ENGL 547

Spring 2013 All Classes

All Classes

Seminar Earlier American Lit

Credit: 4 hours.

May be repeated if topics vary. Prerequisite: One college course devoted entirely to an aspect of American studies or consent of instructor.

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ENGL 547 class schedule data for spring 2013
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	39293	Lecture-Discussion	E	1:00PM -2:50PM	W	113 English Building	Murison, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 01/14/13-05/01/13 Section Title: Secularism & Early US Fiction Section Info: Topic Section E: Secularism and Early U.S. Fiction This seminar explores the vibrant recent debate over secularism and secularization. Long a structuring principle of literary study, the assumption that modernity is marked by an ineluctable secularization has been called into question both by geopolitical events and scholars of the humanities and social sciences. While engaging with these debates directly, this seminar will also use them to study a paradox in the early United States: that during the decades of disestablishment of state-supported churches, religiosity rose rather than waned. The early Republic and antebellum eras gave us the ?separation of church and state? and the Second Great Awakening; provoked the creation of new religious communities and the often violent responses to them; and experienced the evangelizing of abolitionism that spurred the urgency of such figures as William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the relation between belief and secular culture theoretically and historically, with a particular focus on fiction. In great part, our consideration will be how fictional genres gave popular expression to both faith and unbelief, and how new theories of the secular revise commonly held assumptions about the role of fiction in the new nation. More broadly, then, theories about secularism will ultimately allow us to rethink the larger narratives about American literature, those inherited from the founding works in American Studies and those still operational today. To that end, we will read theoretical works on secularism by such scholars as Charles Tayler, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Jos� Casanova; studies of American religion, secularism, and literature by Tracy Fessenden, David Paul Nord, Joanna Brooks, and Susan Griffin, among others; and histories of American fiction and American religion. Our case studies may include works by novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Royall Tyler, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, George Lippard, Augusta Jane Evans, Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as tracts from the American Tract Society, polemical works attacking such groups as Masons and Catholics, and the print culture of sentimental evangelical Protestantism. Restriction(s): Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.