In this course we will explore and integrate three distinct areas of American culture in the latter part of the nineteenth century: literature, architecture, and painting. In this exploration and integration we will focus on what seems a common preoccupation of American art at this time, that is, a shifting in the plane of aesthetic significance from the work of art to the eye of the beholder, a shift which produces an art which is reader- and observer-oriented.

We will start with the seminal essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose philosophy of Nature and theories of art and artist influenced the entire century. From there will we consider the poetry and cultural criticism of Walt Whitman who seems to follow Emerson's theories hand-in-glove and yet who, at the same time, deviates radically from Emerson's political and poetic practice. In this deviation, however, Whitman provides both illustration and rationale for what will become an overriding preoccupation of American aesthetics, that is, a leveling of distinction between artist and audience on the grounds of egalitarianism. Even though Whitman's purposes were directly ideological, we will then consider at the opposite end of the poetic spectrum the example of Emily Dickinson. Her inward, terse, and metaphysical verse seems the polar opposite of Whitman's public, erotic, and expansive lines, yet her syntax and style place an increasing burden on her readers first to decipher and then to recipher her verbal mosaics. Her later poems in particular resemble impressionist paintings in that their coherence depends on imagistic integration on the part of the reader, much as the paintings require visual integration on the part of the viewer.

In fiction at this time, this reader-orientation also provides an approach to both ends of the vernacular-genteel spectrum which characterized the literature of the period. On the one hand, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the ending of which has angered and confused so many of its readers, can be seen as the culmination of Huck's literary progress from reader to writer, a progress and process which Twain, unlike Whitman, views with deep suspicion. On the other hand, Henry James's novels and tales present a sharp and genteel contrast to Twain's vernacular masterpiece and, in his mature work, become increasingly interested in both the nature of fiction and its implication for the reader. In The Ambassadors, the novel James considered his masterpiece, Lambert Strether is forced to choose between two fundamentally opposed ways of seeing the world, one the beautifully composed world of light associated with French impressionism, and the other the morally charged world of interpretation associated with his New England roots. The judgments that Strether, and by implication the reader, has to make in the course ofthe novel should anticipate some of the judgments George Inness was making concerning French impressionism about the same time.

In architecture, we will consider the seminal and innovative example of Louis Sullivan. Whatwe will see throughout Sullivan's writings is that, as Whitman had suggested about the analysis of poetry, the analysis of architecture is synonymous with the analysis of the social fabric of a people. In Kindergarten Chats and "The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered" Sullivan recognizes and follows the earlier example of Whitman, and this acknowledgement provides an illuminating approach to Sullivan's architectural ornament and its "function" of implicating an observer in the meaning and aspiration of his buildings. To test this hypothesis, the seminar will conduct a field trip to Buffalo, New York to view Sullivan's Guaranty Building in the latter part of the semester.

Finally, in American painting at this time, there is also a distinct shift in style, a style which radically reorients the viewer's relation to the work of art. We will examine specifically the worksof Thomas Eakins and George lnness, both to distinguish these painters from the earlier painters of the Hudson River and Luminist Schools and, more broadly, to link them to this larger movement in American aesthetics. While Eakins's apparently photographic realism places him stylistically opposite Inness's subjective and mystical approach to painting, both seem to share a need to involve the viewer in the construction of meaning in the work of art, and this involvement provides some explanation for their respective experiment and innovation in their paintings.

Course Requirements