FINAL

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HUM485/AMST310

Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick, or Street Life in New York With the Boot Blacks 978-0451469595

Edith Wharton, Custom of the Country 978-0307949547

Meridel Le Sueur, The Girl 978-0975348659

Chester Himes, A Rage in Harlem 978-0679720409

Richard Powers, Gain 978-0312429096

 

HUM455

Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of this World (Cuba 1949) 978-0374530112

Eduardo Galeano, The Open Veins of Latin America (Uruguay 1971) 978-0853459910

Patrícia Galvão, Industrial Park (Brazil 1933) 978-0803270411

Federico Gamboa, Santa (Mexico 1900) 978-0807871072

Richard Powers, Gain (US 1998) 978-0312429096

FA18 HUM485 version 1

Provisional:

Wm. Attaway, Blood on the Forge

alt: Meridel Le Sueuer, The Girl

Edith Wharton, Custom of the Country

alt: Frank Norris, McTeague

Richard Powers, Gain

alt: Toni Morrison, Beloved

Jon Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer

alt: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Shorter texts by Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, HD Thoreau, et al

Tropes, genres and themes: the grifter, the rebel, the dream, empire, capital, naturalism, modernism, the historical novel, proletarian lit

 

Enthusiasm

Chapter XII

WHY SOME AMERICANS MANIFEST A SORT OF FANATICAL SPIRITUALISM

Although the desire of acquiring the good things of this world is the prevailing passion of the American people, certain momentary outbreaks occur when their souls seem suddenly to burst the bonds of matter by which they are restrained and to soar impetuously towards heaven. In all the states of the Union, but especially in the half-peopled country of the Far West, itinerant preachers may be met with who hawk about the word of God from place to place. Whole families, old men, women, and children, cross rough passes and untrodden wilds, coming from a great distance, to join a camp-meeting, where, in listening to these discourses, they totally forget for several days and nights the cares of business and even the most urgent wants of the body.

Here and there in the midst of American society you meet with men full of a fanatical and almost wild spiritualism, which hardly exists in Europe. From time to time strange sects arise which en- deavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States.

Nor ought these facts to surprise us. It was not man who implanted in himself the taste for what is infinite and the love of what is immortal; these lofty instincts are not the offspring of his capricious will; their steadfast foundation is fixed in human nature, and they exist in spite of his efforts. He may cross and distort them; destroy them he cannot.

The soul has wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains are taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and disquieted amid the enjoyments of sense. If ever the faculties of the great majority of mankind were exclusively bent upon the pursuit of material objects, it might be anticipated that an amazing reaction would take place in the souls of some men. They would drift at large in the world of spirits, for fear of remaining shackled by the close bondage of the body.

It is not, then, wonderful if in the midst of a community whose thoughts tend earthward a small number of individuals are to be found who turn their looks to heaven. I should be surprised if mysticism did not soon make some advance among a people solely engaged in promoting their own worldly welfare. It is said that the deserts of the Thebaid were peopled by the persecutions of the emperors and the massacres of the Circus; I should rather say that it was by the luxuries of Rome and the Epicurean philosophy of Greece. If their social condition, their present circumstances, and their laws did not confine the minds of the Americans so closely to the pursuit of worldly welfare, it is probable that they would display more reserve and more experience whenever their attention is turned to things immaterial, and that they would check themselves without difficulty. But they feel imprisoned within bounds, which they will apparently never be allowed to pass. As soon as they have passed these bounds, their minds do not know where to fix themselves and they often rush unrestrained beyond the range of common sense.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Recommended

Here are some of the books I read and films I watched this semester when I should have been doing other things.

Books

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Jackson has total control over this funny and macabre story of family, murder, and social rejection.

Steve Fisher, I Wake Up Screaming

Nobody actually wakes up screaming in this Hollywood-centered roman noir, which formed the basis of two film adaptations: I Wake Up Screaming with Betty Grable, Laird Gregar, and Victor Mature, and Vicki with Jean Peters.

Kenneth Fearing, Selected Poems

Fearing understood the looming disaster of mass culture and its tendency to commodify everything in its path. Yet he appropriated those materials for his own ends. By the author of The Big Clock.

Ambrose Bierce, Collected Stories

Celebrated as “the old gringo” by Fuentes, Bierce’s short fiction combines dark romanticism with cynicism.

Dave Eggers, The Circle

Satires of the IT industry and its deleterious effects on the social should probably be more grand guignol than this peppy dystopian takedown, but anything that punctures Silicon Valley’s bulletproof self-regard is worth reading.

Hideo Yokoyama, Six Four

At just under 600 pages this police procedural is a minor epic of bureaucratic politics, corruption, and betrayal.

Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic

This is an edifying and entertaining primer on Goth and pop culture.

Films

The Man Who Could Cheat Death

Anton Diffring’s perverse cosmopolitan charm carry this batty Hammer film about a man preserved far beyond an ordinary lifespan with the glands– yes, the glands— of his victims. A perfect companion to Circus of Horrors, which also stars Diffring.

Frankenstein Unbound

I hadn’t seen this Roger Corman film since undergrad. Raoul Julia as Victor Frankenstein, Jason Patric as Lord Byron, with a brief, disappointingly muffled turn by Michael Hutchence of INXS as Percy Shelley. Nick Brimble’s monster is distorted and tragic. Glorious scifi pulp.

The Witches

Joan Fontaine plays a psychologically fragile schoolteacher who arrives in a remote English village and gradually discovers the presence of Satan-worshipping locals. It’s slow to start but the climactic human sacrifice scene is huge fun.

Footsteps in the Fog

Jean Simmons plays an ambitious maid who’s too clever by half, drawn into the shadowy orbit of Stewart Granger’s aristocratic homme fatale.

Fanny By Gaslight

A dark melodrama about lost origins, malice, and class hierarchy

The Crimson Petal and the White

This is a fairly hard-boiled story, an adaptation of a novel by Michel Faber starring Romola Garai as Sugar, a literate and intelligent young prostitute in Victorian London. Her character develops in counterpoint with the wife of her primary john, a hypocritical bourgeois blind to the violence against women surrounding him not only on the streets but in respectable, middle-class homes.

 

 

 

Final (303)

Focus on the basics of film analysis and the defining qualities of German Expressionist Cinema. There will, of course, be some stylistic variations between the different directors Roberts discusses.

Revisit the paper prompts and our readings on the gothic. These will likely help you to forge links between otherwise disparate concepts and texts.

Did you read chapter 4 of DOC? What’s the difference between colonialism and neocolonialism?

Sorry, this isn’t a very elegant review. I’ll add further details as time permits.

 

Final (485)

Since the midterm we’ve covered a fair bit of territory, from postwar “domestic suspense” and film noir to the ghosts haunting American Empire to the struggle to build Paradise (or find asylum) in a fallen and violent world. Each of these focal points serves as an opportunity to see US American history and culture through a dark lens. The ground we inhabit has bones in it. Society’s benign surfaces conceal destructive forces and irrational appetites. The obverse of the Dream is a nightmare, and any effort to understand this nation and its people must confront the chiaroscuro character of US American life.

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