Required Texts -- Available at the Student Bookstore on the Corner

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills (Bedford Cultural edition)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse
Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
Course Pack -- Available at Brilling Books on Elliewood Avenue

Schedule of Readings and Assignments
Check periodically for updates or changes. I will not add any major assignments or readings, but I will update the Reading Journal assignments, add links to short or recommended readings, or move readings around.

*Check the Resources Page for an Topical List of Websites to find links to information and summaries on many of the inventions, theories or scientific discoveries found in the texts.*

Note: CP=Course Packet; RJ = Reading Journal Assignment
[For an alphabetical list of full descriptions of the journal assignments, click here]

Assorted Poems in Course Pack
Edgar A. Poe, "Poems Written in Youth: Sonnet-to-Science"
Poems from Godey's Lady's Book
Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman

Complete Learning Style Inventory [located here] and bring results to class

RJ: One-sentence summary for each poem

Excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (CP)
Vol. I: "Author's Introduction"
Vol. II, Chapter IX, "The Example of the Americans..."
Vol. II, Chapter X, "Why the Americans are more Addicted to Practical rather than Theoretical Science"
Vol. II, Chapter XI, "In What Spirit the Americans Cultivate the Arts"

Herman Melville, "The Lightning-Rod Man"; articles from Scientific American (CP)

2/7

2/12

1) Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Stereoscope & the Stereograph" (CP)
2) Read at least one other nineteenth-century essay (your choice) dealing with the daguerreotype from the following and come to class prepared to explain it to your classmates:
a) from the Smithsonian Art Museum website
b) or from a website focusing on Emily Dickinson and photography

In-class Group Meeting
Essay #1 due

3/1-3/9

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills

Davis, Life in the Iron Mills, cont. ; Readings from cultural materials:
From the "Work & Class" section: pgs. 77-85, 147-172; Orestes Brownson, 209-220, and from the "Art & Artists" section through William Story excerpt (pps. 293-315)

RJ (Group): Write about 1 hour you spent in the library working on your research

RJ (Everyone else): Double-column entry

RJ (Groups): Write about 1 hour you spent in the library working on your research

RJ (Everyone else): Double-column entry

Hawthorne, "Rappacini's Daughter"; "The Birth-Mark" (Mosses from an Old Manse)

RJ: Discussion questions

Charlotte Perkins Gillman, "The Yellow Wall-paper" (CP)
See also, "Why I wrote the Yellow Wallpaper"; Catharine Beecher's Letter Seventeeth "Personal Experience" (CP)

Optional: Mitchell's Fat and Blood and How to Make Them

RJ: Discussion questions

RJ (Groups): Write about 1 hour you spent in the library working on your research

RJ (Everyone else): Double-column entry

RJ (Groups): Write about 1 hour you spent in the library working on your research

RJ (Everyone else): Double-column entry

Poe, "The Masque of the Red Death"

Wells, “The Stolen Bacillus”

RJ: Look back through your journal and identify a central theme, idea, or question that appears in more than one of your entries. In your final entry, consider at least two of the following questions: Why is this theme important in some of the works we've read? What does it say about the relationship between literature and science or about science and identity in 19th-Century America? OR What do you see as one of the most important issues or tensions that we've encountered in this semester's readings? Why?