ENAM 982 UTC & AMERICAN CULTURE

The Archive and the Classroom Below is the electronic syllabus for a graduate seminar I taught at UVA in the Spring of 2007. It was an experiment. After 9 years building the "UTC & American Culture" electronic archive I wanted to see what happened if I taught a class relying almost entirely on it to provide the material we studied. I learned several things from the experiment, including the adjustments both the students and I had to make to doing most coursework through a computer screen. They had to teach themselves to read texts online (or, when that didn't work, to cope with longer texts as unbound stacks of print outs), and they taught me to be more selective in what I asked them to read or look at or listen to. You'll see those kind of adjustments reflected in the difference between early-, mid- and late-semester assignment pages.
So when or if I teach the class again, I'll make some revisions in the structure and content of the course. And I'd make other changes to teach it at the undergraduate level, spending less time, probably, on the 19th century American contexts for Stowe's novel (religion, temperance, abolition, &c.) and more time on 20th century refractions of Stowe's text, including The Grapes of Wrath and/or Native Son. But I'm publishing the class here exactly as it happened, partly in tribute to the students who took it. I felt lucky in the group who enrolled, especially that they came from five different programs — English, History, Music, German and Education. Exploring all that Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture can teach us about each other led us into all these areas, so it was good to have students to lead the way whenever we got outside the boundaries of my training as a literary scholar. Jim Baker, Jane Carr, PC Fleming, Andrea Hollinger, Sarah Ingle, Hannah Kalan, Jason Kirby, Steve Knepper, Elizabeth Ladner, Eliza Lathrop, Rachel Shapiro, Peter Teigland, Veronika Timpe — thanks! Stephen Railton