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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This course examines works representative of various movements within American literaryintellectual history. We begin with the poetry and personal narratives of the Puritans (Anne Bradstreet, John Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards). From there, we explore the satires and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, as well as the slave narrative of Oladuah Equiano, to see how these eighteenth-century Enlightenment figures attempted to recreate the American identity, borrowing from but also importantly revising the Puritan point of view. We then address the romantic writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman to understand how these writers represented the spirit of Romanticism. Finally, reading works by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson will help us see how American writers used Gothic motifs to represent their ambivalent or outright critical attitudes toward some of the earlier literary, philosophical, religious, social, and political traditions. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
This course traces the development of the novel in America from the late eighteenth century to the present. In addition to examining different types of fiction, such as sentimental, realistic, modernist, and postmodernist, we will also explore how these novels were shaped by and contributed to some of the social and cultural forces of their day. What makes these works "American?" How do they portray social, economic, and ethnic hierarchies in the United States? How do they wrestle with the failures of America's promise to offer all its citizens freedom and equality? After considering some of the earliest examples of American novels, we will study writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry James, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
Contemporary American Drama has been invigorated by creative and cultural forces that have emerged over the last five decades to challenge the theatrical establishment of the early twentieth century. It thus assumes a unique identity. The popular American themes of free expression of individuality and a belief in a bright future now extend beyond Broadway, finding voice in off- Broadway houses and alternative and regional theatres. The style, structure and conventions of earlier American plays have often been retooled; orthodox theatre architecture sometimes modified; and the demographics of theatre on stage and in the audience have been expanded. These practices reflect the creative fire that has produced plays with bold new contours. Readings will include Edward Albee's Who''s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Sam Shepard's True West, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
This course will present a relatively broad and fairly rapid survey of major American poets. We will dwell mainly on three large historical periods: the nineteenth century of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman; the early twentieth century of Robert Frost, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens; and the contemporary period (today), when there are more American poets being published than ever before. (These twenty-first century poets will probably be represented by figures like Robert Pinsky and Louise Glück.) In order even to begin grasping this historical range and poetic diversity, we'll need to move at a pace of about one poet per week, but we'll hope to sustain a fairly serious engagement with each of our poets in turn, while thinking about how each of them imagines (or re-imagines) the idea of America and American discourse. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
An intensive study of three playwrights who changed the course of American drama and branded it with a distinctively American quality. Eugene O'Neill, the son of the country's leading actor, knew early-century American drama intimately and decided to set out in a completely different direction. He rejected the popular melodramas; instead, he wrote searing personal tragedies and attempted to capture in his work the quality of ancient Greek tragedy. He wrote of prostitutes, farmers, young wives and domineering fathers. He created new theatrical styles and wrote Long Day's Journey into Night, often called the greatest American play. Arthur Miller broke theatrical ground in completely different ways: he experimented with surrealism in Death of a Salesman, now an American classic. In the body of his work, he continued to probe questions of guilt, individual perceptiveness and moral responsibility, and he continued to master a range of theatrical styles. Tennessee Williams, a genteel Southern rebel, abandoned the predominantly realistic tradition, feeling it was exhausted and called for a "plastic theatre" in which every scene was crafted as a living sculpture. These three playwrights established the uniqueness of American drama in the early twentieth century. Readings in the course will include the major works of the three playwrights. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
Beginning with the mid-nineteenth-century wave of emigration due to the Great Famine in Ireland, the Irish became a formidable presence in American life and in American fiction as well. We will read representative samples of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction as a foundation for the major focus of the course, which is the contemporary novel of the Irish American experience. For our purposes, we will define Irish American fiction not by the ethnicity of the novelist but rather as fiction which examines the connections between Ireland and America, the influence of the Irish past in the lives of the American characters, the search for a precarious balance between being Irish and being American. Possible authors include Tom McHale, J.P. Donleavy, John Gregory Dunne, Mary Gordon, Alice McDermott, William Kennedy, and Pete Hamill. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
Something radical happened in the early twentieth century. Painters moved toward abstraction. Composers embraced atonality. And writers created a new literary aesthetic through fragmentation, stream of consciousness, and other experiments with language. So what were some of the social, cultural, and political forces that brought about these changes? How were twentieth-century artists rejecting the practices of the Victorian era? How were they responding to drastic changes in technology and science? And how were they challenging audiences to be new readers, viewers, and listeners? This class will examine this period (1907-1929) in American literature, art, and culture. We will read fiction, poetry, and drama, study visual art (Duchamp, Balla, Boccioni, Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne), listen to music (Ravel, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ellington), and do research on historical and social context, including topics such as lynching memorabilia, nineteenth- and twentieth-century etiquette manuals, World War I propaganda, and Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes. This interdisciplinary approach will not only provide a richer understanding of the writings of Gertrude Stein, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, e. e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H. D., William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, but it will also challenge us to think critically about the social and cultural changes shaping modernism. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
The freak show was one of the most popular forms of entertainment in American culture between 1840 and 1940. Audiences clamored to see human exhibits featuring dog-faced boys, Siamese Twins, giants, dwarfs, hermaphrodites, and savage cannibals. Today, only remnants of these shows can be found in museums and state fairs, yet the freak show continues to have a powerful impact on contemporary literature and art. Why? How do these texts use freak shows and the freakish body to address social anxieties about difference? How do these images critique racial hierarchies and heterosexual norms in American culture? As spectators, what is our role in the othering of certain individuals and groups? Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
Body in American Culture from the 19th Century to the Present This course seeks to explore some of the rich historical materials treating aspects of the human body as it has been viewed, exhibited, analyzed, and objectified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will examine some key primary works, fiction, film, photography, and a selection of interpretive studies that consider the social and cultural construction of bodies in America. The readings in this course are intended not to add up to some neat thesis but to raise questions of interpretation and meaning. From the history of freak shows and blackface minstrelsy to more contemporary displays of female and male bodies, these readings - both primary and secondary - will challenge us to think about some of the forces that have shaped - and continue to shape - the ways in which we think about the body. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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3.00 Credits
First emerging in the unstable and traumatic historical period immediately preceding World War I and following it, the modern novel decidedly broke with the realist genre preceding it through challenging and often breathtaking experiments with narrative form. Frequently presenting the reader with bewildering shifts in time and narrative perspective and exhibiting a preference for the interior psychological landscapes of its characters, modern novels often possess an emotional intensity and haunting lyricism that testifies to the widespread fragmentation and alienation afflicting western consciousness in the twentieth century. With the use of pioneering literary techniques like stream of consciousness and fragmented narratives, modern novels defy the expectations generated by traditional narrative even as they give us some of the most memorable characters in literature. Possible authors covered in the class include: Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Faulkner, Kafka, and Rhys. Same as WLT 16. Prerequisites of ENG 1 and ENG 2 are required.
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