HIST 638A History and Literature
This seminar will explore the historical dimension to several works of American literature, focusing on the ways in which writers of fiction try to capture the feel of the past, to seek the genesis of the present in the past and to explore the workings of memory (often in relation to a traumatic event in the past). It will begin with a discussion of Erich Auerbach's theoretical text, Mimesis. It will move on to Tolstoy's War and Peace, after which it will stay on American soil with: Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Fauklner's Absalom, Absalom! Cather's My Antonia, Ellison's Invisible Man, Mailer's Armies of the Night, Krauss' The History of Love and Roth's American Pastoral. Of obvious interest to students of literature, this course should be no less relevant to students of history. With both types of student in mind, it will concentrate on matters of narrative, portraiture and historical argumentation as well on the historical research each of the writers in question did while devising their fictional creations.