21L.705  Major Authors: America's Literary Scientists

CLASS DESCRIPTION

Global exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries radically changed Western science, orienting philosophies of natural history to more focused fields like comparative anatomy, botany, and geology. In the United States, European scientific advances and home-grown ventures like the Wilkes Exploring Expedition to Antarctica and the Pacific inspired new endeavors in cartography, ethnography, zoology, and evolutionary theory, replacing rigid models of thought and classification with more fluid and active systems. They inspired literary authors as well.  This class will examine some of the most remarkable of these authors—Herman Melville (Moby-Dick and “The Encantadas”), Henry David Thoreau (Walden ), Sarah Orne Jewett (Country of the Pointed Firs ), Edith Wharton (House of Mirth ), Toni Morrison (A Mercy ), among others—in terms of the subjects and methods they adopted, imaginatively and often critically, from the natural sciences.

 

This class allows participants to develop a body of research on the scientific concepts, methods, and contexts that inform these literary works. We will use this research to illuminate the fruitful relationship between science and art during a period when such terms did not appear as divided as they do now.  We will also try to become better readers of authors who read voraciously in many fields now often opaque to us.  No special knowledge of science or the history of science is required.

 

READINGS

 

1	Herman Melville, ed. John Bryant and Haskell Springer	Moby-Dick , The Longman Critical Edition	Longman
2	Henry David Thoreau	Walden and Other Writings	Norton Critical Edition
3	Sarah Orne Jewett	The Country of the Pointed Firs	Signet
4	Edith Wharton	The House of Mirth	Oxford
5	Toni Morrison	A Mercy	Vintage