Reading the US Cultural Past Spring 2005 (ENGL 376)
Spring 2005 MW 1:15-2:30 Walsh 392
Professor Randy Bass and Matthias Oppermann (Visiting Researcher)
Randy Bass
bassr@georgetown.edu
Car Barn Office: Car Barn 314
Phone: 202 687-4535
Office hours: Available all week by appt.
Matthias Oppermann
oppermam@georgetown.edu
Car Barn 307
Course Description: This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to reading
primarily 19th century American literary texts, such as Herman Melville, Rebecca
Harding Davis, John Rollin Ridge, and Mark Twain. Our emphasis will be on
situating literary texts among contemporaneous cultural artifacts and influences,
drawing on other literature, documentary narrative (such as journalism), as well
as art, film (e.g., Spike Lee, D.W. Griffith) photography, and other non-literary
cultural sources. By looking closely at the relationship between literary texts and
cultural contexts, we will spend considerable time exploring questions about what
it means to read the past through literature and other cultural documents. Note:
This is a four-credit elective. As such it has an additional dimension of activity
that will include some primary source archival research (digital and in real
archives at the Library of Congress), as well as the option for creating multimedia
representations based on the literary and cultural issues. Students interested in
teaching and education will have the option to focus final projects on methods for
teaching literature based on the approaches we will study.
Required Texts:
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson
Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener and Benito Cereno
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
Stephen Crane, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets
John Rollin Ridge, Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta
Plus handouts and archival reading throughout
Student Work:
Web logs (writing and reading) and reflection paper (30% +10%):
We will use a web log (or “blog”) throughout the course. This will provide both
individual journaling space as well as public space to read and comment on each
other’s ideas. Individual blog entries will not be graded but overall participation
will be a part of the course. Regular feedback will be provided. You will write a
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final reflection paper at the end about your blog postings and the progress of
your thinking about the course issues.
Seminar (30%): There will be four “seminar” weeks where students will run the
week. Leading the seminar includes: creating a digital poster, preparing an
outline and materials, leading two classes, and writing an essay on some
dimension of the seminar, due one week later. Every student (in pairs) will be
responsible for one seminar week; everyone else will be responsible for
preparing and responding that week (including blog posting).
Final Project and Presentation (30%): There will be several options for final
projects in the course. The final projects will provide an opportunity for you to
develop an interest in greater depth and to develop and demonstrate an
understanding of methods and materials by constructing one of several possible
products. All three options privilege two key dimensions: The thoughtful analysis
and representation of the relationship between literary texts and other cultural
texts (and an implicit theory of reading and texts/contexts); and the need to make
these issues meaningful through a sense of audience and purpose. The three
options for final projects are:
(1) Write the editor’s introduction to an edition of a novel. In this option, you
imagine producing an edition of a novel (one we read or otherwise)
bundled with a set of primary contextual documents; the primary task is to
write the editor’s introduction to the edition (for college readers).
(2) Create a multimedia exhibition on a set of issues or texts. In this option,
you design and execute a multimedia “museum” exhibition around a
particular text (one we read or otherwise), cultural and contextual artifacts,
and commentary. The focus of the exhibition must be organized around a
perspective (if not a thesis).
(3) Design a curriculum module or lesson (for whatever age level). In this
option, you will conceive, design, and outline a unit or lesson intended to
teach a set of issues and texts.
Honor Policy
The University has a defined honor code and policy, and all students are asked
to adhere to the following honor pledge:
In the pursuit of the high ideals and rigorous standards of academic life, I
commit myself to respect and uphold the Georgetown University Honor
System: To be honest in any academic endeavor, and to conduct myself
honorably, as a responsible member of the Georgetown community, as we
live and work together.
You can find the honor policy at: http://www.georgetown.edu/honor/. If you have
any questions about the honor code or about your writing please see me.
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Reading and Schedule
Wed 1/12
Introduction to the course.
Mon 1/17
Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday
Wed 1/19
Robert Scholes, “Reading the World” (handout);
introduction to Bamboozled;
Mon 1/24
Spike Lee’s Bamboozled
Wed 1/26
Begin collaborative web on Bamboozled and contexts
Ethnic Notions
Mon 1/31
Bamboozled wrap-up. Develop collaborative web.
Poster tool workshop.
Wed 2/02
Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Mon 2/07
Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and archives
(Putnam’s, etc.)
SEMINAR WEEK: Melville
Wed 2/09
Melville, Benito Cereno and contexts
Mon 2/14
Melville, Benito Cereno and contexts
Wed 2/16
RB and MO’s ausgezeichnetes Abenteuer
Mon 2/21
Presidents Day
Wed 2/23
John Rollin Ridge, Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta
SEMINAR WEEK: Murieta
Mon 2/28
Murieta and contexts
Wed 3 /02
Murieta and contexts
Mon 3/07
Spring Break
Wed 3/09
Spring Break
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Mon 3/14
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
Wed 3/16
Davis (and context documents);
Jacob Riis, and the real in the late 19th century
SEMINAR WEEK: Crane, etc.
Mon 3/21
Stephen Crane, Maggie and representations of the real
Wed 3/23
Stephen Crane, Maggie and representations of the real
Mon 3/28
Easter Monday
Wed 3/30
Library of Congress; work on final projects.
Mon 4/04
Library of Congress; work on final projects
Wed 4/06
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
SEMINAR WEEK: Twain
Mon 4/11
Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and contexts
Wed 4/13
Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and contexts
Mon 4/18
Course synthesis: interdisciplinary readings of literature and culture
Wed 4/20
Course synthesis: interdisciplinary readings of literature and culture
Mon 4/25
Draft Final Project Presentations
Wed 4/27
Draft Final Project Presentations
Mon 5/2
Draft Final Project Presentations
FINAL PROJECTS DUE: May 11
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Course Organization:
The course is organized into five units or ‘cases.’ All these works are what we
might call “social fictions,” fictions about social issues. That is, these texts
somewhat readily lend themselves to being read in a documentary way about
their historical period (all clustered between 1850 and the turn of the century,
with the exception of Bamboozled). But in a sense they are also narratives about
social fictions, in that they reveal (on many levels) the ways that cultures imagine
and represent themselves to themselves. In each case we will try and uncover
the ways that the social fictions or constructs of the era were transformed into
narrative fiction, and similarly, how an understanding of these narratives help
illuminate our understanding of the U.S. cultural past, and perhaps the cultural
present.
Case 1: How does Spike Lee’s Bamboozled read the U.S. Cultural Past?
How is Spike Lee’s Bamboozled about “America”?
What the
case is a
case of:
Spike Lee’s controversial film Bamboozled, about the success of a
racially offensive television show, raises interesting questions
about the representation of race, the workings of culture in the
U.S., and the nature of art and entertainment. The film also makes
effective and evocative use of the cultural past, mixing archival and
intertextual images to significant effect.
Focus text:
Spike Lee’s Bamboozled
Archives:
Cultural artifacts such as memorabilia, cultural and racial
representations through early film.
Critical
resources:
Select reviews of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled
Marlon Riggs, Ethnic Notions: Black Images in the White Mind (film
and text)
Readings on “whiteness”
Activities:


