This course is at once a “survey” of selected works of U.S. literatures written
between the mid-19th Century through the mid-20th
century, and a discussion of what are taken to be constituent through-lines in
“American” thought, such as collectivism and individualism; democratic vision
and violent frontiers/borderlands; equalitarian principles and manifest
inequality; ecology and industrial development; regional narrative, national
narrative, and internationalisms.
ASSIGNED
WORK: Two in-class mid-terms and a final; two oral reports: in the first,
students will briefly introduce and literary/critical term; in the second,
students will introduce and discuss issues raised by a poet (i.e. H.D.,
Langston Hughes, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens), short story writer (Hemingway,
Toomer, Zitkala-sa), or essayist (Twain); frequent in class short-writings on
pre-assigned topics for the day.
COURSE
READING:
A good deal of the assigned reading will be available as PDF’s on the
course site on Laulima. The course books will be available at Revolution Books.
PRIMARY
TEXTS (will include some of the following): Ralph Waldo Ellison, Invisible Man; Ralph Waldo Emerson,
“Nature” & “Self-Reliance”; Kate Chopin, The Awakening; Emily Dickinson, from Poems; Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of
July”; Fanny Fern, from Ruth Hall: Harriet
Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes
Were Watching God; Herman Melville, Benito
Cereno & “Bartleby the Scrivener”; John G. Neihardt
(transcriber/author), Black Elk Speaks;
John Rollins Ridge (Yellow Bird), Joaquin
Murieta; Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government” & “How I
Lived, What I Lived For”; Edith Wharton, The
House of Mirth; Walt Whitman, from Leaves
of Grass.
SECONDARY TEXTS (will include some of the
following): Philip Fisher, “American Literary and Cultural Studies Since the
Civil War”; Gregory Jay, “The End of ‘American’ Literature”; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination; Charles Olson, from Call Me Ishmael; Richard Slotkin, from Regeneration Through Violence; Andrea Smith, “The Three Pillars of
Racism”; Jane Tompkins, “Sentimental Power” and selections from West of Everything; Frederick Jackson
Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”