SPRING 2013 ENGLISH COURSES

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English Y422 001 — American Literature, 1860-1910 Dr. Eby — HARG 276 — TTH 10:50am-12:05pm American Realism, Regionalism, and Naturalism Explore American literature during the Gilded Age—the age dominated by literary realism, regionalism, and naturalism. In addition to a few shorter works by writers such as Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Charles Chesnutt, we’ll read Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady, William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. We’ll try to place these texts against a historical background of explosive industrial growth, the emergence of vast wealth and terrible poverty, the urbanization of America, rampant political and corporate corruption, the failure of Reconstruction in the South, the closing of the frontier, and the emergence of the U.S. as a global (some would say, imperial) power. We will also explore the intellectual influence on American literature of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and William James. Required texts with ISBN numbers: Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (978- 0520268166); Henry James, A Portrait of a Lady (978-0393966466); William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (978-0140390308); Edith Wharton The House of Mirth (0451527569); and Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (978-0140188288). Please be especially careful to get the correct editions of A Connecticut Yankee and A Portrait of a Lady! BENG Y427 001—Southern Literature Dr. Malphrus—HARG 204—MW 12:15pm-1:30pm “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” ~ Flannery O’Connor Who are the writers that have shaped Southern Literature? When did Southern Literature emerge? Where does the South begin and end – is it all about the Mason-Dixon Line? How can we tell if a particular text is Southern or not? Why do readers, writers, scholars, and the general public around the world continue to be fascinated by all things Southern? . . . These are some of the initial questions we’ll address in this senior level seminar on Southern Literature. In addition to top guns such as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, and the like, we will focus our attention specifically on South Carolina writers – from William Gilmore Simms to Henry Timrod to Mary Boykin Chesnut to Julia Peterkin to DuBose Heyward to James Dickey to Percival Everett to Josephine Humphreys to Dorothy Allison to Nikky Finney to Pat Conroy to Ron Rash – for starters. 4
Literary roots run deep in the Palmetto state, and we’ll spend the semester digging around in them. As for textbooks, we’ll use The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, edited by William L. Andrews, published by W.W. Norton (ISBN:10: 0142001473); James Dickey, Deliverance (ISBN: 0-385-31387-X); William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (ISBN: 0-679- 73217-9); Gloria Naylor, Mama Day (ISBN: 0-679-72181-9); Ron Rash, One Foot in Eden (ISBN: 0-312-42305-5); Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides (ISBN-10: 0553268880) BENG Y437 001—Women Writers Madwomen Beyond the Attic: Sense, Sensibility & Madness in Literature by Women Dr. Hoffer—HARG 276—TTH 9:25am-10:40am “The madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather, she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage.” ~ Gilbert & Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic Sense and Sensibility: These concepts, paired famously in the title of Jane Austen’s first published novel, have been the source of much attention since the 18 th century. The Age of Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, prized sense above all else, defining it in terms of rationality and empiricism. Romanticism brought with it a backlash that privileged sensibility, or acute, emotional perception and responsiveness, over sense. For the Romantics, sensibility was linked to the imagination as well as spirituality and involved a heightened level of sensitivity to nature, art, and other beings. These terms were not only tied to these historical-literary movements, however; they were also understood to be guiding principles through which to understand the differences between the sexes. While sense has been traditionally associated with men, sensibility was thought to be a defining quality of women. Because of this, another concept associated with women since medieval times has been madness. When women’s innate knack for emotion strayed out of control, as it was thought to often do, a woman was deemed “hysterical” (defined as an unmanageable excess of emotion, from the Greek root hystera, meaning uterus). In this course, we will study how British and American women writers from the early 19 th century through the late 20 th centuries have responded to and interrogated these shifting ideologies in their work. We will examine both the historical background that informed these writers’ thinking as well as the landmark scholarship that has theorized these women’s depictions of reason, emotion, and madness. Through our explorations of sane and insane female characters, and the authors who created them, we will be able to trace how cultural concepts regarding gender have shifted over time—and how they have stayed the same. Texts to include: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (Broadview, ISBN 9781551111254), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (Broadview, ISBN 9781551111803) , Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (Norton, 9780393960129), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (Norton, ISBN 9780393960570), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark. **NOTE: Those texts for which publishers and ISBNs are provided indicate editions in which students will be assigned specific readings in addition to the primary text. Students who do not wish to buy these particular versions of the text will be responsible for obtaining the secondary readings by other means! 5
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SPRING 2013 ENGLISH COURSES

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