I. Reprieve. Given that the exam is due one week from today (prompts posted inline below), and that many of you need to really do well on this last paper, I’m canceling Tuesday’s class. I will be in my office during our regularly scheduled time and you may drop by to conference if you like. You can use the time to visit the library, write, visit the writing center, etc. Please be prompt to class on Thursday, December 10, with both your self-evaluation and your final exam (both explained in detail below).

II. Self-Evaluation. On the last day of class you must turn in a hardcopy self-evaluation for the course. You’ll also be evaluating the course on the last day, so be sure to show up. While I supply the forms for the latter, you’ll be supplying your own copy for the former. There are guidelines, however. No more than one page, single spaced, typed and printed neatly. !!!MAKE SURE YOUR NAME IS ON THE EVALUATION!!! And answer the following questions:

• What grade would you give yourself for attendance and participation (25% of your total grade)?  The syllabus asked that you come to class every day, prepared (meaning you had read the day’s reading, were prepared to discuss the material, had written a minimum of two questions for class discussion and that you ask them). It also asked that you meet your deadlines, not amass any more than three unexcused absences, and that you make an attempt to meet with me outside of class (either before, after, or during office hours). Offer any commentary you wish to justify your self-evaluation.

• What grade would you give yourself for your participation on the American Lit Experience Discussion Board (25% of your total grade). How often did you post? What was the quality of your posts? Did you ever respond to another student or just to the professor?

• What grade did you receive on your midterm exam (also 25% of the total)?

• Based on your interpretation of the course expectations and your experience on the midterm exam, what grade do you feel your final examination essay deserves (25% of the total)? Please bear in mind that this question doesn’t account for how “hard” you worked, but only the quality of the product. Please comment on your rationale if you see fit.

• Based on the above grades, taking the entire class into consideration as a whole, and considering a range of both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, what grade would you give yourself for the course. Please feel free to comment on your rationale here as well.

III. Final Examination Essay Guidelines & Prompts. Essays should be 8-10 pages, typed, in MLA format with a work cited page. Please feel free to utilize the writing center and your research librarians. Essays are due as hardcopy (sorry, no email submissions this time), stapled, at the beginning of class on Thursday, December 10. Prompts:

• Between 1865 and 1914 the United States transformed from a country just emerging from a destructive civil war to an imperial nation with overseas possessions and coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific.  Completed in 1869, the transcontinental railroad opened up the interior to settlement by homesteaders and prospectors, who arrived to exploit cheap land and discoveries of gold and other useful ores. Such innovations as the development of telegraph, telephone, and electricity networks helped develop these new Western settlements along with the East and allowed a burst of economic prosperity and industrialization. Enticed by promises of ready work made by businesses trying to keep wages down through an oversupply of labor, a massive influx of immigrants arrived, mostly from Europe and East Asia, and swelled the ranks of New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. By 1893, so many Americans had moved westward that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed. Americans subsequently turned their attentions overseas, toward new territories in Samoa and Hawaii and former Spanish possessions in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, in an attempt to join the European empires on the world stage.

• Though these years brought wealth to some and stature to America in the eyes of the world, the undesirable consequences of rapid territorial, population, and industrial expansion were felt most by those with the least resources to resist the greedy, unscrupulous, and powerful. The Native American populations of the Great Plains, whose cultures depended on the free-roaming buffalo herds, faced the shock of interference in their hunting grounds by crisscrossing telegraph lines and railroad tracks. The federal government developed small reservations to replace hunting traditions with farming, always with the expectation that Native customs and distinctiveness would eventually vanish. Much of the land stolen from Natives was acquired cheaply by railroad companies and land prospectors, even though the Homestead Act of 1862 had intended the land to be improved by small farmers and immigrant families. Those homesteaders who did settle the plains were squeezed by the pricing policies of railroad monopolies that attempted to corner the transportation market and eliminate all competition. In the railroad industry, as with steel, oil, meat packing, and banking and finance, corporate power was focused in the hands of a few powerful men such as Gould, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, Hill, and Rockefeller. The plight of workers in the major cities was dire, not just because of the monopolists’ control over inhumane and often dangerous working conditions, but because of corrupt government officials who allowed them to act without hindrance. Early efforts to organize labor against the monopolists were often violent and had to fight against social prejudices favoring unfettered capitalism and a hands-off approach to business. In the same way, small farmers often failed to organize because of an abiding desire for independence that trumped the benefits of collective action.

