ENGL 255

Fall 2016 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Aug 22-Dec 7

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 2016
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
33958	Discussion/ Recitation	AD1	11:00AM -11:50AM	F	English Building	Young, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/16-12/07/16 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course.
33959	Discussion/ Recitation	AD2	10:00AM -10:50AM	F	English Building	Young, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/16-12/07/16 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course.
33973	Discussion/ Recitation	AD3	12:00PM -12:50PM	F	English Building	Thompson, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/16-12/07/16 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course.
33976	Discussion/ Recitation	AD4	1:00PM -1:50PM	F	English Building	Thompson, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/16-12/07/16 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course.
33954	Lecture	AL1	1:00PM -1:50PM	MW	Engineering Hall	Murison, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/22/16-12/07/16 Degree Notes: Literature and the Arts, and Western Compartv Cult course. Section Info: The title of this course is enticingly misleading. While we can look back on the history of the geographic expanse we now denominate the United States and create a literary narrative, this narrative begins with an assumption that to be on the continent and write makes one an “American writer” and that what these writers produced we would call “literature.” European colonists, however, did not begin to call themselves “Americans” until the late eighteenth century, and a category of “American literature” turns out to be more of a willful assertion than a completed effect through the mid-nineteenth century. And just as the geography of the continental United States began to reflect what we recognize it as today, the country breaks out in Civil War. These paradoxes and others endemic to American culture will guide our discussions of colonial, revolutionary, and antebellum literatures during the semester. Beginning with early exploration narratives by Europeans, this course will track the effects of travel, displacement, contact, and conversion on expressions of identity and community, and how, in turn, these constructions reimagined boundaries, both geographic and personal. Our concerns will therefore center on how writers struggled with the paradoxical issues that defined early America: freedom and slavery; individualism and federation; comity and conflict; region and nation; wilderness and settlement. To do so, we will canvass a variety of genres and forms, including poetry, sermons, travel narratives, fiction, and speeches, and we will explore the persistence of prominent tropes, forms, and ideas—and, as crucially, the decline and disappearance of others—between different eras and regions in light of this literary archive. As with any survey, this course attempts to cover a mind bogglingly wide expanse of history: from early imperial writings in the fifteenth century to the poetry of the Civil War. The readings are therefore meant to be representative rather than comprehensive, reflecting the wide range of genres and styles in American literature before 1865. Many of the authors on the syllabus will be easily recognizable (such as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson) and others may prove less familiar. In both cases, our goal will be to make these texts “vitally charged,” as Henry David Thoreau would say. The course requirements will be a mixture of short writing assignments, reading quizzes, and exams. To pass the course successfully, attendance at both lecture and discussion sections is necessary.