Build a collaborative web on Bamboozled using the poster
tool
Web logs
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Case 2: Why is Melville’s social fiction ‘unreadable’?
What the
case is a
case of:
Herman Melville was highly attuned to contemporary issues and
cultural forms. He was also quite fascinated by the idea of
“reading” in its broadest perceptual sense (the reading of meaning
and of signs). There is an element of his more social fictions (two
of which are “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno”) where the issue of
readability and unreadability plays a huge role in how his
narratives manipulate social and cultural meaning. How does his
fiction count on “unreadability” as a significant rhetorical device
and strategy for cultural critique? How does some literature
derive its critical power through complexity, questioning, and
confounding? How might cultural forms of a particular place and
time, rendered in “literary” language and structures, illuminate
cultural complexities, as questions at least if not answers?
Focus texts:
Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno”
Archives:
Putnam’s Monthly (1850’s) and other contemporaneous
periodicals;
Amasa Delano’s Journals (excerpts)
Select anti-slavery writing
Scholars in Action site (Making Sense of Evidence): Bergmann on
Melville
Critical
resources:
Critical essays on Benito Cereno, including Eric Sundquist, from
To Wake the Nations and Sarah Robbins, “Gendering the History
of the Antislavery Narrative: Juxtaposing Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Benito Cereno, Beloved, and Middle Passage”
Activities:


