ENGL 255

Fall 2013 All Classes

All Classes

Survey of American Lit I

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Credit: 3 hours.

American literature and its cultural backgrounds to 1870. For majors only.

Prerequisite: Completion of the Composition I requirement and ENGL 200.

Students must register for one discussion and one lecture section.

This course satisfies the General Education Criteria in Fall 2022 for:

Humanities – Lit & Arts

Cultural Studies - Western

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ENGL 255 class schedule data for fall 2013
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
33958	Discussion/ Recitation	AD1	11:00AM -11:50AM	F	325 Gregory Hall	Robb, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/13-12/11/13 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course. Section Info: This course is restricted to English majors/minors. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).
33959	Discussion/ Recitation	AD2	10:00AM -10:50AM	F	325 Gregory Hall	Tienou, D	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/13-12/11/13 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course. Section Info: This course is restricted to English majors/minors. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).
33976	Discussion/ Recitation	AD4	12:00PM -12:50PM	F	325 Gregory Hall	Robb, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/13-12/11/13 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course. Section Info: This course is restricted to English majors/minors. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).
33964	Discussion/ Recitation	AD5	1:00PM -1:50PM	F	325 Gregory Hall	Tienou, D	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/13-12/11/13 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course. Section Info: This course is restricted to English majors/minors. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).
33954	Lecture	AL1	10:00AM -10:50AM	MW	1000 Lincoln Hall	Loughran, P	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/26/13-12/11/13 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course. Section Info: This course is restricted to English majors/minors. The purpose of this course is to introduce you to ?early? American literature and to assure that you have basic cultural literacy about terms, ideas, and events that will help you when you enroll in upper level literature courses. Our focus will be fourfold, encompassing specific literary forms, major literary movements, major historical events and problems, and finally the general history of intellectual ideas in this period. We will get at these areas by thinking broadly about ?American culture? from its earliest iterations up until the crackup called the Civil War. By looking at a variety of visual and verbal texts?from paintings, engravings, and maps to slave narratives, seduction novels, narrative poems, autobiographies, newspaper essays, and pamphlets?we will try to get to know this culture both through its parts (its poems, essays, and stories) and through our own cohesive reconstruction of these parts into an integrated whole?a story, which we will call, in our class, ?American Literature, Part I.? This is a course that will thus introduce you not just to the basic facts of American cultural history but that will challenge you to theorize the very practice of literary history?which is, in fact, a very special kind of storytelling that we practice in English departments. Along the way, our readings will range from the short to the long, from the conventional to the idiosyncratic, from commercial blockbusters to very big flops. The syllabus represents authors of different genders, classes, races, and regions, but the course is less devoted to giving equal representation to authors of different backgrounds than to thinking about how representation works to create conditions of inclusion and exclusion across American culture. The ?canon? we call ?American literature? only exists as a master narrative because of its tendency to include some and to exclude others. This produces an intellectual dilemma for surveyors like ourselves because we cannot reconstruct that which was never allowed to exist nor can any reader ever read everything a culture produces. We can?t fix this problem in an undergraduate survey class, but it is something I invite you to discuss and think about over the course of the semester. Restriction(s): Restricted to English major(s) or minor(s).