The specific availability for this course is not currently known. If you would like to know if this course will be offered during your session, please contact us.
The U.S. American nation-building process is intimately connected to the emergence of the American short story in the early nineteenth century. This genre introduces its readers to an independent nation that is still in need of a unifying national identity. In this seminar, we will look at selected short stories by Washington Irving ("Rip Van Winkle"), Nathaniel Hawthorne ("Young Goodman Brown"; "Rappaccini’s Daughter"; "The Birthmark"), Edgar Allan Poe ("Murders in the Rue Morgue"; "The Fall of the House of Usher"; "The Masque of the Red Death"; "The Tell-Tale Heart"), and Lydia Maria Child ("The Quadroons") and discuss both formal conventions of the genre – as introduced by Poe – and the representation of issues crucial for an understanding of U.S. America’s national and cultural identity such as history, the nation’s cultural dependence on Europe, gender, and ethnicity.
A Reader will be available through ILIAS (e-learning platform) at the beginning of the semester.
