ENGL 255

Fall 2018 All Classes

All Classes

Early American Literature

SHOW FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE

Credit: 3 hours.

This large scale survey course offers students background in a wide range of genres, authors, and texts, focusing on "early American literature," which ranges from pre-Columbian indigenous narratives to nineteenth century novels, poems, and plays. The material studied ranges across multiple centuries and continents, and includes a wide variety of racial, ethnic, and gendered perspectives. Writers may include Christopher Columbus, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson.

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

My Favorites

My Schedule

Section Status updates every 10 minutes.

ENGL 255 class schedule data for fall 2018
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
33958	Discussion/ Recitation	AD1	10:00AM -10:50AM	F	English Building	Humphrey, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33959	Discussion/ Recitation	AD2	11:00AM -11:50AM	F	English Building	Humphrey, C	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33973	Discussion/ Recitation	AD3	12:00PM -12:50PM	F	English Building	Becker, L	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33976	Discussion/ Recitation	AD4	1:00PM -1:50PM	F	English Building	Becker, L	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33954	Lecture	AL1	1:00PM -1:50PM	MW	Burrill Hall	Murison, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/27/18-12/12/18 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course. Section Info: Early American Literature and Culture 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 cultural aspiration than a complete achievement by the mid-nineteenth century. And just as the geography of the continental United States began to reflect what we recognize it to be today, the country broke out into the Civil War. These paradoxes and others endemic to American culture will guide our discussions, which will focus 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. Many of the authors on the syllabus will be easily recognizable (such as Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson) and others may prove less familiar. In both cases, our goal will be to bring the literary past to life, and see how these authors’ works and concerns still resonate in our current moment. The course requirements will be a mixture of short writing assignments and exams.