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Survey of American
Literature—INTRO class and part of Module Two!
Full syllabus available on MOODLE
The lecture
will serve as an overview of American literature from the encounter of Europeans
and Americans to the present. We will discuss major literary movements
and the authors who shaped them. Students will learn to understand the
historical and social circumstances that contributed to literary
production.
Over the
course of the fall 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 in the literary production of the past sixty years.
Tuesdays 10-12h
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