ENGL 255

Fall 2025 Part of Term 1

Part of Term 1
Aug 25-Dec 10

Early American Literature and Culture

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Credit: 3 hours.

[IAI Code: H3914] 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

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ENGL 255 class schedule data for fall 2025
CRN	Type	Section	Time	Day	Location	Instructor	Section Details
33958	Discussion/ Recitation	AD1	10:00AM -10:50AM	F	123 English Building	Streitmatter, O	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/25/25-12/10/25 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33959	Discussion/ Recitation	AD2	11:00AM -11:50AM	F	125 English Building	Streitmatter, O	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/25/25-12/10/25 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33973	Discussion/ Recitation	AD3	12:00PM -12:50PM	F	135 English Building	Schmidt, A	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/25/25-12/10/25 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: 08/25/25-12/10/25 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course.
33954	Lecture	AL1	10:00AM -10:50AM	MW	157 Noyes Laboratory	Murison, J	Part of Term: 1 Date Range: 08/25/25-12/10/25 Degree Notes: Humanities - Lit & Arts, and Cultural Studies - Western course. Section Info: FA25 ENGL 255 - Early American Lit and Culture - Justine Murison - 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 colonizers, 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 even through the mid-nineteenth century. And just as the borders of the United States as a nation-state began to reflect what we generally recognize them to be today, the Civil War broke out. These paradoxes and others endemic to US culture will guide our discussions of American literature to 1865. Along the way, we will canvass a variety of genres, including poetry, 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—across three centuries of writing.