Seminar
Web logs
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Case 3: What made reality real in the late 19th century?
What the
case is a
case of:
In the second half of the 19th century, one of the most dominant
concerns among writers (and other artists and social activists) was
the representation of the “real”). This impulse to realism was
closely tied both to a sense of progress and of crisis. Narrative
fiction changed in the United States in parallel and intersecting
ways with other (especially emergent forms of representation)
such as investigative journalism and photography. Every era has a
particular way of constructing reality as real. How did the late 19th
century make reality real through representation? How did literary
language, fiction and narrative in particular, try to make claims on
representing the real? What authorized these representations of
reality? What unsettled them? How does the representation of the
real depends on certain conventionalized elements relating to
narrator’s authority, voice, evidence, objectivity and subjectivity,
etc.?
Story:
Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills
Stephen Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets
Archives:
Critical
resources:
Activities:
Ignatius Donnelly, Caesar’s Column
Journalism: New York journalism (do this at LC)
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives
Photography, early film
Miles Orvell, “Seeing and Believing” American Photography
Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive”
Critical readings on photography and realism in the 19th century
Making Sense of Evidence site: photography




Seminar
Web logs
Library of Congress, group archival research
Create collaborative web on New York journalistic
representations of the city in the mid 1890’s
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Case 4: Who was Joaquin Murieta? And what’s he doing in the Disney
version of Zorro?
What the
case is a
case of:
In 1854, a writer named John Rollin Ridge (or Yellow Bird, his
Cherokee name) wrote a novel about a famous “bandit,” Joaquin
Murieta, who had committed acts of violence across Gold Rush
California. Not only was Ridge’s narrative extremely popular but
also it had the effect of creating the figure of Joaquin Murieta as a
person of both history and folk culture, representing different
meanings to Anglo and Latino California. In 1998, in the Disney
movie Mask of Zorro, Joaquin Murrieta makes a quick appearance
as the murdered brother of the man who will become the second
Zorro. What happens to “Joaquin Murieta” between 1854 and
1998? How do fiction, history, and myth sometimes blur? What
does that blurring reveal about the cultural function of some
narratives? Why was the Ridge story so popular and so often
plagiarized? How can popular literature even if somewhat
formulaic be deeply expressive of certain cultural forms? How
does the power of narrative give shape to cultural meanings? How
do elements of narrative and storytelling “travel” across forms?
Focus Text:
John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta
Archives:
John Rollin Ridge, Joaquin Murieta
Bret Harte, “Wan Lee, the Pagan”
Wong Sam and Assistants, “An English-Chinese Phrasebook”
Documents on citizenship in early California
Versions and allusions to Murieta myth
Critical
resources:
Richard Rodriquez, “The Head of Joaquin Murieta”
John Carlos Rowe, “Highway Robbery”: ‘Indian Removal,’ The
Mexican-American War, and American Identity in John Rollin
Ridge’s (Yellow Bird) The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta”
Luis Leal, introduction to Iraneo Paz, Joaquin Murrieta
Activities:



Seminar
Web logs
Draft final project proposal posters
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Case 5: Why isn’t Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson about what it’s about? Or is
it?
What the
case is a
case of:
First, Mark Twain started writing a novel called Those
Extraordinary Twins, inspired by news stories of real Siamese
twins. Twain was fascinated by the idea of Siamese twins because
they invoked all his interests in identity, consciousness, will, and
moral responsibility. After completing a short 10-chapter novella
about a set of Siamese twins, Twain was profoundly dissatisfied
with the result. He discerned however, within the farce, a storyline
with more promise. Out of that came the novel Pudd’nhead Wilson,
an infinitely more complex, serious, and ‘complete’ narrative about
race, identity, and justice; but it is still not the book he wanted to
write. That is, Pudd’nhead Wilson is as interesting for the things it
cannot speak as the things that it does. Twain’s novel serves as a
compelling case of a literary narrative both reflecting and refracting
social ideas. Its messiness is illuminating for the paradoxes of
American values it reveals surrounding race in the late 19 th
century, and the way that race relates to American consciousness
about whiteness, violence, science, and cultural order.
Story:
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
Archives:
Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors
Images of lynching (photographs and postcards)
Plessey v. Ferguson (Supreme Court Decision)
Reviews of Pudd’nhead Wilson
Images of the stage play and print editions (illustrations)
Documents on fingerprinting and racial identity
Critical
resources:
Essays on Pudd’nhead Wilson by Gilman, Sundquist, Robinson,
and others
Shelley Fishkin, “Mark Twain and Race”
Essays on race, lynching, and gender at the turn of the century
Activities:



Seminar
Web logs
Revise and develop final project proposal posters
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