• The literature of this period appears in the context of the dramatic diversification of American experience, both ethnic and regional, and the small but insistent movement among authors to combat the social inequities arising from too-rapid growth. Immigration from Europe and Asia resulted in a newly heterogeneous American population, now no longer mainly of New England descent, and now more diverse in terms of class and ethnic backgrounds. As populations in large urban centers and all geographic areas of the country increased, newspapers and magazines focusing on specific ethnic and regional readerships flourished. Among many others, the Jewish Daily Forward, founded by Abraham Cahan, catered to a Yiddish-speaking New York reader, and the Overland Express was the first periodical to feature Western-themed fiction and journalism. With new publishing opportunities available to depict previously underrepresented and “marginalized” peoples, many fictional characters, often created by authors from the same cultural and economic backgrounds, began to challenge received notions about the American character. But this new diversity often resulted in suspicion, antagonism, and cultural paranoia, triggering a cultural unease that pitted urban against rural, labor against management, and immigrant against native. In response, a generation of writers spoke out against social, economic, and political injustices in newspapers and magazines. Among these were journalists known as “muckrakers” for their devotion to exposing the dangers of the city and the evils of monopolies. Some notable muckrakers included Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, who took on the railroad monopoly on behalf of small farmers, and Lincoln Steffens, who exposed the corruption of government officials like Boss Tweed of New York. Other writers took advantage of the new periodical media to write the “literature of argument,” which brought the spirit of reform to sociology, philosophy, and economics: some examples include Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor (1881), which attacked U.S. injustices against Native Americans, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898), which explored wealth and women’s rights, and Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which examined the “conspicuous consumption” of the super-wealthy business magnates. Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery(1900) and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) are two examples of nonfiction prose that responded to racial injustices by challenging white audiences to work toward political solutions.

• To face the challenge of representing these dynamic cultural changes, American authors turned to the international aesthetic of realism, whose European practitioners include Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, and Gustave Flaubert. American realism was an attempt to accurately represent life as authors saw it through the use of concrete descriptive details that readers would recognize from their own lives. William Dean Howells advanced a type of realism that concentrated on affectionate portrayals of ordinary, middle-class characters in an attempt to make the novel more democratic and inclusive. Henry James and Edith Wharton, meanwhile, focused on refined mental states, rather than exterior surfaces and surroundings. Their “psychological realism” attempted to find a precise language for intangible moral situations. The realism of Mark Twain was devoted to rendering the vernacular dialects and colloquialisms of his ordinary characters, often using humor to help readers sympathize with roguish heroes like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.

• A distinct aesthetic response to the late nineteenth century, American naturalism continued the realist attempt to represent new and unfamiliar types of characters, but naturalists concentrated on lower-class and marginalized people and merged the realist attention to detail with a strong belief in social determinism rather than free will. Building on the theory of natural selection proposed by Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), naturalists like Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London tried to represent life scientifically rather than providentially. Characters in naturalist novels exist in worlds where the environment determines character, events happen randomly, the strong prey on the weak, and protagonists often have neither the intelligence nor the resources to overcome adversity. But despite these bleak and unforgiving features, naturalist novels present their characters as case studies to suggest social solutions: Crane’s “The Open Boat,” for example, emphasizes the individual frailties of its protagonists in order to commend how they eventually band together and survive.

• Another crucial development of realism was regional, or “local color,” writing, an attempt to capture distinct language, perspectives, and geographical settings before industrialization and cultural homogenization erased them. Some regionalist writing relied on nostalgia to generate interest in authentic but vanishing characters. In the West, writers like Bret Harte, Twain, and Owen Wister romanticized the lone cowboy and frontiersman, while Native American writers like Sarah Winnemucca offered a Native alternative. But other writers found regional specificity to be a vehicle for social change. Hamlin Garland used local descriptions of the Midwest to combat nostalgic stereotypes and depict the real plight of farmers. Women writers found regional writing an important opportunity to record their perspectives. The fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mary Austin challenges readers to attune themselves to women’s thoughts and rethink society’s privileging of men. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a regional work that demands respect for a feminine perspective while also critiquing the patriarchal constraints of Catholic Louisiana.

Do some research on realism. What is it as it pertains to American Literature? What are its markers? When does it begin and end? Who’s in, who’s out? What are its social and cultural contexts?

Then do the same with modernism. What is it as it pertains to American Literature? What are its markers? When does it begin and end? Who’s in, who’s out? What are its social and cultural contexts?

Then compare the two. How do they relate? How do they differ? Where’s the overlap?

1. During the eighteenth century, the religious, intellectual, and economic horizons of the thirteen English colonies expanded, challenging the dominance of Puritan culture with Enlightenment thought and uniting the different regions behind common national interests. The death of the minister and author Cotton Mather in 1728 symbolizes the waning influence of Puritan theocentrism. The scientific and philosophical writings of Isaac Newton and John Locke argued in favor of a worldview that accepted the ability of individuals to puzzle through and understand the universe and placed a premium on mutual sympathy, or “sentiment,” to guide moral action rather than religious grace alone. The Enlightenment emphasis on sentiment helped guide Americans to accept rapid population expansion due to European immigrants, lured overseas by tales of healthier, less crowded communities and merit-based opportunities, and economic expansion, especially in industries relating to agriculture and shipping. The boom in these industries resulted in cosmopolitan comforts, wealth and prosperity, and trade linkages between the colonies and the other ports and countries of the Atlantic Rim. But it also caused suffering for exploited indentured laborers and the African slaves who were brought to work on plantations. And the two populations who had met each other when the Pilgrims landed in 1620 found their numbers and influence dwindling: many communities of New England Indians disappeared entirely due to urban expansion, and from the same cause many of the small-town Puritan settlements lost families due to religious dissension and a search for better farmlands. The same prosperity and security that led colonists to rely less on their neighbors for their physical safety allowed them to think less of what separated them from communities in other colonies (or from those descended from other ethnicities) than of their common social and cultural experiences—potentially national interests that would lead directly to the Revolution.

