ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

FDR: HL
Credits: 3-4

Spring 2016, ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature: The American Short Story (4). This course is a study of the evolution of the short story in America from its roots, both domestic and international, tracing the main branches of its development in the 20th century. We also explore more recent permutations of the genre, such as magical realism, new realism, and minimalism. Having gained an appreciation for the history and variety of this distinctly modern genre, we focus our attention on the work of two American masters of the form, contemporaries and erstwhile friends who frequently read and commented on each other’s work–Hemingway and Fitzgerald. We examine how they were influenced by their predecessors and by each other and how each helped to shape the genre. (HL) Oliver.

Winter 2016, ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature: Introduction to African American Literature (3). This course surveys literature by black writers from slavery to hip-hop. Beginning with the poems of Phillis Wheatley, this course analyzes writings conditioned by slavery, freedom, oppression, and music. Genres include novels, poetry, short stories, plays, and song lyrics. Interested in questions that connect and disconnect artists such as Langston Hughes and Nas, Pauline Hopkins and Nicki Minaj, one of the course’s missions is to provide students with an overview of African American literary movements and the energies that inform them. Writers include Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, George Schuyler, Zora Neal Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gloria Naylor, Notorious B.I.G., Queen Latifah, MK Asante, and others. This course meets the requirements for the Africana Studies minor. (HL) Campbell.

Winter 2016, ENGL 293-02: Topics in American Literature: Introduction to African American Literature (3). This course surveys literature by black writers from slavery to hip-hop. Beginning with the poems of Phillis Wheatley, this course analyzes writings conditioned by slavery, freedom, oppression, and music. Genres include novels, poetry, short stories, plays, and song lyrics. Interested in questions that connect and disconnect artists such as Langston Hughes and Nas, Pauline Hopkins and Nicki Minaj, one of the course’s missions is to provide students with an overview of African American literary movements and the energies that inform them. Writers include Frederick Douglass, Frances Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, George Schuyler, Zora Neal Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gloria Naylor, Notorious B.I.G., Queen Latifah, MK Asante, and others. This course meets the requirements for the Africana Studies minor. (HL) Campbell.

Winter 2016, ENGL 293-03: Topics in American Literature: American Gilded Ages: Reading the 19th and 21st Centuries (3). Are we living in a second Gilded Age? Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein joke on Portlandia that “The dream of the 1890s is alive in Portland,” and Comedy Central’s Another Period mines the first Gilded Age for laughs by depicting the Vanderbilt-like Bellacourt family in the reality-TV mode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. This course examines the connections between the late-19th century and today. We consider muckraking, environmentalism, serialization, and literary naturalism to compare the cultural forms, historical contexts and socio-political issues that resonate both today and at the turn of the previous century. Course texts include The Jungle (Sinclair), Nickel and Dimed (Ehrenreich), The House of Mirth (Wharton), The Water Knife (Bacigalupi), and the HBO series The Wire. (HL) Bufkin.

Fall 2015, ENGL 293-01: Topics in American Literature: Sex and Intimacy in American Literature (3). This course surveys the formations of intimate feelings in the literature from Hawthorne’s take on Puritans to Ginsberg’s open celebration of gay sex. We will look at how different periods of American culture - the Romantics, Realists, Moderns, and post-Moderns - represent intimacy, its relation to gender and race, and why, in a country touted for its optimism, love in literature always seems to end badly. (HL) Leland. Planned Offering: Fall, Winter, Spring