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques. Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1984, 107-140.
9. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (“Brute Neighbors”), “Walking”
Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds. Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, 223-254.
10. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours (“Spring”), “A Dissolving View” (in Essays on Nature and Landscape)
Lucy Maddox, “Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rustic Primer”; Tina Gianquitto, “The Noble Designs of Nature: God, Science, and the Picturesque in Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours,” in: Susan Fenimore Cooper. New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works. Eds Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson. Athens and London: The Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001, 83-95, 169-190.
Rochelle L. Johnson, Passions for Nature. Nineteenth-Century America’s Aesthetics of Alienaton. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009, 23-65.
11. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (sections 1-6), “Our Old Feuillage,” “Song of the Universal”
Jerome Loving, Emerson, Whitman, and the American Muse. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1982, 5-22, 55-82.
12. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (selections)
Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001, 182-199, 238-271.
13. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (selections)
Sandra Humble Johnson, The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1992.
14. Gary Snyder, selected poems
15. Discussion of term papers
Type of course
elective courses
Mode
Prerequisites (description)
Course coordinators
Learning outcomes
Knowledge: a graduate knows and understands in depth
- the significance of cultural studies, religion studies, history, sociology, political science political science and administration, their position in the scholarship system, the specificity of these fields and its relation to other fields of study within the humanities and social sciences, the paradigm of interdisciplinary research and the need to integrate perspectives and research
methods in the field of American Studies
- select facts, objects, processes, creations, and cultural phenomena related to the Americas, as well as theories explaining the complex dependencies between them, which constitute general knowledge from the field of cultural and religion studies; historical, social, political, and economic contexts characteristic of the cultural lives of the Americas
- the terminology, methods, tools, and data gathering, select research traditions and schools, and the directions in which they are developing, crucial for studying cultural phenomena in
the Americas
- interpret works of North and Latin American literature in their various contexts (social, cultural, political) using theoretical and methodological tools from the field of literary studies
Skills: a graduate is able
- use their knowledge to formulate and creatively solve complex and unusual research tasks and problems, formulate and test related hypotheses by selecting and applying appropriate sources
and nformation, assessing, critically analyzing and synthesizing them, and creatively interpreting in the context of interdisciplinary American Studies
- apply appropriate research methods and tools, adjust existing tools and methods as well as develop new ones for the purposes of interdisciplinary American Studies
- interpret works of North and Latin American literature in their various contexts (social, cultural, political) using methodological and theoretical tools in the field of literary studies
Social skills: a graduate is prepared to
- critically assess their own knowledge and the context they consume on the Americas
- use the interdisciplinary knowledge they gained in the field of American Studies in order to formulate their own opinions
- get engaged and use their knowledge from the field of American Studies in the interest of their social environment to initiate the actions for the public good
Assessment criteria
Term paper: 15-20 pages (40%), participation in class discussion (30%), final test (30%)
Grades: 100-88 pts/5, 87-75 pts/4, 74-55 pts/3, 54-0 pts/2
Bibliography
See above.
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: