WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2016-2017       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
American Literature, 1865-1945

ENGL 204
Spring 2017
Section: 01  
Crosslisting: AMST 235
Course Cluster: Urban Studies

Together we will explore not only the complexities of American literature from the 1860s to the 1940s but how this literature excels as a usable critical resource that can advance our understanding of how America has "ticked" as a culture; a socioeconomic system that established and sought to maintain class, gender, and racial difference; and a political power structure. In our ongoing analyses of the relationship of literary form and social form, we will trace connections between historical developments such as the gothic genre and gender ideologies, domestic romance and the social reproduction of labor, realism and mass-urbanism, naturalism and immigration, and modernism and imperialism. The creative works of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Fanny Fern, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Chesnutt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Meridel Le Sueur, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, Nathanael West, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston will help equip us to be more imaginative readers of literature, ourselves, and America. This literature offers us expansive insights into what was at stake in America's production of "the modern." We will experience the aesthetic pleasures and critical pleasures of reading great writing.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL
Course Format: LectureGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST)(ENGL)(ENGL-Literature)
Past Enrollment Probability: 90% or above

Last Updated on NOV-22-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459