453 E SEMINAR IN LATER AMERICAN LITERATURE, Foote, M 1-2:50

TOPIC:          Distinction and Age of Realism

Literary histories commonly call the late nineteenth century in the US the "age of realism," but no term was more contested than the "real." In the literary and social arenas, mechanisms for determining who and what counted as real were multiplying.  But at the same time, opportunities to change one's social place or to become someone else, even if momentarily, were increasingly available.  This class will track two narratives that intersect with the crisis of the real in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

One trajectory of the class will give students of American literature and culture some grounding in the debate over the value of the genre of realism in literary history.  We will look at the self-conscious formation of realism, studying its relationship to the social field that produced it and that it in turn helped to produce.  We will look at the strategies of the realists for making sense of a world whose very social multiplicity challenged any easy ways to classify persons.  We will also took at the tradition of literary criticism in the United States that helped to privilege realism as the generic totem of the nineteenth century.  The second trajectory of this class will contextualize our inquiry into realism.  As we look at debates over the meaning and proper expression of the real, we will also look closely at the development of the social world as an object of study itself Through the lens of social distinction and the rise of the middle class, we will study the meaning of the social distinctions that helped to create the middle class readers of realism.  How were they solicited by advertisements?  How did they make (quite unstable) distinctions between high and low culture?  How did they understand the relationship between money and status?  How did the category we now think of as "class" develop as a cultural sign in the age of realism?

Primary texts may include: Novels by Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jacob Riis, Abraham Cahan, Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, selected photographic texts and magazine texts.

Secondary reading is likely to include: Bourdieu, Distinctions and The Field of Social Production; Judith Butler, Erving Goffman, Amy Kaplan, Michael Davitt Bell, Richard Brodhead, Brook Thomas, John Kasson, Janice Radway, George Levine, Richard Ohmann, Nancy Glazener.  Thorstein Veblen, Althusser, examples of period magazines and advertisements, and a packet of reading consisting of a history of critiques of American realism including Werner Berthoff, Vernon Parrington, Fred Lewis Pattee, and FO Matthiesson