UN3893: Rivers, Oceans, Seas | V. Kuiken

English and Comparative Literature
Undergraduate Seminar
M 2:10-4PM

This course explores the trope, motif, theme, and concept of water antebellum American literature. From Columbus’s “discovery” of the “New” world to the Puritans’ transatlantic pursuit of religious and political freedom; from the Middle Passage which brought slaves to the Americas to erect what soon became the United States, to Lewis and Clarke’s expansive exploration of the country on the Mississippi River—the liquid element plays a decisive role, historical as well as artistic, factual as well as fictional, in the way Americans represented themselves (and others) to themselves. In this class we will explore how and why, to what aesthetic or political end, early and pre-Civil War American literature employed different bodies of water—rivers and oceans—that eventually led to the modernist invention of the stream of consciousness as it was championed, in psychology and literature respectively, by the James brothers. We will investigate water’s literal presence in the writings of Bradford, Equiano, and Thoreau; its deployment as a symbol and allegory in Whitman, Dunbar, Sansay and Stowe; or its articulation as a psychological notion in Brockden Brown; as a philosophical concept in Melville and Poe; and as a generic device in Emerson and Dickinson. Our central task will be to explore the effects that aquatic environments and marine ecosystems have on human bodies and minds. How do they enhance and in what way do they dissolve our "mainland" conceptions of personhood, identity, memory, and/or history? How does the difference between water and land, liquid and firm environs shape the way we comprehend the world and our place in it.

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