Studies in American Literature (471-0-20)

Topic

American Women Auteurs, Novels, & Films: 1895-1960

Instructors

Julia Ann Stern
847/491-3530
University Hall Room 415
Office Hours: Mondays 1:1:50; Tuesdays 10-11; and Thursdays 12:20-1

Meeting Info

University Hall 418: Tues 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

American Women Auteurs centers around five novelists - Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Nella Larsen. That is, we move from the exquisite local color realism of Jewett's spinster-filled Maine to Chopin's "creole Bovary" set in fin de siècle New Orleans to Wharton's anthropological vision of Old New York's tribal mores for women, to Cather's enabling Nebraska prairies and historical ante-bellum Virginia to Larsen's Renaissance Harlem, Tuskegee, and rural black belt South. The seminar pairs both Jane Campion's The Piano and an all-star set of Bette Davis's greatest classical Hollywood films with these novels: The Country of the Pointed Firs and Deephaven with The Piano; Jezebel with The Awakening; Dark Victory and Now, Voyager with The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence; Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? with Sapphira and the Slave Girl and My Antonia; and In This Our Life with Quicksand and Passing. Augmenting this reading list will be theoretical essays on authorship by Foucault and Barthes; star theory; essays on spectatorship; and genre criticism on melodramatic, gothic, and sentimental forms.