Goal:
Write an essay in which you explain how one key character, theme, or scene in the novel illuminates and is illuminated by one of the issues under discussion in our course.
Resources:
You can draw upon the archive of resources on "turn of the century America" in order to document your reading. You may also use any of the texts and resources we have used earlier in the semester to document your case or introduce contextual evidence you have located as part of your research. Be sure to provide a bibliography of primary and secondary resources that could be used by future readers who wished to understand this text within its historical/cutural context. Explain the way in which this work continues a particular thread in the American "conversation," and the ways in which it builds on or moves away from previous treatments of that theme. Use primary and secondary resources to show the way in which the text does or does not reflect American life in the period in which it was published.
A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells
Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie
The House of Mirth, Wharton
My Antonia, Willa Cather
The Gilded Age, Warner and Twain
Possible themes include: women, work, wealth, class relationships, immigration, education. In general, how does this text answer the question of what it means to be an American, and what problems complicated the answer to that question?
Each team will have three weeks to develop and present a report on one of the novels. Each member of the team will be responsible for producing an independent report (based on shared research and discussions) or a distinct contribution to a group report.
Read Susan B. Anthony's "Woman's Half-Century of Evolution" published in 1902 in THe North American Review. In that article, Anthony recalls the "Declaration of Independence" that had been issued at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848, and then goes on to talk of the progress made towards gender equality in the intervening years. How many of the complaints lodged by the delegates to the Seneca Falls convention accurately describe the circumstances of Lily Bart?