WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2024-2025       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
American Literature, 1865-1945: The Americanization of Power

ENGL 204
Spring 2025
Section: 01   02  
Crosslisting: AMST 235
Course Cluster and Certificates: Urban Studies

Together we'll explore not only the complexities of American literature from the 1860s to 1940s, but also how this literature is usable today and excels as critical equipment that can advance our understanding of the modern Americanization of power (put narrowly, we'll develop insights into a "democratic" capitalism, what some called a "Robber Baron" plutocracy, that pulled off and contrived to maintain systemic class, gender, and ethnoracial hierarchies to reproduce its power). As we unpack the relationship of literary form and social form, we'll 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, modernism and imperialism, and narrative experimentation and anti-racism. The creative works of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Chesnutt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, Nathanael West, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston will help teach us to be more imaginative readers of literature, ourselves, and what America was, is, and might be. While pooling ideas about this, we'll savor the pleasures of reading inspiring and transformative writing. This is very much a thinking-intensive course.
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: Not Available

Last Updated on OCT-04-2024
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