CLITR 2120 American Literature
This course will explore the centrality of the real or imagined North American wilderness on the development of American society, as reflected in all periods of American literature. Against the background of the American wilderness, or against its ghost once the wilderness has largely disappeared, we will explore the influence of capitalism, racism, democracy, religion, and changing ideas about self and society, including gender roles and qualifications for American citizenship. We will read late 19th century writers who belonged to the Naturalist Movement in literature, who depicted the human place in the American city and in the Natural World in a way radically different than the writers of earlier generations (see the definition for Naturalism below*). We will go on to read modern playwrights, essayists, poets and novelists who extend in distinct ways the presence of the American Wilderness in their books, essays, plays, and poems.
*Naturalism is sometimes claimed to be an even more accurate picture of life than is realism. But naturalism is not only, like realism, a special selection of subject matter and a special literary manner; it is a mode of fiction that was developed by a school of writers in accordance with a particular philosophical thesis. This thesis, a product of post-Darwinian biology in the mid-nineteenth century, held that a human being belongs entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul or any other mode of participation in a religious or spiritual world beyond nature; that such a being is therefore merely a higher-order animal whose character and fortunes are determined by two kinds of forces, heredity and environment.