Dr. Rebhorn 3 credits

This course traces the genealogy of Herman Melville’s writing, from his first novel to his last, paying particular attention to the ways both Melville and his reading public made sense of his works.  In addition to following Melville’s anxious understanding of himself as an author in the young republic, this course will also contextualize Melville’s works, attending to the critical discourses that have developed around him in order to create a “cognitive map” of how Melville negotiated a shifting national terrain.  Ultimately, by exploring Melville’s cultural and aesthetic gestures in relation to pressing social issues like chattel slavery, nationalism, industrial capitalism, and the sectional crisis leading to the Civil War, this course reveals how nineteenth-century American artists, like Melville, were always already putting pressure on what it meant to write “American” literature.

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