Course Requirements 
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| Weeks One and Two: | Course introduction; material and methods, Ralph
Waldo Emerson's Nature, "Self-Reliance," "The American Scholar." "The Poet":
Emerson and the and the Painters
Reserve Reading: F. O. Mathiessen's American Renaissance, chapter on Emerson, Murphy's Poetics of the New World, chapter on Emerson; Novak's chapter on "Luminism" in Nineteenth Century American Painting, Bryan Wolf's "When is a Painting Very Much Like a Whale?" in Brodhead, New Essays on Moby-Dick |
| Weeks Three and Four | Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," "Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry," and selected poems; 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass; Democratic
Vistas
Reserve Reading: Murphy's Poetics of the New World," chapters on Democratic Vistas and "Song of Myself"; Thomas, Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry, chapter 4, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" |
| Weeks Five and Six: | The poetry of Emily Dickinson; comparisons and contrasts
with the vision and practice of Walt Whitman; Dickinson's fusion of Emersonian
aspiration Hawthornian skepticism; Dickinson's embrace of Emerson's logocentricity
and simultaneous rejection of his optimistic philosophy of Nature
Reserve reading: Sharon Cameron's Lyric Time and Roland Hagenbuckle's "Precision and Indeterminacy in Emily Dickinson's Poetry" |
| Week Seven: | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the dark side of
logocentricity; Huck Finn as literatus
Reserve Reading: Murphy's "Illiterate's Progress: The Descent into Literacy in Huck Finn" |
| MIDTERM BREAK | |
| Weeks Eight and Nine | Henry James's The Ambassadors; ambiguity and the
office of the reader
Reserve Reading: Murphy's "The Unfixable Text: Bewilderment of Vision in The Turn of the Screw"; James's The Painter's Eye |
| Weeks Ten and Eleven: | Louis Sullivan's Kindergarten Chats; the Chicago
School of Architecture; functional architecture; Sullivan's Guaranty Building
(field trip to Buffalo,New York)
Reserve Reading: Murphy's "Walt Whitman and Louis Sullivan: The Aesthetics of Egalitarianism." |
| Week Twelve: | The painting of Thomas Eakins: "Max Schmitt in a
Single Scull" and "The Gross Clinic"
Reserve Reading: Novak, American Painting in the Nineteenth Century, chapters on "Luminism" and "Thomas Eakins"; Rob Wilson's "Sculling Toward the Transcendental"; Micheal Fried's "Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration in Thomas Eakins's "The Gross Clinic"; Johns, Thomas Eakins: Heroism of Modern Life, chapters on "Max Schmitt in a Single Scull," "The Gross Clinic," and "Walt Whitman" |
| Week Thirteen: | The painting of George Inness: the movement from
the Hudson River School through Luminism to American Impressionism. The
viewer as subject in art.
Reserve Reading: Alfred Werner's Inness Landscapes and Nicolai Cikovsky and Micheal Quick's George Inness (catalogue for 1986 exhibition at Los Angeles County Museuem of Art); Wilmerding's "The Luminist Movement: Some Reflections" |
| Week Fourteen: | Connections |
Course Requirements
Home
This page maintained by Kevin Murphy, murphyk@ithaca.edu
Page designed and produced through Instructional Graphics Services, Last revised January 17, 2001