Année universitaire 2017/2018 Descriptif d’enseignement Cycle Master 1 (4ème année) / 4th year Semestre 1
Titre du cours Lectures d’œuvres Langue du cours/Language of instruction : English
Enseignant(s) Alice Béja Maîtresse de conférences Contact : [email protected]
Résumé du cours – Objectifs This seminar aims at analyzing major American protest movements from the middle of the 19th century to the end of the 1930s, while understanding how the United States have built their identity as a protest nation. We will not retrace the sociology and evolution of abolitionism, feminism and anti-capitalist movements, but rather try to think about the rhetoric of protest. How do those who rise against injustice use the American creed, founded on freedom and equality, to justify their claims? Students will be working on philosophical and political texts (Emerson, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eugene Debs…) as well as fiction (Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Dos Passos…) to analyze how dissenters try to break the bars of « the sunlit prison of the American dream » (James Baldwin).
As a result of this course, students will: • Learn about major protest movements in American history from the 19th and 20th century • Study these movements’ historical impact and their cultural importance • Read and comment on major texts from American political history and culture • Analyze the rhetoric of dissent • Think about the relationship of protest and American identity
Evaluation Two students will present the texts each week, two students will act as respondents and two students will take notes and write a synthesis of the course, to be handed out to the others. Students will be evaluated on their capacity to perform those tasks as well as on their overall participation throughout the semester.
Plan – Séances Week 1 - Introduction: Voicing Dissent in the Land of Consensus Week 2 - A Revolutionary Nation? Week 3 - Transcendentalism: Freeing the Self Week 4 - The Original Sin: Slavery and Abolitionism Week 5 - “Shall Women have the Right to Vote?”: Suffragism and Women’s Rights Week 6 - Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? Fighting for the Poor in the Land of Opportunity
Bibliographie : Students will be given a coursepack at the beginning of the course, containing all the texts we will be discussing as well as additional bibliographical references.
Most texts in the coursepack are taken from the following anthology, which students can go to if they want to read other protest writers than the ones we are studying in class, and learn about the more contemporary aspects of protest (civil rights, second- wave feminism, gay liberation, environmentalism…):
Zoe Trodd (ed). American Protest Literature. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2006.
For historical background of major protest movements, our reference book will be:
Ralph Young. Dissent. The History of an American Idea. New York: New York University Press, 2015.
Additionnally, here is a list of primary sources related to the movements we will be studying; the * indicates texts which are excerpted in the coursepack:
Nonfiction
*The American Declaration of Independence. http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration.html
The American Constitution http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html
The Bill of Rights http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights.html
James Agee, Walker Evans. Let Us How Praise Famous Men (1941). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. NB: to see a variety of documentary photographs from the Great Depression (by Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hines, Edwin Rosskam and others, go to: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/PRINT/document/doc.html
*J. Hector St John De Crèvecoeur. Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
*Eugene Debs, “Statement to the Court” (1918), https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1918/court.htm
*Frederick Douglass. “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852), in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1999.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Self-Reliance”, from Essays. First Series (1841), http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm Jacob Riis. How the Other Half Lives (1890), http://www.bartleby.com/208/
* Werner Sombart. Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906). New York: Macmillan, 1976.
*Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Sentiments
* Henry David Thoreau. Civil Disobedience (1849), http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/walden/Essays/civil.html
Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
*David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular and very expressly, to those of the United States of America (1829), New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
Fiction
*John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (1938). New York: Library of America, 1996.
Rebecca Harding Davis. Life in the Iron Mills (1861). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/876/876-h/876-h.htm
*Charlotte Perkins Gilman. “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Wall_Paper -- Herland (1915), http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32
Jack London, The Iron Heel (1908), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1164/1164-h/1164-h.htm
*Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread (1932). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). New York: Penguin, 2000.
*Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2004.
Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth (1905). New York: Penguin, 2012.
*Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855), https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm