English 353
American Literature: Later Nineteenth Century

Introduction

About the Course

The purpose of this course is to provide a framework for reading and discussing seven novels, nine short stories, and one comic memoir written by important American authors in the four decades that followed the Civil War. This period, often called the Age of Realism, is a crucial one in American literary history. It is the time of one of the great shifts in American thought and letters, from the religion- and metaphysics-centered romanticism of the early nineteenth century to the secular modernism of the twentieth.

To some extent, this course will deal with the prominent isms of the period — romanticism, realism, and naturalism. But this will not be our primary emphasis. We will concentrate less on the large-scale literary, intellectual, and social tendencies of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s and more on the details of particular literary works. As far as this course is concerned, your primary responsibility will be to acquire and demonstrate a close, intelligent familiarity with the stories on our reading list.

The late nineteenth century may have been the last era in American letters when the most "serious" and "modern" writers still wrote for a broad popular audience; their stories are not only "important" but interesting and enjoyable for the general reader. So the first rewards in this course are reading and enjoying specific literary works—and thinking purposefully about them. I've framed the discussions and assignments in these online course materials with the hope of stimulating a concrete, not-too-technical interest in what is going on in the eight books you'll be looking into. All vital literary experience begins with a reader genuinely engrossed in a book. I sincerely hope that you will find the stories assigned for this course engrossing.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask me a question or preferably post your question on the forum. I will reply on the same forum.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Required Texts

• Mark Twain, Roughing It (Signet)
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Signet)
• Henry James, The American (Signet)
• William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (Signet)
• Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman (Univ. of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Books)
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Short Stories (Signet)
• Stephen Crane, The Great Short Works of Stephen Crane (Harper & Row)
• Frank Norris, McTeague (Signet)

Structure of the Course

The course consists of four sections or lessons. In each we will take up two books or authors. For each lesson I offer a few pages of introductory and explanatory remarks and questions and themes for you to think about while you read.

You will quickly notice that the kinds of issues and questions I ask about vary greatly from story to story. In these online course materials, you'll find no one checklist or approach that covers them. Mastering literary interpretation is unlike mastering algebra or chemical analysis. The nature of the beast, literature, precludes any tidy, pre-established analytical method equally applicable to all its specimens. Serious fiction comes from such a complex interaction of authors' lives, imaginations, literary backgrounds, and the life of their society, that its ways are variable and unpredictable. The wisest approach to any literary work is to be as open as you can to its subjects, concerns, preoccupations, themes, and angles of vision.

I have tried to provide in my comments and questions the fruit of my numerous readings and discussions of the stories on our list. In going over these stories by myself and with hundreds of students over the years, I have perceived lines of inquiry that take you into the life of the work and provide terms you can use to articulate what you see there. I offer them here in hopes that they will work for you.

Writing Assignments

At the conclusion of each lesson I ask that you choose one of three or four proposed topics for a short essay (three or four typed pages, 750 to 1,000 words).

When you tackle a writing assignment for this course, do not think of it as a problem of guessing what I, the instructor, would do if I were writing the paper. Take over the topic; make it your own. Look at it broadly, giving your imagination room to move in and out of it and around it. The objective is for you to find an idea about the topic that interests you; then sink your teeth into it. When you do that, you can be sure that I too will find your ideas interesting and worthwhile.

When you write, keep the stories in the foreground of your thinking. Your argument should be deeply involved with the assigned stories; resist the temptation to let your mind drift off into subjective and abstract thoughts about people and life, psychology, morality, and society. Our first responsibility is to examine what Mark Twain and Henry James and William Dean Howells and the others say about such things, not what you or I may believe.

Make your essay have a point, a clearly stated central thesis, a focus to which everything contributes. The old formula applies here: make explicit from the outset what you consider your main point, provide the evidence from the story that leads you to your conclusion, and explain your reasoning. If you conscientiously do that, your essays can hardly fail to satisfy both you and me.

For each of the authors and works in this course, I list some secondary reading — criticism and biography. Secondary reading is neither required nor expected. I encourage you to do background reading based on your interests. You won't be tested on it. Some people find a little reading in secondary sources a good way to gain confidence in offering their own opinions and judgments, whether they draw directly on that reading in their own written work or not. If you do use secondary sources for ideas in your essays, be sure to acknowledge them, either in footnotes [e.g., "1. Walter Blair, Mark Twain & Huck Finn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962): 17."] or by more informal reference in the body of your paper (e.g., "As Walter Blair says in Mark Twain & Huck Finn, Huck is 'almost completely humorless, and . . . bound to be incongruously naive and somber on many laugh-provoking occasions'"). You can satisfactorily do the writing assignments using your own thoughtful reactions to the stories you're reading.

For information on submitting assignments, please see the "About Your Instructor" page on the course syllabus.

Format, Procedures, and Grades

Please submit your essays one at a time. You will be better prepared for each assignment if you have had a chance to read and digest my comments on one essay before submitting the next. It is, however, perfectly appropriate for you to begin your reading and thinking on a lesson before receiving my comments on the preceding assignment. It will usually take about two weeks from the time you submit a paper for you to receive my comments on it.

If you feel you must submit papers more than one at a time, please contact me explaining the reasons, and if this arrangement seems advisable, I will accept multiple assignments from you.

If you have questions or comments outside the regular format of the assignments, please include them with your essays. I will do my best to respond to them.

Use the calendar included on the course syllabus to plan your time and schedule your assignments.

Your grade in this course will be based on your four essays (weighted equally, a total of 70 per cent of your grade) and a final examination (30 per cent of your grade).

A two-hour, closed-book, proctored final examination will consist of about fifteen short-answer questions that can be answered in a few sentences apiece. For example:

1. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, what exactly is "the Royal Nonesuch"?
2. In The Awakening, point out the principle ways in which Edna is not a "mother-woman."
3. In McTeague, how and why does McTeague lose his dental practice?

About Your Course Developer—John Griffith

My name is John Griffith; I am an Associate Professor in the University of Washington English Department. I took my BA at the University of New Mexico in 1962 and my Ph.D. at the University of Oregon in 1969. I've been teaching at the University of Washington since then. My primary specialty is American literature; I have taught and published scholarly articles on American writers ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. I also teach The Bible as Literature, and Children's Literature Reconsidered.

So that I can get a better understanding of your background, please fill out the Student Information Sheet on the following page and return it to me with your first assignment.

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