2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Apr 02, 2025

2024-2025 Academic Catalog

ENG 180 - American Literature I

Do present-day ideas about American identity and community reflect the nation’s dramatic, troubled past? Did early writing about U.S. culture and society create social change or work against it? In this class we will seek to answer these questions by examining the entanglement of popular ideas (e.g. American exceptionalism, individualism, democracy); historical events (e.g. slavery and abolitionism, pro- and anti- immigration movements); and literary genres (e.g. the gothic tale, the slave narrative, the realist novel) during the long nineteenth century (ca. 1790s-1910s). Authors we’ll study might include Poe, Melville, Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Whitman, Dickinson, Sui Sin Far, Henry James, and Charles Chesnutt. While course meetings will often include lecture, they will also involve interactive student-led discussions, presentations, and/or writing workshops.

Course Designation/Attribute: HP, DI

Anticipated Terms Offered: Every year