PROFESSORIAL PREJUDICES

 

English 171B is a reading course designed to acquaint the serious and attentive student with the writings of several important American authors who flourished during the period between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century.  In lecture the instructor will address the class's attention to historical problems--political, philosophical, religious, and geographic--that bear importantly on the writings under consideration and on our contemporary response to them.  The act of reading literature is, in part at least, an historical exercise, doomed to defeat, but at the same time bolstered by its own aesthetic delights.  The problems inherent in an individual's creative and conscious involvement with the past, both personal and cultural, are ones to which American authors have been keenly responsive and to which their works speak variously and eloquently.  It is this eloquence that redeems these historical documents as works of art.  As works of art, however, they are answerable to a complex set of inquiries other than the merely historical.  These critical and aesthetic problems the instructor will also address in lecture, but only in the hope that his remarks will enable the student to formulate, in as meaningful and economical way as possible, his or her own response to the literary texts themselves.  Critical inquiry may drift far and wide, but if it fails in the end to illuminate the common text in some important aspect of its vitality and significance for us all, it is invalid and even possibly irresponsible.

 

It is essential, perhaps inevitable, that we share our insights: first in conversation and discussion; afterwards through the more precise medium of formal prose.  The initial form of response is encouraged, both in and outside of class; the second is required.