Grad School Registration Update

Last week, I mentioned that I am embarking upon the grad school registration process. In yesterday's post, I mentioned taking a class on Thursdays in the fall. Well, that class is called ENG 5004: Studies in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature, and I'm really excited about it. Eighteenth-century Brit. lit. is a prerequisite to nineteenth-century Am. lit. in that the Founding Fathers were inspired by eighteenth-century British and French philosophers when they crafted documents such as the Constitution. This period is often referred to as the "Era of Enlightenment." It's also the time of the French Revolution, which, in a sense, inspired the American Revolution. In the nineteenth century, writers, such as Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, among so many others, adapted the Founding Fathers' ideals to speak out against various social injustices, especially the institution of slavery. This literary tradition was continued in the twentieth century by the likes of the Beat poets, including my fave-- Allen Ginsberg-- as a means of protest against war, racism, gender-based oppression, religious hypocrisy, etc. It lives on in post-9/11 America and led to the creation of the Obamanation. (I used that term in a positive way here, of course!) Remember, class: America was founded through dissent!