Courses

This course reads late 19th c American literature through a transatlantic lens: novels and stories by Henry James, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, W.E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin (save for Chesnutt, set largely in New York and Chicago) are situated in the context of a larger tapestry of visual, literary and sociological representations of late 19th c urban life in Paris and Berlin. The turn of the century Berlin sociologist Georg Simmel and  the mid-19th c Parisian flaneur Baudelaire directly inspire influential late 20th c American theorists of 19th c modernity--Marshall Berman & Richard Sennett. Together these four analysts form a matrix of modernist theorizing against which our literary texts acquire enlarged contexts and dimensions.