Marrs, Cody
MWF 3 :00 PM
Park Hall 139
The American Renaissance was one of the major events in American literary history. This course explores the literature and philosophy of the American Renaissance. We will study the movement’s birth and development, as well as its context and legacies. Focusing on several authors, we will discuss how they adapted and expressed their ideas, as well as our assessment of those ideas. Throughout the semester, we will pay particularly close attention to these authors’ biographies, styles, and views on a range of aesthetic and philosophical questions.
Texts: Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes; Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times; Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance; Emily Dickinson, The Gorgeous Nothings