2. The Enlightenment involved the uneasy mixture of new scientific and philosophical investigations into the nature of the universe with traditional responses to scripture. Some of these questioners were “deists,” who believed in a comprehensible universe ordered by a supreme being who was rational and benevolent. Their empirical studies replaced the Puritans’ habit of looking past reality for emblems of spiritual grace with an emphasis on the stable, observable world. People became more interested in how their actions related to the social well-being of their neighbors than their own spiritual progress; similarly, readers were more eager to read the accounts of ordinary individuals as they thoughtfully responded to the feelings and experiences of others, such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, than the metaphysical introspections of divines like Cotton Mather popular in the preceding generations. Enlightenment thought drove many to reject the innate depravity of human beings in favor of the assumption that people were basically good, and therefore capable of living together in sympathy and understanding with their fellow citizens.

3. In response to the Enlightenment’s intellectual rigor and call to ethical sentiment, the “Great Awakening” of 1735–50 encouraged a return to Calvinist zeal by stressing an intense emotional commitment and complete surrender to faith. Itinerant ministers like the Methodist George Whitefield traveled the countrysides of England and America, preaching to thousands of new converts with appeals designed to register with the cult of feeling John Locke’s philosophy had sponsored. Jonathan Edwards’s preaching in New England was the most successful integration of Enlightenment thought and Puritanic zeal during the Great Awakening. His ministry rejuvenated the Calvinist doctrine of election in spite of its irrationality by stressing the rational delights to be gained by surrendering to God’s sovereignty and how spiritually moving true religious feeling could be. Edwards went too far when he demanded early signs of personal conversion; his Northampton congregation dismissed him from his ministry in 1749.

4. Imperial politics and the American Revolution dominated the writings of the late eighteenth century. After the British began imposing punitive and damaging laws on the colonies to punish dissent and repay debts from a recent war with France, the Second Continental Congress pushed through a Declaration of Independence authored by Thomas Jefferson. What had started as a meeting to oppose overseas taxation policies quickly led to open revolt once the common interests of the delegates were made clear. Revolutionary writings by Thomas Paine, most notably Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis, used Enlightenment ideals and the antimonarchy language of the British Whig Party to spur public support for the fledgling rebellion. The success of Paine’s writings underscores the growing importance of American newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1704, and whose number had grown to about fifty by the Revolution. Significant political writings like those by Hamilton and Jay and Madison’sFederalist Papers (1787–88), which successfully argued for adoption of the U.S. Constitution, appeared mainly in New York newspapers, and after the war, poets and satirists like Philip Freneau continued to use periodicals to engage in partisan attacks on political positions. Some successful women writers, most notably Judith Sargent Murray and Sarah Wentworth Morton, used pseudonymous publications in periodicals to claim their right as women to engage in the political sphere traditionally reserved for men. And some women novelists like Susannah Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster capitalized on the increased appetite for women’s writing to publish novels they hoped would sell enough to stay in print.

5. Lasting effects of the Enlightenment include a greater social mobility, cultural acceptance of ideals such as reason and equality, and the assumption of an innate moral sense in all Americans. Whereas John Winthrop had assumed in his Model of Christian Charity (1630) that both privileged and poor had a stable place in society, by 1800, President John Adams would remark on the American lack of an aristocracy and therefore the possibilities for social mobility unheard of in Europe, at least for white men. Others were less fortunate: African Americans were enslaved, and even the Founding Fathers turned a blind eye to such hypocrisy; and white women, despite their privileges, could neither vote, nor own property, nor earn wages for themselves. Native Americans, too, found their lot unacceptable: they had supported the British in the Revolution and now faced reprisals from greedy and vengeful Americans. But by and large, the preeminent mood of the period was one that supported the ultimate “perfectability of man,” and the Enlightenment principles that had led to the Revolution would eventually be extended to those groups that had not won liberty and equality. For many, Benjamin Franklin’s example proves most representative for this period: ambitious, self-educated, and constantly curious, self-improving, introspective, and civic-minded. Franklin’s influence and direct involvement are evident in many of the important documents and treaties of the Revolutionary period. His idealistic assumption that all people shared a common sense of right and wrong was shared by many Enlightenment thinkers and represents a fundamental tenet of American democracy.