Nicolaus Mills

Beginning in the mid-19th century, a small group of American writers published a series of books that, by virtue of their quality, brought a new richness to American literature. This American renaissance, as the literary historian F. O. Matthiessen called it, had at its center a belief in “the possibilities of democracy.” It was an undertaking that sought to fulfill the hopes unleashed generations earlier by the American Revolution. This course will focus on the prose masterworks of the American renaissance writers and two of their successors, Henry James and Mark Twain. We will begin with a memoir, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, continue with Henry Thoreau’s Walden, and then move on to four novels: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. The aim of this course is to look closely at a set of representative texts and to see in them a modernity in which their central characters (in the case of Douglass and Thoreau, the authors themselves) defy the limits of the society in which they grew up and—in the extreme case of The Scarlet Letter’s Hester Prynne, who has a child out of wedlock in Puritan New England—lose the right to privacy.

In the final chapter of The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel, her heroine—while still in her 20s—looks back on her life and describes herself as being born twice. With a cheerful irony, she observes that she is now “patched, retreaded, and approved for the road.” She has, she believes, gained a hard-won perspective on herself and her world that she did not have at the start of her story. In this self-description, Plath’s heroine is like a series of figures in the classic coming-of-age novels of 20th-century American literature. She wants the kind of knowledge that will allow her to lead a meaningful life, not simply climb the ladder of success. This course will trace the history of the coming-of-age novel in 20th-century America, generation by generation, from the turn of the century through World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. We will end with America’s rise as a superpower. In addition to Sylvia Plath, the authors that we study will include Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and J. D. Salinger. In its traditional form, the coming-of-age novel traces the life and education of a central figure from early childhood to early adulthood, typically ending around the central figure’s 30th birthday. In this course, a number of coming-of-age novels expand this tradition to include multiple characters and whole families. The books that we will study reflect the inequities of American society, whether rooted in race or wealth or gender; but what unifies the central figures in these books is that, in the end, they see themselves defined by their self-understanding rather than by their origins.

“Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had,” Charlotte Brontë’s title character exclaims in the concluding chapter of Jane Eyre. Jane’s wedding may be quiet, but the steps leading up to her marriage with a man who once employed her as a governess are dramatic—and so are the steps leading to marriage in the other classic marriage-plot novels with which this course begins. From Jane Austen’s Emma, to Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, the novels we read in the first half of this yearlong course reflect the thinking of the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who observes, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” Nothing, in short, is “conventional” about the 19th-century English and American classics of Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and James that we will study. They lead directly to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and the modern novels that we will take on in the second half of the course, which range from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Love and romance are at the heart of the books that will dominate our reading, but so are laughs and gender politics in addition to the heartache that is part of any serious relationship.

At a time when he was America’s most famous novelist, Ernest Hemingway declared that all modern American literature begins with Mark Twain’s novel, Huckleberry Finn. This course is based on the belief that Hemingway did not look closely enough at the authors who constitute the classic American prose writers of the 19th century. The heroes and heroines of their densely-written books offer us a legacy of defiance that is distinctly modern. Twain is no outlier when put in their company. In the autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass flees slavery to begin a new life in the North as a writer and abolitionist. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne refuses to conform to Puritan society and has a baby out of wedlock. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, his narrator—who never reveals his actual name—goes to sea seeking meaning on a whale ship. In Henry Thoreau’s Walden, Thoreau takes up life in the woods in order to draw closer to nature. In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Huck travels down the Mississippi with an escaped slave with whom Huck sides despite his southern upbringing. In Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer refuses to make the marriage expected of her;, and in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (published at the start of the 20th century), her heroine, Lily Bart, flouts convention even more daringly. In focusing on just seven books, the aim of this course is to provide an opportunity for a series of close readings of representative texts. In conference, students will be encouraged to look more closely at other work by these same authors, as well as the 19th-century English novel.

Nineteenth-century American literature is made up of a small number of iconic prose texts. The ones most often put in this category are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. This course will focus on these five books and then conclude with a glimpse into two 20th-century novels, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. What links these texts is the rebellion of their central figures. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne defies the sexual and theological mores of the Puritans. In Moby Dick, Ahab challenges the notion of a moral universe. In the narrative of his life, Frederick Douglass challenges the slave system. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck defies the racism he was raised to believe in. In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer ignores the assumption that she must marry well to be a success. In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart refuses to marry at all. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby challenges the prerogatives of old money and power. The questions we will wrestle with over the course of the term is: What are we to make of the antagonism that mainstream, 19th-century American literature exhibits toward social and political convention? And does the antagonism speak to our better angels?

