Trish Loughran
loughran@uiuc.edu

Technology has long been linked in American culture to utopic narratives of personal and collective liberation. This course will explore this master narrative with weekly readings that revolve around specific historical technologies that transformed the early American world and engaged the attention of writers and intellectuals of their day—including (for example) printing, the steamboat, the factory, the telegraph, the railroad, the photograph, and electricity. How, we will ask, has the emergence of such technologies affected works of classic American literature? How do writers tend to represent technological transformation in their work? And how do specific technologies change the terms on which representation is even possible (as, say, a photograph surely does)? Students will work with a range of genres and materials (including novels, stories, essays, paintings, engravings, and photographs); secondary criticism will be drawn from historians, literary critics, and cultural critics; and primary texts will likely include works by Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman.