Spring 2008
HUSL 6304.001
Wed. 12:30 - 3:15 p.m.
JO 4.708
American
Popular Literature
aka
Trash-y Books: A Historical Romp through American Popular Literature from
the Puritans to the Present
This course is both a historical survey of American popular literature from
the colonial period to the present and an introduction to the
interdisciplinary study of reading, literacy, and history of the book.
Historians of the book study texts as both sign systems and material
artifacts. That is to say that a book’s meanings arise not only from the
words on the page, but also from the contexts in which it is produced,
distributed, and read. Consequently, we will read a variety of popular
texts—Puritan Indian captivity narratives, novels of the early Republic,
nineteenth-century women’s sentimental fiction, dime novels, pulp magazines,
turn-of-the-century Westerns, and contemporary romances, horror, and
Christian fiction—along side studies of the institutions that shaped their
production and the readers for whom they were important.
These texts offer clues to the preoccupations of ordinary people, ways of
reconstructing popular world-views. What kind of “equipment for living” did
these texts offer women and men, recent immigrants and the native-born,
slaves and free, the rich and the working classes? Do ordinary readers
uncritically consume these texts, or are they “resisting readers?” What is
the relationship between popular texts and the institutions that produce,
market, and distribute them? How do changes in levels of education and
religious beliefs influence popular literature? How do gender, race, and
class shape what texts we read and how we make sense of them?
Learning Objectives:
1. Students will be able to describe major genres of American popular
literature and the major issues and questions in scholarship about them.
2. Students will be able to analyze and evaluate arguments made by scholars
in the field.
3. Students will research and write a literary or literary historical
argument about some aspect of American popular writing.
Texts:
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Vaughan & Clark, ed., Puritans Among the Indians (1676-1724) |
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Hannah Foster, The Coquette (1797) |
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Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) |
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Henry Louis Gates, ed., Classic Slave Narratives (1845, 1861) |
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Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick (1866) |
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Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) |
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Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1930) |
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Stephen King, Carrie (1974) |
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Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind: A Novel of the
Earth’s Last Days (1996) |
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Harlequin romance novel |
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Cathy Davidson, ed., Reading in America |
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All texts except the Harlequin romance and Left Behind
available at Off-Campus Books or the UTD bookstore
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| Selected readings on e-reserve at: |
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http://utdallas.docutek.com/eres/coursepage.aspx?cid=382 |
Course Requirements / Evaluation Criteria:
| *seminar attendance,
preparation and participation |
| *class presentation
(including 1-page handout of 4-6 questions for discussion) |
| *Final Project |
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*prospectus (3 pages) and bibliography due Wed. 19 Mar. |
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*final paper (20 pages) due
Wed. 7 May |
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Course Schedule:
| Wed. 9 Jan. |
Intro. to Course / Books as
Artifacts
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| Wed 16 Jan. |
Paradigms for Studying the "Popular"
Stuart Hall, “Cultural studies: two paradigms” in Media, Culture and
Society 1980 (2): 57-72 (e-reserve).
Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular'" in People's
History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (Boston: Routledge,
1981): 227-39 (e-reserve).
Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social
Text 1 (Winter 1979): 130-48 (e-reserve).
Michael Denning, "The End of Mass Culture," International Labor and
Working-Class History 37 (Spring 1990): 4-18 (e-reserve).
Tony Bennett, "Introduction: Popular Culture and 'the turn to Gramsci'"
in Popular Culture & Social Relations, eds. Tony Bennett, Colin
Mercer & Janet Woollacott (Philadelphia: Open UP, 1986): xi-xix
(e-reserve).
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| Wed. 23 Jan. |
On Popular Reading
Michel de Certeau, chap. 12, “Reading as Poaching”
in Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Los
Angeles: U of California P, 1984): 165-76 (e-reserve).
Roger Chartier, chap. 1, "Communities of Readers"
in The Order of Books (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994): 1-23
(e-reserve).
Robert Darnton, chap. 7, “Communication Networks”
in The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (NY:
Norton, 1995): 181-97 (e-reserve).
Pierre Bourdieu, "The aristocracy of culture,"
Media, Culture & Society 2 (1980): 225-254 (e-reserve).
Janice Radway, "The Book-of-the-Month Club and the
General Reader: The Uses of 'Serious' Fiction," in Reading in
America, 259-85.
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| Wed. 30 Jan. |
Captivity Narratives
Puritans Among the Indians: Mary Rowlandson
(29-75); Quentin Stockwell (77-91); Hannah Swarton (145-158); and Hannah
Dustan (159-65)
David D. Hall, chap. 1, "The Uses of Literacy," in
Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989):
21-70 (e-reserve).
E. Jennifer Monaghan, "Literacy Instruction and
Gender in Colonial New England" in Reading in America, 53-81.
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| Wed. 6 Feb. |
The Novel in the Early Republic
Hannah Foster, The Coquette
Cathy Davidson, chap. 3, "Ideology and Genre"
(38-54) and chap. 4, "Literacy, Education and the Reader" (55-82) in
Revolution and the Word (New York: Oxford UP, 1986) (e-reserve).
