• Austenfeld Thomas

A one-semester survey of major historical periods, movements, genres, and authors

Over the course of the spring semester, we will sample texts from the following literary-historical periods: Colonial, early Republic, pre-and post-Civil War, Realism and Naturalism, Modernism, Postmodernism and Contemporary.  At the same time, we will question the notion of periodicity and uncover its historical assumptions.

Major genres will include the sermon, the captivity narrative, the political tract, allegorical and symbolical writing, slave narratives and abolitionist texts, regional short stories, modernist and postmodernist experiments in writing, as well as the incremental establishment of an ethnic consciousness and its literary production with a focus on the past sixty years.

While we will attempt to get to know all major genres, the short story and the lyric poem—and perhaps the memoir—will be of particular importance, not just because of their relative brevity but because of their particular American manifestations.

Recurring topics of American literature are—to name just a few—empire and dispossession, the self and its ability to shape itself, race and ethnicity, religion, gender, and wealth/poverty. These topics circumscribe American identity and recur in American literature.

By the end of the class, you may have developed some answers to the question, "What is American Literature?", but far more important than this will be your ability to ask significant questions, such as those that address the place of literature in politics and society, its "cultural work" (Jane Tompkins), and its power to shape the hearts and minds of Americans.  

Required text:  Norton Anthology of American Literature, Ninth Edition, five volumes.