Marrs, Cody
TR 12:45 PM
Park Hall 0139
The American Renaissance was one of the major events in American literary history. This course explores the literature, philosophy, and legacies of the American Renaissance. We will study the movement’s birth and development, as well as its context and memory. Focusing on several prominent authors (i.e., Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville), we will discover how they developed, adapted, expressed their ideas, and discuss our modern-day assessment of those ideas. Throughout the semester, we will pay particularly close attention to these authors’ biographies, styles, and views on a range of political, aesthetic, and metaphysical questions.
Required Texts:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Emerson
Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Emily Dickinson, Poems
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
Henry David Thoreau, Walden