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| Wed. 13 Feb. |
Slave Narratives
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave (243-332) in Classic Slave Narratives
Dana Nelson Salvino, "The Word in Black and White: Ideologies of Race
and Literacy in Antebellum America" in Reading in America,
140-156. |
| Wed. 20 Feb. |
Slave Narratives - ctd.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(335-515) in Classic Slave Narratives
Elizabeth McHenry, Introduction, “In Search of Black Readers” in
Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American
Literary Societies (Durham: Duke UP, 2002): 1-21 (e-reserve).
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| Wed. 27 Feb. |
Sentimental Fiction (*no student
presentation)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
(chap. 1-20)
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| Wed. 5 Mar. |
Sentimental Fiction- ctd.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (finish)
Jane P. Tompkins, "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and
the Politics of Literary History" in The New Feminist Criticism,
ed. Elaine Showalter (NY: Pantheon, 1985): 81-104 (e-reserve).
Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70.3
(1988): 581-606 (e-reserve).
Sicherman, Barbara, "Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's
Reading in Late-Victorian America" in Reading in America,
201-225.
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| Wed. 12 Mar. |
SPRING BREAK -- NO CLASS
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| Wed. 19 Mar. |
Dime Novels -- Prospectus and Bibliography
Due
Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick
Michael Denning, chap. 2, "Fiction Factories: The
Production of Dime Novels" (17-26) and chap. 3, "'The Unknown Public':
Dime Novels and Working Class Readers" (27-56) in Mechanic Accents
(New York: Verso, 1987) (e-reserve).
Marcus Klein, chap. 3, "The Imposters" in
Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes (Madison: U of Wisconsin P,
1994): 53-64 (e-reserve).
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| Wed. 26 Mar |
Westerns
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage
Marcus Klein, "The Westerner: Origins of the Myth"
in Gender, Language, and Myth, ed. Glenwood Irons (Toronto: U of
Toronto P, 1992): 65-82 (e-reserve).
Jane Tompkins, "West of Everything," South
Atlantic Quarterly 86.4 (fall 1987): 357-77 (e-reserve). |
| Wed. 2 Apr. |
NO CLASS -- work on papers |
| Wed. 9 Apr. |
Hard-Boiled Detective
Fiction
Dashiell Hammett, The
Maltese Falcon
Erin Smith, chap. 2, “The
Adman on the Shop Floor: Workers, Consumer Culture, and the Pulps” in
Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Temple UP,
2000): 43-73 (e-reserve).
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| Wed. 16 Apr. |
Christian Fiction
Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, Left Behind
Amy Johnson Frykholm, chap. 2, “Networks of Readers, Networks of
Meaning” (39-66) and chap. 7, “Witness to the Apocalypse” (153-174) in
Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (New
York: Oxford UP, 2004) (e-reserve).
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| Wed. 23 Apr. |
Romances (*no student presentation)
Harlequin romance
Tania Modleski, chap. 2, "The Disappearing Act:
Harlequin Romances" in Gender, Language and Myth, 20-45
(e-reserve).
Janice Radway, chap. 4, "The Ideal Romance: The
Promise of Patriarchy" in Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: UNC
P, 1991), 119-57 (e-reserve).
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| Wed. 7 May |
Final Papers due in my office by 4:00 p.m. |
Course Requirements
Attendance and participation -- You are expected to come to class
prepared for discussion. Your participation includes not only expressing
your own ideas, but also the respect and seriousness with which you treat
the ideas of your colleagues.
Presentation -- You and (maybe) a partner are responsible for getting
discussion of the day’s primary and secondary reading started once during
the semester. You should meet in advance and plan the background, issues,
passages to examine closely, and questions you want to bring to the class.
Your job is to give us an overview of what scholars have said about this in
the past and to identify the central questions/issues/concerns in that
scholarship. Presentations will be (MAX) the first 10 minutes
of class, although discussion of questions may run much longer. You will
distribute to everyone a single hand-out you jointly produce with 4-6
questions for us to address at the start of class.
1. Look up the text in the MLA on-line bibliography. How many citations
come up? Any patterns (lots of recent scholarship, lots of scholarship from
the early 1980s and little since, etc.)? What kinds of journals are these
articles/essays published in (feminist, African-American, those focused on a
particular genre or time period, big-name journals or smaller, specialized
ones)?
2. Skim the titles of the citations. What are the 3-5 major
themes/issues/questions scholarship on this book is concerned with?
3. Pick 3-4 of these articles that look interesting and read them. Mine
them for insights to share in your presentation or to add to discussion of
your questions.
4. Be sure to include questions that allow us to discuss the secondary
reading assigned for that day, as well.
Prospectus (3 pages plus bibliography) – detailed hand-out available
on my website.
Final Paper (20 pages of so plus bibliography) – detailed hand-out
available on my website.
University
Policies
READING QUESTIONS FOR 16 AND 23 JAN.
Guide to Critical Reading for
Grad Students
Final Paper and
Prospectus Guidelines
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