Graduate Office - Literature and Criticism Course Offerings By Semester

Course schedules are subject to change.  Please see Cathy Renwick for more information.

FALL 2007  

ENGL 761/861 Topics in American Literature before 1870: Nineteenth-Century Poetry

Dr. Karen Dandurand  

Section 1: T 6:00-8:45 p.m.

Section 2: R 6:00-8:45 p.m.

The format of this course in nineteenth-century American poetry will be somewhat different from what I have done in the past.  It will be divided into two parts.  During the first part of the semester, we will read several poets; during the second half of the semester, we will focus on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, spending at least three class sessions on each.  This course organization will allow us to read Whitman and Dickinson in the context of the work of their (now) less famous contemporaries,  and will also afford the opportunity to look in a bit more depth at the work of arguably the two most important American poets.  We will try to understand the place of poetry and the poet in nineteenth-century American culture, contextualizing it in part by looking at the material culture in which it was embedded and by considering statements about poetry and the poet in poems and prose.  Among the poets we will read in the first part of the semester are the following: William Cullen Bryant, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frances Sargent Osgood, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Frances E.W. Harper, Sarah Piatt, Helen Hunt Jackson, Alice Cary, Phoebe Cary, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Stephen Crane. Texts for the first part of the course will be in handouts and a copy packet; for Whitman and Dickinson, we will use a collection of the works of each.

 Requirements will include a short critical paper (4-6 pages) on something covered in the first half of the course (this will be an in-depth treatment of a narrowly defined topic), and a longer paper (15-20 pages) on Whitman and/or Dickinson. Students will also be asked to do one or two (depending on class size and our needs) brief oral reports summarizing and analyzing secondary readings, accompanied by an appropriate one- or two-page handout.  Of course, the consistent and active participation of everyone in the class is expected and will be essential to the success of our work together.

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