The american novel: stranger and stranger

Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 1.5 hours / session

The novel is a place where strangers meet. Characters in Octavia Butler's Kindred, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, William Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom!, and Toni Morrison's A Mercy meet strangers who are disturbingly kin, kin who turn out to be strangers. These often-experimental works also reflect on America as a home for strangers, and as a stranger in the global family. We will study the ways fiction can create new, undreamed-of relationships and forms of storytelling in a strange world.

Travelers to a strange world need tools, maps, schema of different kinds. Our work in this class will depend on the tools of literary analysis: close reading, study of plot structure, character development, and language, and interpretive skills. We will also adapt interpretive tools from other domains, using maps, genealogies, timelines, and a simple annotation tool (Annotation Studio) to make the strange familiar, even as these authors make the familiar strange.

Assignments will include three essays, in-class presentations of work-in-progress (one map, two posters), and in-class writing assignments.

[Melville] = Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: A Longman Critical Edition. Edited by John Bryant and Haskell Springer. Longman, 2009. ISBN: 9780205514083.

[Jacobs] = Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Harvard University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780674035836. [Preview with Google Books]

[Twain] = Twain, Mark. Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson. Edited by R. D. Gooder. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780199554713. [Preview with Google Books]

[Wharton] = Wharton, Edith. Age of Innocence. Vintage, 2012. ISBN: 9780307949516.

[Faulkner] = Faulkner, William. Absalom! Absalom. Vintage, 1991. ISBN: 9780679732181.

[Morrison] = Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. Vintage, 2009. ISBN: 9780307276766.

[Butler] = Butler, Octavia. Kindred. Beacon Press, 2004. ISBN: 9780807083697.

Note: Although it is best to have the classroom text, in most cases you may use a different edition if you prefer. In the case of Moby-Dick, however, the Longman edition edited by John Bryant offers features that other texts lack and that will be important to our discussions of the text.

[Butler] "The Fight," "The Storm," "The Rope," and "Epilogue"

Annotation Studio Workshop

[Melville] "Etymology," "Extracts," and Chapters 1–9

Locast Mapping Workshop

This course consists of both an oral component, which accounts for 25% of the grade, and a written component, which counts for 75%.

All essays will build on your use of Annotation Studio, a simple digital annotation tool that allows you to search and take notes in a digital text, to display your comments either privately or publicly, and to filter, tag, and sort your notes. Please go to the site to find out more about the tool (scroll down menu under "The Application" to "Tutorial"). You will receive a link where you can register for the site and begin annotating texts.

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