English 372, Fall 2012
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:35-11:50, CUE 219
Dr. Donna Campbell
Email (best way to reach me): campbelld@wsu.edu
357 Avery ,509-335-4831
Office Hours: 9-10, 2:50-3:30 T, Th and by appointment.
Virtual Office Hours: Contact me via Twitter, Skype, and Google chat at dmcampbellwsu.
Required Textbooks
Wilde, Oscar |
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
Dover |
1993 |
978-0486278070 |
Chopin, Kate |
The Awakening and Selected Short Stories |
Simon & Schuster |
2004 |
978-0743487672 |
Dickens, Charles |
Hard Times |
Oxford World |
2008 |
978-0199536276 |
Twain, Mark |
Huckleberry Finn |
Dover |
1994 |
978-0486280615 |
Shelley, Mary |
Frankenstein (1818 edition) |
Oxford |
2009 |
978-0199537150 |
| Negri, Paul, ed. | Great American Short Stories | Dover | 2002 | 978-0486421193 |
| Course pack | At Cougar Copies beginning 8/22/12 or http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/engl372/coursepack.pdf. Bring printed copy to class. | |||
Course Description
English 372, 19th-Century Literature of the British Empire and the Americas, approaches Anglophone literature—literary and cultural texts in English from 1800 to 1900—via identifiable “points of intersection" significant in the nineteenth century: Romanticism, Society, and Individualism; Ecology and Industrialism; Imperialism and Global Expansion; and Aesthetics, Gender, and Sexuality. Although certain sections are identified on the syllabus with one of these four themes, each of these ideas recurs throughout the century and throughout the course. Our purpose is to understand these works in a broader framework of social, literary, and political contexts; thus we will also read cultural documents of the times such as pictures, cartoons, and maps as well as tracing these ideas in popular culture.
Course Goals. The goals for students in the course are as follows:
- To read and closely analyze a number of works of literature and journalism within the course materials described.
- To view and interpret multiple kinds of texts, including maps, songs, and political cartoons, to understand the ways in which they comment on and reflect their culture.
- To learn about significant issues, movements, and trends in literature of global British and American literature of the 19th century.
- To search for instances of how 19th-century perspectives, language, and literature permeate contemporary culture and to assess the ways in which they affect our perspectives on issues such as individualism, industrialism and ecology, relations with other countries, and aesthetics, gender, and sexuality.
- To work with and learn to evaluate primary and secondary resources, including locating primary print sources and digitized versions online, learning to use the MLA Bibliography and other databases to find secondary sources, and learning to assess web materials for reliability, and locating primary source materials.
- To synthesize the knowledge thus gained and to produce into papers and other modes of presentation in order to disseminate those insights to the class.
