123425 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA American/North American Lit./Studies (2017S)

The American Renaissance, referring to a period in American (or rather: New England) Literature so termed by F.O. Matthiessen in 1941 which ran from about 1830 to around the Civil War, has been a major category in the canonization of romanticist and transcendentalist writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Matthiessen argues that all of these writers, heretofore little acknowledged, shared a devotion to "the possibilities of democracy." At the time of World War II and its Cold War aftermath, this interpretation recalled the literary nationalism of the mid-19th century, calling for a unique American literary style to distinguish it from British literature. In this class, we will re-examine core texts of the period regarding their alleged democratic values on the one hand, but on the other also try to find approaches to make these texts speak to prevalent issues of our own times. In order to do so, we will address a variety of critical perspectives on these texts, from feminism to race criticism and environmental studies. In addition, the process of canon-formation will be critically assessed.

Methods: text discussions, lecture elements, single/pair/group work