Survey of American Literature

Prerequisite: ENGL 102, which may be taken concurrently; open to English majors and minors only This survey course will acquaint English majors with key American literary texts and literary-historical periods (colonial, early republican, romantic, realist, naturalist, modernist and postmodernist). Examining literature in the context of 400 years of cultural and historical change, the course will investigate constructions of U.S. national identity as well as changes in literary conventions. Writers may include Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Franklin, Poe, Emerson, Douglass, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, James, Hughes, Stein, Hemingway, Faulkner, Morrison, Pynchon and Alexie.