Course syllabus

SEMESTER 1, 2019

15 points

Teacher: Alex Calder 
a.calder@auckland.ac.nz 

Course delivery format:

Weekly 3 hour seminar

(Timetable and room details can be viewed on Student Services Online)

Summary of Course Description:    

Examines a selection of classic texts and major issues in the literature of the United States from the American Renaissance of the 1840s and 50s through to the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 30s. Texts and emphases may vary from year to year, but our primary concern is the relation between literature and some of the larger historical processes and problems of the period. A cross-cultural frontier becomes a settled landscape; a ‘new world’ becomes a new world order; a post-colonial literature engages the traditions of Europe; utopian hopes are contradicted by slavery and its legacies; emancipated women challenge the dominance of men; the big city offers new opportunities for self-fashioning and cultural invention. The theoretical orientation of the course is broadly new historicist and is responsive to recent developments in settler colonial studies, gender theory, environmental and spatial history.

This course promotes advanced reading, critical, and writing skills through the study of a carefully chosen set of thematically interlocking texts. Proposed 2019 timetable:

1. Introduction: Thoreau, ‘Walking’
2. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
3. Poe, stories
4. Melville, shorter fictions (‘Bartleby’ and ‘Benito Cereno’).
5. Emily Dickinson, poems
6. Twain, Huckleberry Finn
7. James, Portrait of a Lady
8. James, Portrait of a Lady
9. Cather, The Professor’s House
10. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
11. Gershwin, Porgy and Bess
12. Conclusion

Course outcomes:

Develops a broad-ranging and high-level understanding of major authors and issues in nineteenth and early twentieth-century American Literature.

Develops reading and writing skills to an appropriate graduate level, and models the processes that lead to professional publication.

Develops a transferable theoretical understanding of new historicist, settler-colonial, ecocritical and gender-related criticism. 

Develops the potential to undertake comparative work in other settler colonial literatures, such as New Zealand, Australian, Canadian and South African.

Assessment Summary:

1. Presentations, equivalent of a total of 2,000 words. 20%
2. Essay abstract and annotated bibliography: equivalent of 1,000 words. 10%
3. First submission of essay: 6,000 words. 50%.
4. Second submission of essay: 6,000 words. 20%.

Notes on assessment.

1. Presentations. Over the course of the semester, each student presents two in-class ‘discussion starters’ and two ‘oral reports’. For the discussion starter, the student selects a relatively short passage from the week’s reading and devises three questions (or finds ‘intertexts’ such as paintings or newspaper reports) as prompts for close-reading and discussion. For the oral report, the student reads an assigned work of criticism and generates a list of bullet points outlining key and suggestive ideas. The in-class presentations are revised for assessment as a portfolio of powerpoint slides or mini-essays.

2-4. Students complete a major essay, treating at least two of the texts on the course. These linked assessment tasks model the aims and processes of the professional peer review process for scholarly publication: from a researched abstract (2), to a final draft/first submission (3), to a revised final submission responding to copy-editing and readers’ comments (4). The latter has no specific word count, but is expected to be the equivalent of 2,000 words of new writing. The learning outcomes depend on students completing their first submission to a high standard—setting the marks for this phase at 50% is intended to discourage students from handing in ‘rough’ work.