ENGL 3611 - American Renaissance

(crosslisted)
(also AMST 3611) # (LA-AS)

Spring. 4 credits.

M. Jonik.

In his 1837 oration “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that any individual self could tap the vast potential of nature and the mind. Frederick Douglass wrestling against slave culture and Margaret Fuller sculpting a cosmopolitan female identity participated in this revitalized bond of self to nature and society. Poe’s and Melville’s sea voyagers confronting the abyss, Hawthorne’s utopians imagining life anew, Dickinson’s celebrants of self-negation, and Whitman’s singers of the democratic multitude: these mid-nineteenth-century Americans reinvented themselves to probe the human in ways which continue to orient and disorient. They recast notions of nature and religious faith, identity, the body and the self, race and gender, and used writing to end slavery, empower women, and preserve a vanishing native American culture.