American Lit Survey

This course allowed students to approach the problem of defining America from a variety of angles. We read a diverse selection of American writers from the seventeenth century until the present day and we explored historical, biographical, and cultural contexts for each writer for clues to his or her meaning. We also encountered many different genres such as speeches, slave narratives, sermons, political tracts, philosophic essays, autobiographies, fiction, and poetry.

Required Books

Assignments

Emerson’s Transparent Eyeball
Hawthorne’s The Birth-Mark
Frederick Douglass and Slavery
The Harlem Renaissance
Gwendolyn Brooks