{"id":234,"date":"2019-04-15T16:42:37","date_gmt":"2019-04-15T16:42:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/?page_id=234"},"modified":"2019-04-15T16:57:55","modified_gmt":"2019-04-15T16:57:55","slug":"english-344-the-true-the-beautiful-and-the-good","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/english-344-the-true-the-beautiful-and-the-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Course Announcements"},"content":{"rendered":"

English 344: American Literature to 1890<\/h2>\n

The True, the Beautiful, and the Good<\/h1>\n

Fall 2109<\/h3>\n

Mondays and Wednesdays 12:30 \u2013 1:45<\/h3>\n

Dr. Joshua Mabie<\/h3>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/h3>\n
To the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett in whose beautiful and delicate work there is the perfection that endures.<\/h5>\n
Willa Cather, dedication to O Pioneers!<\/em><\/h5>\n
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, \u201cThis is and no mistake.\u201d<\/h5>\n
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden<\/em><\/h5>\n
He questioned softly why I failed?<\/h5>\n
\u201cFor beauty,\u201d I replied.<\/h5>\n
\u201cAnd I for truth, – the two are one;<\/h5>\n
\u201cWe brethren are,\u201d he said.<\/h5>\n
– Emily Dickinson<\/h5>\n
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.<\/h5>\n
-Edgar Allen Poe, \u201cThe Philosophy of Composition\u201d<\/h5>\n
<\/h5>\n
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song\u2014the rhythmic cry of the slave\u2014stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.<\/h5>\n
– W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of the Black Folk<\/em><\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Course Description<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

We are consumed by politics. Unfortunately, the minute-by-minute politics of breaking-news rage and outrage can also consume English professors\u2019 and English majors\u2019 approaches to literary art. Literature, by one definition, is collection of \u201ccompositions . . . which have been (or deserve to be) preserved.\u201d Might we gain something by thinking about bigger, more lasting questions of literature\u2019s truth, beauty, and goodness? There is precedent for sidestepping immediate political back and forth to pursue truth, beauty, and goodness on a much longer and more slowly unfolding timescale. Even in the midst of civil tumult that makes our current politics look tame, some nineteenth-century American writers found ways to create and comment on works of lasting beauty, truth, and goodness. Thoreau spent a couple of years at Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller spent a summer on the Great Lakes and the midwestern prairie. John Muir walked a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Emily Dickinson wrote poems and put them in boxes in her attic. Herman Melville wrote defiant novels that almost no one read from a farmhouse far from New York. W.E.B. Dubois wasn\u2019t satisfied with mere political, social, and economic recognition for African Americans; he sung of spiritual and cultural equality. All this struck some of these writers\u2019 contemporaries as irrelevant, frivolous, or irresponsible, but perhaps we can learn something from these acts of defiant disengagement.\u00a0\u00a0 In English 344 this term we will attempt to lift our gaze from the controversies that are immediately in front of us to instead consider older, maybe even timeless, notions and representations of beauty, truth, and goodness. To do so, we will acquaint or reacquaint ourselves with a vocabulary of literary study that emphasizes appreciation and wonder a little bit more than demystification, destabilization, and deconstruction. We will test Rita Felski\u2019s contention that \u201cWorks of art do not only subvert but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform . . .\u201d We will read, talk about, and write about some really great books.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

English 344: American Literature to 1890 The True, the Beautiful, and the Good Fall 2109 Mondays and Wednesdays 12:30 \u2013 1:45 Dr. Joshua Mabie To the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett in whose beautiful and delicate work there is the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3878,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-234","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3878"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/234\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":242,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/234\/revisions\/242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/jmabie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}