Learning Outcomes:
● Demonstrate ability to discuss complex ideas in class and in written assignments
● Perform close-reading of texts leading to nuanced analysis
● Work with key insights in space and place theory, critical race theory, social history, gender & sexuality.
● Demonstrate awareness of domestic architecture as it is shaped by (and shapes) race, gender, class, and sexuality.
● Discuss key elements of 19th century American domestic fiction
Indicative Module Content:
The course will begin with early American architectures of revolution, nation building, and enslavement, with readings from Hannah Crafts, and Edgar Allen Poe, and move to examinations of the natural and industrial worlds. We will consider the architecture of empire in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, and examine the evolution of the domestic novel and true womanhood in the Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces. At our conclusion, we will visit Anzia Yezierska’s institutional homes for immigrant women, and consider the radical contours of turn-of-century urban rental housing.