At the start of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne is punished by the Puritans of Boston for having a child out of wedlock. She is forced to stand in the town square wearing a dress with a scarlet A on it. As she endures the stares of the crowd around her, Hester thinks back to her past life in England. It will be seven years before she comes to terms with this moment and still longer before she gains full perspective on her life. In her struggle, Hester is like a series of figures in the classic coming-of-age novel, who go from a period in their lives when their perspectives are limited to a time when their experiences lead them to a much deeper self-awareness of who they are in relation to the world at large. In varying degrees, this struggle is one we all go through. This course will trace the history of coming-of-age literature in 19th-century America, generation by generation, from the pre-Civil War years, through the Civil War, to the prosperous 1880s and 1890s and the turn of the 20th century. The kind of personal education that lies at the heart of these books is captured by the narrator of Moby Dick, when he observes, “A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.” In addition to Hawthorne, the authors we will study include Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. In a country that divided over slavery and had to overcome its Puritan origins, the novels we study reflect the conflicts of American society whether rooted in race, class, or the role of women. What unites these books is that, in the end, the self-awareness of their central figures takes on a life of its own. By the time we last see them, they know who they are.

In 20th-century American literature, first-person writing is central to a series of classic texts—from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. The result is a body of literature at once both personal and far-reaching. This course will explore how first-person writing, with its emphasis on supplying an “I” for an eye, helped increase the diversity of the 20th-century authors that Americans read and even influenced the form of books not written in the first person. We will pay particular attention to how first-person writing was conducive to the rise of narrators who, in the past, might have been dismissed as either unreliable or ignored as outsiders. The reading for this course will include novels, memoirs, and journalism and move chronologically through the 20th century. In addition to the work of Fitzgerald and Baldwin, the books that we study will include Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In conference, students will have a chance to combine close analysis with their own first-person approach to a subject or an author.

America’s writers have been at home writing in the first person since the early nineteenth century. The result is a body of literature that is both highly personal and diverse.  This course will begin with three nineteenth-century books: Frederick Douglass’s autobiographical Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Then we will then move into the early twentieth century and the rethinking of the American Dream in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. We will next look at the age of Roosevelt with two American odysseys, The Grapes of Wrath (a book in which Steinbeck makes his presence so heavily felt that he might as well be writing in the first person), and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.  We will conclude the term with two self-critical, coming-of-age novels that take place in post-World War II America—J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.  The aim of this course is to capture the full range of American literature and explore why so many unconventional narrators—from an ex-slave to a failed suicide, to cite two examples—play such an important role in American writing.

“Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had,” Charlotte Brontë’s title character exclaims in the concluding chapter of Jane Eyre. Jane’s wedding may be quiet, but the steps leading up to her marriage with a man who once employed her as a governess are tumultuous. With the publication of Jane Eyre, we have left behind the early marriage-plot novel in which a series of comic misunderstandings pave the way for a joyous wedding. This course will begin with such classic marriage-plot novels as Jane Austen’s Emma, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. But the course will also look at love and courtship in untraditional marriage-plot novels such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. By the time the course concludes with Jeffrey Eugenides’s contemporary novel, The Marriage Plot, the marriages and courtships we see will be distinctly modern in the form that they take and, equally significant, in the complexity and uncertainty that they bring with them. 

“Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had,” Charlotte Brontë’s title character exclaims in the concluding chapter of Jane Eyre. Jane’s wedding may be quiet, but the steps leading up to her marriage with a man who once employed her as a governess are dramatic, and so are the steps leading to marriage in the other classic marriage-plot novels with which this course begins. From Jane Austen’s Emma, to Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, the novels we will read in fall reflect the thinking of the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who observes, “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” Nothing, in short, is “conventional” about the 19th century English and American classics of Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Eliot, and James that we will study. They lead directly to Edith Wharton’s turn-of-the-century novel, The House of Mirth, and the modern fiction we take on in spring, which ranges from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. Love and romance are at the heart of the books that will dominate our reading, but so are the laughs and heartaches that are part of any serious relationship.

We are living in an era in which the literature of fact is thriving both online and in print. Writers have found, as the late Tom Wolfe observed, that it is possible to turn out nonfiction as lively as fiction and, in the process, capture the history of one’s own times. The aim of this course is to explore nonfiction in a variety of forms and for students to write nonfiction of their own on a steady basis. Class will be used to go over assigned reading and as a workshop for student writing. Students should be prepared to have their work read both in early drafts and in completed drafts. The course is structured around six sections: basic reporting, memoirs, op-eds, reviews, profiles, and long-form journalism. The writing that we do for class will parallel the writing that we are reading at the time. We will begin with short assignments that emphasize writing techniques and move on to longer assignments in which research, interviews, and legwork play an increasingly important role. The writers we study will be a mix of old and new and range from George Orwell and Joan Didion to James Baldwin and Zadie Smith. We will meet weekly in individual donning and academic conferences until October Study Break, then biweekly for the rest of the year.