ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3-4
Planned Offering: Fall, Winter, Spring

Prerequisite: Completion of the FW requirement.Studies in American literature, supported by attention to historical contexts. Versions of this course may survey several periods or concentrate on a group of works from a short span of time. Students develop their analytical writing skills in a series of short papers. May be repeated for degree credit with permission and if the topics are different.

Topic for Winter 2011:

ENGL 293: Topics in American Literature: Wilderness in American Literature (3). “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.” This course investigates ideas of wilderness in selected writings by American writers from a variety of periods and perspectives. We read fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by writers like Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, John Muir, Mary Austin, Aldo Leopold, Cormac McCarthy, and Terry Tempest Williams. Writing assignments include examinations and analytical papers. (HL) Warren.

Topic for Fall 2010:

ENGL 293A: Topics in American Literature: The Birth, Development and Prematurely- reported Death of the American Short Story (3). Since Poe “invented” it less than 200 years ago, the short story has become one of the leading literary genres. It lends itself to one-session readings and offers fiction writers the opportunity to work in detail on a small scale. The form interweaves and crossbreeds with genres like the poem, the tale, the myth, the job application, the joke, the dream and many more. With almost 900 colleges teaching short story writing, why are some pundits declaring the imminent demise of the genre? To discover how the American story evolved and why it’s not going away, we read work by Poe, Melville, James, Baldwin, O’Connor, Faulkner, Updike, Oates, King and other standards, as well as recent voices - Ha Jin, Makkai, Proulx, Mark Richard, Z. Z. Packer. Students develop their writing skills in a series of short papers and develop a creative project. (HL) Smith

ENGL 293B: Topics in American Literature: Toward ‘Edge City’: American Literature and Film in the 1960s (3). Ken Kesey coined the phrase ‘Edge City’ to describe his quest to break through conventional boundaries on his way toward a new consciousness—spontaneous, visionary, communal. Edge City seems an appropriate way of describing the trend of the sixties both historically and artistically. It is a time of extremities, a series of cataclysms, each outdoing, in shock value, the one before it. Readings include non-fiction by Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Pete Hamill, Michael Herr, and Hunter Thompson; novels such as Percy’s The Moviegoer, Updike’s Couples, Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; short fiction by Flannery O’Connor, Tobias Wolff, Tim O’Brien, and Denis Johnson; as well as three films: The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and “Tet, 1968” (from the PBS documentary series on Vietnam). (HL) Oliver