82-008-L-ANG40-V-S-SE-0916.20231.001

Literature and Other Discourses (Mastermodul): C19 - Histories, Literatures, Perspectives, or: Not Your Grandparents' Nineteenth Century!

Seminar (präsent)

Englisch

17.04.2023 - 21.07.2023

Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät

Dietrich, René

Semesterbegleitende Prüfung

Hausarbeit

25 unbegrenzt

The Nineteenth Century has a bad rep – it is old, stuffy, and for more than 20 years it is not even the last century anymore (although people born in the last century have a hard time keeping up with that). But, it does not have to stay that way.
The Nineteenth Century (or C 19 as its more recent scholarly designation) has been a time of enormous social, political and cultural upheaval and transformation, in the U.S. as well as globally. In the US, it has seen enslavement (mostly) in the southern States, struggles for abolition, a Civil War which ended with three amendments all of which were strongly contested by the century’s end. It was the century in which American literature strove to be recognized as a national literature in its own right, while thinkers developed their own variety of Romanticism - Transcendentalism - that remained strongly connected to its European counterpart. The first Women’s Rights Convention was held, and the cross-fertilization of the women’s rights and the abolitionist movement showed the possibilities of solidarity, just as the right to vote given to Black men and no women at all in 1865 laid bare the limits and tensions. The U.S. settler state invaded and appropriated Indigenous lands and completed the century with installing a program of cultural extinction via education, while Native peoples found new outlets for their political agency and voices in literature, speeches, and journalism. Technological and industrial advances shaped the country and the cities, with the transcontinental railroad manifesting the completion of U.S.’s continental imperialism and paving the way for further efforts abroad.
Considering texts of literary, cultural, and political history, the course aims to explore these different aspects of the Nineteenth Century so as to lift it from the specters of Hawthorne, Melville, and sometimes Dickinson (although we will read them too!) and get a better sense of the diverse perspectives one can develop on this century of innovation, aggression, and transformation which moved the U.S. into 20th Century modernity (which is the actual last century).
Authors will include Fredrick Douglass, William Apess, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, David S. Walker, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others.

Texts will be provided via ILIAS unless otherwise indicated.

14.03.2023 -

a.Anmeldbar