ENG 426SEM

The content of this course is variable. Concentrated and detailed study of the works, biography, and milieu of Mark Twain. For example: Prof. N. Schmitz Mark Twain, the performer, the comic lecturer, the stand-up comedian, is our first study in this course. This is the Bob Hope, Bill Cosby, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Mark Twain, media star, media magnate, a writer of comic sketches, a boaster at celebrity banquets and receptions, the Mark Twain who would have loved Hollywood and TV, loved lolling in the chair opposite Jon Stewart, bushy haired, wagging an unlit cigar. He originates the figure, Americas beloved humorist. If you know American cultural history, you know Will Rogers was the Mark Twain guy of the 20s and 30s. We'll read a sequence of comic monologues, sketches, essays, speeches. We'll sample some of his contemporary humorists: Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, Josh Billings. We'll consider the literary tradition of Southwestern humor (Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana) frontier humor, redneck humor. Next we turn to the great Mark Twain and his Civil War cycle, the one that begins with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and A True Story, that lovingly remember the antebellum South in Old Times on the Mississippi, then loathes it in Life on the Mississippi, Clemens desertion of the pro-Confederate Missouri National Guard in A Private History of a Campaign that Failed and rethinks the desertion in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We'll regard the career in the 1880s, the grate house on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut, and realize the significance of its suburb, Nook Farm. His neighbor across the way is Harriet Beecher Stowe, her house as exemplary New England as Twain?s is Southern Baroque. And what do we do about the name Mark Twain?

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