ENGL 116

Fall 2018 All Classes

All Classes

Introduction to American Literature

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 3 hours.

American literature speaks in distinctive dialects that pre-date the arrival of European explorers in the Renaissance, range across centuries and continents, and intermingle a rich variety of racial, ethnic, and gendered perspectives. Genres examined in this course might include lyric poems, dystopian novels, horror stories, seduction narratives, slave narratives, political speeches, or postmodern plays. Writers studied might include Walt Whitman, Columbus, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Junot Díaz, Harriet Beecher Stowe, David Foster Wallace, Martin Luther King, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

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

Humanities – Lit & Arts

Cultural Studies - Western

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ENGL 116 class schedule data for fall 2018
	CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
	32293	Lecture-Discussion	CHP	2:00PM -3:15PM	TR	1120 Foreign Languages Building	Spires, D	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Camp Honors/Chanc Schol, Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course. Section Title: Democracy in Hamiltons America Section Info: Democracy in Hamilton’s America The award-winning Broadway musical, Hamilton, participates in a long tradition of defining the place that we now know as the United States through its past. These fictional renderings are often not about getting the history “right” as much as they are about meeting the needs of what Frederick Douglass described as the “ever-living now.” We tell stories about the past to help us understand our present and chart paths to the future. Despite its diverse casting and championing of democratic ideals, however, Hamilton’s narrative is pretty standard fare: a collection of ambitious white men defies the odds to “found” a new nation. What are the implications, then, of retelling this oft-repeated story with Miranda’s emphasis on Hamilton as an immigrant narrative in the twenty-first century? How have narratives about the American Revolution functioned over time, and how have they shaped our understandings of democracy in America? To answer these questions, we’ll examine American literary history and culture to think about the stories and people Hamilton draws on and leaves out. We’ll take a look at the documents informing Miranda’s lyrics, including the Federalist Papers and debates around the Declaration of Independence, women’s rights, and emancipation. We’ll read narratives from former slaves, radical women, abolitionists, American Indians, and white frontiersmen, and we’ll trace some of the musical’s key figures through visual culture and monuments. While most of our readings will come from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we’ll also survey Hamilton’s contemporary influences (modern Hip Hop and show tunes) alongside crossover segments on contemporary media (Black-ish and the Hamilton Mixtape) and democratic theory. Above all, we’ll ask ourselves, what is the meaning of “democracy” in Alexander Hamilton’s and Hamilton’s America? This section is for Chancellor's Scholars only; other students may only enroll with the consent of the instructor and the Campus Honors Program. Restriction(s): Restricted to Chancellor's Scholar-CHPHonors students.
	32294	Lecture-Discussion	D	12:30PM -1:45PM	TR	104 English Building	Soto Crespo, R	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course. Section Info: This course studies twentieth-century literature of the Americas, focusing on the short story genre. We will read stories written in the U.S. Mainland by well-established American writers as well as short stories written by Latino authors to see one recent development in this genre. The course discusses, first, this latest surge in short story writing, and then it examines the canonical works that precede it. Short stories are condensed narratives that provide an alternative sense of reality and a keen sense of cultural/national belonging. At the same time, they tell a story of a “self” on a journey, that is, an individual going through a process of change and transformation. In this course, we will examine the tension between two concurrent impulses: the writing of the individual self and his/her experiences and the use of writing to represent their particular sense of reality. We’ll discuss the implications of these two levels of representation by examining the points where the individual and cultural experience meet and challenge each other. This course examines short fictions by Raymond Carver, Julio Cortazar, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, O. Henry, Jean Rhys, Junot Diaz, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rosario Ferre, Shirley Jackson, Willa Cather, Langston Hughes, Kate Chopin, and Jack London. Possible themes for discussion include: self and wilderness, national identity, ecology, spanglish, racism, sexism, machismo, feminism, sexuality, gender, colonialism, reality/fantasy.