COURSE DESCRIPTION

REQUIRED WORK

There are 31 separate, required assignments for this course. Fifteen cover the first half of our work, from 1865-1900. Assignment 16 is a simulated exam covering that first half, and will be useful practice for the Final Exam. The next fifteen assignments, 17 through 31, cover the second half of our work, from 1910-1980. The Final Exam will be cumulative.

AMERICAN STUDIES

All courses offered in the University Studies Program "American Studies Cluster" are focused around two primary and eight secondary questions for study and analysis. They are:

1. What is American?
1. How does Nature affect and form the American? In turn how does the American affect and transform Nature?
2. What ideals, such as that of a providential destiny, shape American experience? Are these ideals realized?
3. How did the mobility of American society-for example, during westward expansion-shape American identity?


2. What is the center of American society?
1. What institutions and traditions shape American national identity?
2. Is American culture one culture shaped from many-e pluribus unum-or is it always an aggregate of cultures?
3. When the center no longer holds, what forces break it up?
4. How are tensions between chaos and order, liberty and structure, manifest in American culture, history, and society?
5. What are the characteristics and consequences of racism and other forms of discrimination in American life?

OVERVIEW

English 252 is a course in American Literature from the end of the Civil War through contemporary times, roughly 1865 until 1980. It is a "survey" course only in the sense that we shall read in chronological order a small selection of texts, each of enduring significance, and representative of the changing literary forms, cultural values, and social tensions of the 115 years under consideration. Thoroughly "surveying" this period would be a major task of scholarship, for reasons we shall consider further, below.

Your reading for this course will span three crucial periods of American history. The first half of the course will involve writings from the period of Reconstruction and America's growing awareness of its Imperial size and power. The second half of this course will focus on a selection of texts from the era of modernism, roughly 1910 to 1950, and conclude with consideration of selected writers from the contemporary or "post-modern" era. It is a rich and varied century-plus of cultural activity.

Notwithstanding its richness, however, we shall also want to consider its anxieties. For example, it was during this period that Americans confronted the closing of the frontier, announced formally by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. For many Americans, this loss of an alien, wilderness territory, against which the increasingly urban and industrial civilization could define itself, was crucial. Also, long after Emancipation, and indeed well into our times, the problems of racism and ethnic prejudice have persisted; and when we consider that this was an age that experienced enormous influxes of southern and eastern European immigrants, as well as new patterns of immigration from Asia and Hispano-American countries, the problems of racial oppression loom as a constant, and major concern. Further, the urbanization and industrialization of American life would change patterns of daily living, at work and at play, in irrevocable ways; and after 1950 the expansion of new communications technologies would create what many historians now describe as a "Second Industrial Revolution" that would alter American civilization still further. The responses of American writers to these developments--sometimes rejecting industrial culture, other times embracing it; confronting the facts of race prejudice; and adapting artistic production to the new "media-scape"--are basic concerns in this course.

Your readings for this course will be from an anthology. The word is from the Greek, anthologia, meaning (literally) a bunch of "flowery words" gathered into a book; and the twin assumption about such a collection of literary "flowers" is that it should gather together not only the most beautiful, but also the most representative texts.

In our time these assumptions about the literary anthology have become the subjects of heated dispute. The evaluative assumption, that of "beauty," is especially problematic. Just whose standards of beauty should apply? For American writers in particular this question has typically involved European conventions for literary expression, but European aristocratic civilization was precisely what the American had always, one way or another, rejected. Moreover, the development of an American self, and of conventions for democratic rather than aristocratic art, was a process encompassing the whole expanse of American history. During the age under study in this course, the interplay of old European forms with new American expressions remained central to literary culture; for example, in Henry James's story, Daisy Miller, about a confrontation between American naivete and European cynicism. Also, many of the significant developments in American literature were achieved by women and African American writers: nineteenth-century fiction by women, twentieth-century poetry by African-American writers of the "Harlem Renaissance," for example. If judged by the Eurocentric conventions of writers such as T.S. Eliot, whose poetry was deeply influenced by European literature in general, would these American texts ever have been deemed worthy of anthologization? Perhaps they would only have been regarded as curious instances for use by specialists, though many of them were highly popular writings in their own time. If on the other hand we consider more distinctly American standards of evaluation-and in particular the importance in American culture of the individual who finds a literary voice by renouncing European conventions and indeed tradition in toto-then these writings will become central to our efforts at understanding American literature. The student of it therefore needs to consider a range of texts.

This is why the second (inclusive) assumption behind any anthology, that of representation, becomes both important and equally problematic here. In following the course of readings mapped out by this syllabus, you will be reading a range of different kinds of texts by a range of writers: men and women, whites and blacks. In that sense, the anthology succeeds in representing for our survey the variety of "flowers" in this field of study. The important activity comes in putting these readings alongside, and "into dialogue with," each other, and many of the responses you will be encouraged to write will ask that you try just that. Again, though, because this course is designed as a Sophomore level survey, there are limits to how much of this comparative study we can do and still achieve an historical sense of the period under study. Having recognized such limits, we begin the course with a sense that our readings from the anthology are defined as much by what they exclude, as by what they include. It's an important caveat.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Upon completing this course the student should be able to:

1. Define some of the principal themes and problems that emerge from studies in the history of American culture, and discuss the manifestations of those themes and problems in selected literary texts.
2. Identify selected instances of classical American writing, and discuss, in general terms, how they exemplify the historical period from which they derive.
3. Demonstrate an ability to closely analyze selected passages of literary texts, and an ability to use such analyses to both illuminate and complicate a reading of the texts in which they occur.
4. Write a short critical essay about a literary topic, an essay that develops and defends a critical claim (or thesis), and does so in a manner that is, in general, grammatically and rhetorically correct and effective.
5. As and whenever possible, identify, find, and use basic secondary sources to further the reading and writing required in and beyond ENG 251 and 252.

TEXTBOOK

Nina Baym, Ronald Gottesman, et al. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 5th Edition. Vol. 2. (New York: Norton, 1998).

All assignments refer to this text. In addition, students should also keep handy, and frequently use a good dictionary (such as Webster's Collegiate or The American Heritage Dictionary). Our writers will often use a demanding or somewhat archaic English vocabulary, for which a dictionary is essential. Moreover, American writers make frequent allusions to biblical scripture and European literature, and the student's understanding can be richly repaid by the work of tracing those allusions. The editors of your anthology have footnoted many allusions and archaic words, and you should make good use of those footnotes. But the editors have also missed many others that will puzzle any student, and it will be necessary to do your own work on them. Many students will also benefit from using a handbook of literary terms, such as Harmon, Holman, and Thrall's A Handbook To Literature, or Roberts' Writing About Literature, both available in bookstores and libraries.