This is a three-credit writing-intensive honors seminar, and, as such, there will be an emphasis on writing and class participation. There will be four short writing assignments in the first half of the semester, based on the reading of the seminar, a term paper focused on one of the literary works of the seminar, and a take-home final examination which will focus on interdisciplinary connections testing the hypothesis of the seminar. As preparation for both the class discussion and written assignments, there will be scheduled individual conferences throughout the semester.

Required Texts

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Writings.

Whitman, Walt. Complete Poetry and Selected Prose.

Dickinson, Emily. Final Harvest.

Clemens, Samuel. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

James, Henry. The Ambassadors.

Sullivan, Louis. Kindergarten Chats.

In addition to the required texts which students are expected to purchase, there will be extensive readings on reserve at the library. These required readings will supplement the texts (in the case of Eakins and Inness the reserve material will constitute the readings for those weeks) and will, on average, take about three hours per week. Moreover, there will be on-line commentary and images placed on this web page as part of instruction of the seminar.

Reserve Texts

Bishop, Jonathan. Emerson on the Soul. Harvard Belknap Press

Bloom, Harold. Review from New York Review of Books. (Xerox)

Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time. Johns Hopkins University Press

Cikovsky, Nicolai and Micheal Quick. George Inness. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Condit, Carl. The Chicago School of Architecture.

Fried, Michael. "Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration." (Xerox)

Hagenbuckle, Roland. "Precision and Indeterminacy in Emily Dickinson's Poetry." Emerson Quarterly

James, Henry. The Painter's Eye. Harvard University Press

Johns, Elizabeth. Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life. Princeton University Press

Lubin, David M. Acts of Portraval: Eakins. Sargent. James. Yale University Press

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. Oxford University Press

Murphy, Kevin. Poetics of the New World: A Study of Walt Whitman's " Song of Myself. " Ph. D. diss., University of Rochester

-----. "Illiterate's Progress: The Descent into Literacy in Huck Finn. " Texas Studies in Literature and Language.

-----. "Walt Whitman and Louis Sullivan: The Aesthetics of Egalitarianism." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.

-----. "The Unfixable Text: Bewilderment of Vision in The Turn of the Screw. Texas Studies in Literature and Language.

Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, especially chapters 5 ("Luminism") and 11 ("Thomas Eakins: Science and Sight").

-----. Nature and Culture. Oxford University Press

Thomas, Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry.

Werner, Alfred. Inness Landscapes. Watson-Guptil.

Wilmerding, John. "The Luminist Movement: Some Reflections," in American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850-1875. Washington: The National Gallery of Art, 1980. Harper and Row.

Wolf, Bryan. "When is a Painting Very Much Like a Whale?" in Richard Brodhead, ed. New Essays on Moby-Dick

Wilson, Rob. "Sculling to the Oversoul: Louis Simpson, American Transcendentalism, and Thomas Eakins's Max Schmitt in a Single Scull." American Quarterly.

Course Outline