ENGL 255

Fall 2019 All Classes

All Classes
Early American Literature and Culture

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
ENGL 255 class schedule data for fall 2019
CRN Type Section Time Day Location Instructor Section Details
33958
Discussion/
Recitation
AD1
10:00AM -10:50AM
F
135 English Building
Pacheco, H
Part of Term:
1
Date Range:
08/26/19-12/11/19
Degree Notes:
Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33959
Discussion/
Recitation
AD2
11:00AM -11:50AM
F
123 English Building
Pacheco, H
Part of Term:
1
Date Range:
08/26/19-12/11/19
Degree Notes:
Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33973
Discussion/
Recitation
AD3
12:00PM -12:50PM
F
123 English Building
Schmidt, A
Part of Term:
1
Date Range:
08/26/19-12/11/19
Degree Notes:
Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33976
Discussion/
Recitation
AD4
1:00PM -1:50PM
F
123 English Building
Schmidt, A
Part of Term:
1
Date Range:
08/26/19-12/11/19
Degree Notes:
Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33954
Lecture
AL1
1:00PM -1:50PM
MW
1090 Lincoln Hall
Murison, J
Part of Term:
1
Date Range:
08/26/19-12/11/19
Degree Notes:
Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western 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 name 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 was something we would label as “literature.” European colonists, however, did not begin to call themselves “Americans” until the late eighteenth century, and a coherent category of “American literature” turns out to be more of a willful assertion than a completed effect through the mid-nineteenth century. And just at the moment when the boundaries of the continental United States began to reflect what we generally recognize them to be today, the nation broke out in the Civil War. Across these centuries, writers sought to represent the paradoxes of American society and, as often, dissented from or tried to reform that society. We will canvass a variety of genres, 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. The course requirements will include response papers, three exams, and active participation in discussion sections.
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