American Literature

Perhaps you’ve heard some of the terms: “Manifest Destiny”; “The Color Line”; “The Frontier”; “The Red Scare”; “The Pursuit of Happiness”; “The American Dream”; “The Melting Pot.” You may have a sense of what some of them mean, even if you didn’t read The Great Gatsby in high school. But did you know that the phrase “The American Dream” wasn’t actually popularized until the 1930s, some 150 years after the nation’s founding? Or that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s understanding of “Civil Disobedience” was deeply influenced by the 1846 work of that title by Henry David Thoreau (the one who also wrote a tome on his “back-to-the-land” experience at Walden Pond)? Did you know “Make America Great Again” has been used repeatedly in American politics, at least since Ronald Reagan (in the 1980s), and appears as well in the form of an imagined presidential slogan in a novel published in 1998? 

This course will take a “keywords” approach, building on, supplementing, and complicating the terms that have been used to understand American literary and cultural history. In fall term, we will ground our vocabulary in some of the founding documents (like the Declaration of Independence), before proceeding to our focus on the 20th  and 21st centuries. Along the way, we will read some significant works of American literature, including W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Gish Jen’s The Resisters, along with selected essays, short stories, and poetry. Students should expect to read extensively and actively, to listen and participate attentively, and to write rigorously.