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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Before America was a nation, it was an idea. That idea was conveyed through John Winthrop's comparison of the Puritan community to a city on a hill. This model city was imagined opposition to what was assumed to be a savage wilderness. In contrast, the woodland Indians who inhabited what the Puritans had erroneously deemed virgin landscape had been referring to the continent as Turtle Island for generations. Begins with these New World stories and narratives of exploration and discovery. Considers literature from the revolutionary period and concludes with a look at slave narratives or a James Fenimore Cooper novel.
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3.00 Credits
In the early 19th century, transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed the need for American literary independence. By the time of the Civil War, the emerging nation of the United States had produced literature worthy of international recognition, leading some 20th-century scholars to call this period the "American Renaissance." Covers some of the authors and texts (such as Walden, Moby-Dick, and The Scarlet Letter) often considered at the heart of this period, alongside the slave narratives, sentimental fiction, gothic tales, and women's poetry that were popular in their own day and have recently emerged as objects of literary study.
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3.00 Credits
The period between 1870-1920 was the era of the invention of the bicycle, the telephone, and the incandescent light. The poet Walt Whitman captured the spirit of optimism of these inventions and celebrated the creative force of Americans. Awed by the inhuman scale of new technologies, naturalists including Dreiser and Wharton were not as optimistic about one's capacity to shape personal destiny. It was everyday life and emotion not grand or disastrous destinies with which realist writers such as Howells were concerned. Explores these varied viewpoints on this transformative era as they are expressed in literature written between the war "to preserve the union" and "the war to end all wars."
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3.00 Credits
Considers the major developments in twentieth century American Literature, with special emphasis on issues of race, class, and gender. Examines responses to the upheavals of the two world wars, the liberation movements of the 1960s including feminism, and the influence of literary developments in other parts of the world. Significant attention will also be given to more recent writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Louise Erdrich, and Derek Walcott.
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3.00 Credits
The United States has been called "a nation of immigrants." Certainly most of us, if not immigrants ourselves, are the descendants of people who were born overseas and came to these shores seeking political asylum, religious freedom, or-most often-economic opportunity. Stories will reflect the pains and satisfactions of adjustment to American culture as well as the sometimes troubled relations between immigrant parents and their American-born children. The ethnic groups represented in the course may change from semester to semester. D
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3.00 Credits
Meet three commonly identified American icons-the cowboy, the capitalist, and the feminist-to see what they reveal about themselves and the U.S. culture. Through literature, film, historical documents, and narratives, we will see how these representations of America evolve and change in response to changes in society itself and how they differ from icons in other cultures. The course addresses the ethnic, racial, and other variations in American life embodied in these American icons.
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3.00 Credits
Toni Morrison has a compelling explanation for the rising popularity of black women's fiction: "white men, quite naturally, wrote about themselves and their world; white women tended to write about white men because they were so close to them as husbands, lovers and sons; and black men wrote about white men as the oppressor or the yardstick against which they measured themselves. Only black women writers were not interested in writing about white men and therefore they freed literature to take on other concerns." This course includes autobiographical and fictional works by such black women writers as Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor to illustrate the richness and diversity of the black woman writer's literary tradition, as well as the ways in which contemporary writing by African American women has revolutionized American literature.
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3.00 Credits
The course focuses on study of selected literary works about baseball, considering the game as a factor in American history and culture, with attention to economic and social conditions reflected in the literature about baseball, as well as on the aesthetic features of the game and the writings about it. Particular use will be made of theoretical implications in recent scholarship devoted to the sociological, cultural, and psychological character of both the game and the industry.
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3.00 Credits
We will explore colonialism as an important frame of reference for understanding contemporary cultures, and the connections among the themes of money, violence, love and colonialism, including cases involving US foreign and domestic policy. Can there be love between people on opposite sides of a political conflict How are the motives of romantic fantasy and profit connected in campaigns to exert political influence (hegemony) or dominance over another culture or group To what extent is the legacy of colonialism a story of physical and emotional violence What can we learn about our own lives from experiences such as European imperialism and Vietnam Can we speak of an "internal colonialism," here in the culture we inhabit We will explore a broad range of cultural materials, both visual and textual, film and literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, to understand these and other complex questions about cross-cultural relationships. C D I
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3.00 Credits
Whether they are heroic and hearty pioneers of the Wild West or the nurturing nuclear units of television sitcoms such as Leave it To Beaver, the American families of the past are often idealized by contemporary Americans anxious about and frustrated by contemporary family conflicts. The media converts those anxieties into consumable types--unwed mothers, supermoms, deadbeat dads -- and positions them against the sitcom ideal of the self-sacrificing mother and tough, but loving father. In order to explore these family types and ideals, especially anxieties about the nuclear family's breadwinner and homemaker, the class will analyze texts by authors such as Gilman, Alcott, Olds, Sexton, Updike, Cheever Morrison, Erdrich, Smiley, DeLillo, and Soto, and directors such as Sirk, Ford, Waters, Ang Lee, and Allen, reading these texts alongside the social, political, and historical forces that have affected attitudes toward sex, marriage, divorce, dating, and gender expectations in general. C D I
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