Prerequisite:  Graduate standing in English or permission

Recent offerings:

The Rude Quarter Century, 1841-1866 (Spring 2010, Friedlander)

I take you to be mine, you beautiful, terrible, rude forms.

—Walt Whitman, “Poem of Many in One” (1856)

Marked at the start by Emerson’s Essays: First Series and Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”; marked at the end by Dickinson’s vast flood of verse and Melville’s Battle-Pieces; the years leading up to and through the Civil War were a time of exciting and frightening possibility, awful and awe-spilled. And much of that awe was refracted through various forms of rudeness: incivility, coarseness, violence, barbarity, inelegance, artlessness, rawness (each of these an aspect of the “rude” as defined by Noah Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary). In this course, we will attend closely to that rudeness, working through its principal cultural expressions (captivity, conflict, intemperance, madness, spectacle, authenticity) as preserved, analyzed, and transformed in literature. We’ll begin with two methodological overtures: an introduction to archival study and a crash course in the reading of poetry (both of these keyed to the antebellum period). We’ll then spend a session on conceptualizing the rude, tracing its complex of definitions back to eighteenth-century aesthetics. With this preparation, we’ll be well set to immerse ourselves in the period. Readings will encompass a broad range of texts in various genres (fiction, autobiography, travel writing, journalism, philosophy, plays, and poems). Authors to be considered will likely include Dickinson, Douglass, Emerson, Fuller, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Melville, Poe, Stowe, Thoreau, and Whitman. Most of the reading will be in sample form, but students are encouraged to follow their curiosity in producing final projects. There will be extensive use of online databases, allowing us to look at works both forgotten and canonical.

Back to Graduate Courses