230606 Reading 19th Century Social Fictions (S) (WiSe 2007/2008)

This course builds coherence around the "craft of reading" (Robert Scholes) primarily 19th century American cultural texts and contexts in an interdisciplinary approach. Primary literary texts will be by authors such as Herman Melville, Rebecca Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, John Rollin Ridge, and Mark Twain.

All these works are what Randall Bass has called "social fictions", fictions about social issues. That is, these texts lend themselves to being read in a documentary way in regard to their historical period (between 1850 and the turn of the century). But in a sense they are also narratives about social fictions in that they reveal (on many levels) the ways that cultures imagine and represent themselves to themselves.

Our emphasis will be on situating these literary texts among contemporaneous cultural artifacts and influences, drawing on other literature, documentary narrative (such as journalism), as well as art, film, photography, and other non-literary cultural sources. By looking closely at the relationship between literary texts and cultural contexts, we will explore questions about what it means to read the second half of the 19th century through literature and other cultural documents.