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Academic Year 2005/2006

Literature of the Peculiar Institution: a Research Seminar
ENGL 348 SP

This research seminar focuses on pro- and anti-slavery novels, essays, personal narratives, oratory, and poetry by U.S. authors from the 1790s to the 1870s. We will ask how writers combined argument and aesthetic to target profound divisions in nineteenth-century America. Our readings will prompt us to consider as well the ways in which the reverberations of slavery in contemporary American culture inspire calls for collective memory and collective accountability. To help situate our study of the literature in relation to current literary and historical scholarship, we will also develop strategies for conducting academic research in material, textual, and electronic sources.

MAJOR READINGS

Readings may include such contemporary writers as Toni Morrison and Cornell West in addition to the eighteenth and nineteenth-century texts of Thomas Jefferson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Lydia Maria Child, Frederick Douglass, Mary Chestnut, Abraham Lincoln, Maria Stewart, Nathaniel Tucker, William Wells Brown, Harriet Jacobs, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Caroline Hentz.

EXAMINATIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS

Several short critical response papers, library assignments, an annotated bibliography, and a 8-10 pp. final paper.

ADDITIONAL REQUIREMENTS and/or COMMENTS

This is a Research Required course.

COURSE FORMAT: Discussion

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Level: UGRD    Credit: 1    Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL    Grading Mode: Student Option   

Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.

Last Updated on MAR-30-2006

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