Studies in American Literature:
“Hysterical” Symptoms: Treatments of Trauma in Literary
Narrative
This course examines how literary narratives represent traumatic
experience, from train accidents, shell shock, and hysteria at the
turn of the twentieth century, to concentration camp experiences,
domestic abuse, and terrorism through the turn of the twenty first.
We will read the writings on trauma by early psychological
theorists such as Freud and Charcot as well as the later trauma
theorists Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra. We will also
read a selection of novels, testimonial literature, and short
fiction, from Stephen Crane to Toni Morrison.
19th Century Public Culture: Literary
Bestsellers
What books did the nineteenth-century American reading public love
and why? This course will ask what role the rise of
professional authorship played in the formation of social and
national identity in the United States, and it will frame questions
about audience, taste, and the development of literary canons.
Authors may include: Susannah Rowson, Benjamin Franklin, Washington
Irving, Herman Melville, Nathanial Hawthorne, Susan Warner, and
Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Honor Thy Father and Mother: Literary
Representations of Family Ties
Although women were not the source of political power in antebellum
America (they could not own property, and they were excluded from
political participation), mothers have been entrusted with the task
of rearing children from the earliest days of the Republic.
Mothers reproduced and molded good citizens; mothers were
responsible for nurturing and caring. This course will
examine the importance of the real and symbolic role of mothers
and fathers on the American literary landscape. We will
investigate the presence (and conspicuous absence) of mothers in
U.S. literature, and we will compare and contrast the literary
representations of the family within the language and writings of
some of our early literary fathers. We will read works by
Hannah Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Wilson and more.