BASC64211 - Alumni Sequence: The American Tradition Year II
Course Description
In the second year of this sequence, we follow out the trajectory of some of those fracturings considered in the spring quarter – especially the conflicts about race, slavery and regionalism that erupted into one of America’s most destructive and defining moments – the Civil War. Writing decades after the war, Mark Twain reaches into the antebellum past to reflect on the meaning of freedom and the legacy of unfreedom that persists beyond Emancipation. Stephen Crane seeks an adequate literary form to reveal the reality and significance of the war. Crane’s literary naturalism reflects a breakdown of traditional sense and the emergence of a new but uncertain individualism. Ulysses S. Grant writes about the war from his inimitable perspective as the victorious general in the field. On the other side, Emily Dickinson’s “slant” version of Transcendentalism offers a striking counterpoint to all these more traditionally “masculine” concerns – though hardly from a traditionally “feminine” perspective – through her poems of extreme interiority, ellipticism and abstraction. In the tutorial we read Melville’s prescient, apocalyptic, and multifarious American epic of 1850: political allegory, skeptical treatise on the possibility of meaning without God, and corking tale of the hunt for the big white whale.
Course Outline
Seminar
| Week | Seminar |
|---|---|
| 1 |
Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers-“ (1861 version), “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!,” “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-,“ “A Bird came down the Walk” |
| 2 |
Dickinson, “I like a Look of Agony,” “ Much Madness is divinest Sense-,” “The Soul selects her own Society-,” “After great pain, a formal feeling comes - ,” “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (possible additional works) |
| 3 |
Grant, Memoirs, pages TBD |
| 4 |
Grant, Memoirs, pages TBD |
| 5 |
Grant, Memoirs, pages TBD |
| 6 |
Crane, Red Badge of Courage, through Chapter 11 |
| 7 |
Crane, Red Badge of Courage, through the Conclusion |
| 8 |
Twain, Huckleberry Finn: through Chapter 17 |
| 9 |
Twain, Huckleberry Finn: through Chapter 29 |
| 10 |
Twain, Huckleberry Finn: through Chapter the Last (plus Appendix) |
Tutorial
| Week | Seminar |
|---|---|
| 1 |
Melville, Moby Dick, Etymology, Extracts, Chapters 1-3, pp. xxxvii-li; 3-27 |
| 2 |
Melville, Moby Dick, Chapters 4-19, pp. 28-103 |
| 3 |
Melville, Moby Dick, Chapters 20-35, pp. 104-173 |
| 4 |
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| 5 |
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| 6 |
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| 7 |
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| 8 |
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| 9 |
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| 10 |
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REQUIRED TEXTS
1. Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (Vintage Press) ISBN 978-0307475565
2. Stephen Crane. The Red Badge of Courage. ed. Henry Binder (Norton, 1999) ISBN 978-0393319545.
3. Ulysses S. Grant. Memoirs and Selected Letters. (Library of America) ISBN 978-0-94045058-5.
4. Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. (Back Bay Books, 1976) ISBN 978-0316184136.
5. Melville, Moby Dick, or The Whale. Penguin, ISBN 978-0142437247 (or used as 978-0140390841).