Spring 2005

E 376L • Crane, ¨-isms¨, and American Renaissance

Course Description

This course aims to analyse and reappraise some of Stephen Crane’s major works by bringing them into reverberation with earlier famous American texts.

We shall seek to ¨disentangle¨ Crane’s writings from the many ¨-isms¨—realism not least—that have been enlisted to categorize his craftsmanship and subjects. We shall scrutinize closely some of his most captivating texts and attempt to bring into prominence a sketchy ¨grammar¨ of his fiction. We shall see that his works, journalism, fiction, even poetry, are haunted by an obsessive phantasmatic turmoil whose central vortex of fascination is an ever present dead/alive father figure, and we shall examine the dramatic impacts this overwhelming presence carries with it.

We shall then broaden the picture and try to view Crane’s achievements against those of major American Renaissance writers (Hawthorne, Poe, Melville).

Grading Policy

Short papers 30%
Class participation 25%
Reading responses 20%
Final exam 25%

Texts

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and Other Selected Writings, edited by Phyllis Frus and Stanley Corkin (New Riverside Editions)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Roger Malvin’s Burial, Wakefield (Norton)
Edgar Allan Poe, The Man of the Crowd, The Tell-Tale Heart (World’s Classics, Oxford)
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids (World’s Classics, Oxford)

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