Major Authors: America's Literary Scientists
MIT's course looks at how nineteenth century natural science shaped major American writers. It covers Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and The Encantadas, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs, Edith Wharton's House of Mirth, and Toni Morrison's A Mercy, tracing how each author borrowed or challenged the methods of comparative anatomy, botany, geology, and ethnography that grew out of expeditions like the Wilkes voyage to Antarctica and the Pacific. The course examines specific scenes and passages where these writers adopt scientific classification schemes or push back against them, treating literature as a site where scientific worldviews get tested imaginatively. Materials include the syllabus, reading list, and session-by-session topics from MIT OpenCourseWare, free to access under a Creative Commons license with no certificate offered.