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Dec 21, 2024
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ENGL 198R: Special Studies: American RebelsSemester Hours: 3
This is a distance learning course offered online. Please contact the English Department for registration procedures. Americans like to think of themselves as innovators and adventurers. Like immigrants willing to risk all for a chance at another life, we, as a society and culture, seem to pride ourselves on our native ability to seize the time, oppose the commonplace, and strike out on our own. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his seminal essay “Self Reliance,” seemed to be speaking for all Americans when he wrote, “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong is what is against it.” If everyone has the duty to be bad, then bad becomes the universal good. This online course will examine rebellious writers of America’s first great literary century—roughly the period from 1790 to 1900. The writers we will consider—John Marrant, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, Kate Chopin, and, of course, Emerson—are remembered for their fierce moral commitments. In giving voice to conscience they stood out against their time—and, often, against each other. But their revolutionary stance as often looked to the past as to the future. Some, like Marrant and Hawthorne, wanted to purify their time by reviving old ways. Others, like Douglass and Emerson, wanted to shatter convention and bring revolutionary change. Still others, like James, Melville, and Chopin, depicted rebels defeated by the forces they tried to oppose. In following their stories, we will watch a cultural conversation come into sharp focus, one that attempts to define a new nation’s values by challenging its most cherished ideals. Prerequisite(s)/Course Notes: WSC 001 .
Summer Offerings
SSIII: 80157: Aug 6-24; Distance Learning; Fichtelberg
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