ENGL 293 - Topics in American Literature

Credits: 3-4 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 if the topics are different.

Winter 2021, ENGL 293A-01: Topics in American Literature: Urban Rural Frontier (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. The goal of this course is to trace how writers and other artists imagined and reimagined changing urban, rural, and frontier landscapes throughout the US 19th century. What significance does the notion of “place” hold in America’s imagination? How has that conception of place and space consolidated over time? Potential authors include: Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sui Sin Far. (HL) Millan.

Winter 2021, ENGL 293B-01: Topics in American Literature: King and Kubrick (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. The surprisingly bitter (and long lasting) dispute between Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick over the latter’s adaptation of King’s seminal novel The Shining proved a major cultural and artistic event that continues to shed light upon a range of important questions: theories of the novel and film, perennial debates about adaptation, bitter matters of cultural valuation and prejudice, especially the great dispute between highbrow and middlebrow, the status of such genres as horror and epic in modern literature and film, and the complex relations between modernism and postmodernism. Centering on the dispute over The Shining, this course ranges over these broader questions by surveying the careers and oeuvres of these two imposing figures in the landscape of twentieth- and now twenty-first-century art and culture. (HL) Adams.

Winter 2021, ENGL 293C-01: Topics in American Literature: The American West (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. The American West is a land of striking landscapes, beautiful places to visit, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, and stories that have had a huge impact on the USA and the world, such as Lewis and Clark, the Oregon Trial, Custer’s Last Stand, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and Cowboy and Indian adventures galore. This course studies some of these Western places, stories, art works, and movies. What has made them so appealing? How have they been used? We study works by authors such as John Steinbeck, Frederic Remington, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, and Cormac McCarthy, plus movies with actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Brad Pitt to see how Western stories have played out and what is happening now in these contested spaces. (HL) Smout.

Winter 2021, ENGL 293D-01: Topics in American Literature: Asian American Literature (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. A study of literatures by Asian-American authors, with a focus on how Asian Americans—broadly and inclusively defined—have transformed the social, political, and cultural landscapes of the United States. With such topics as immigration and refugee politics, racism and xenophobia, exclusion and internment, civil-rights activism, the post-9/11 period, and the model-minority myth, our selected texts (novels, poetry, short stories) present both a historical and an intimate look into the lives of individuals who articulate what it means to identify as Asian American in the modern and contemporary United States. Potential texts include John Okada’s No-No Boy, Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. (HL) Kharputly.

Winter 2021, ENGL 293E-01: Topics in American Literature: Literature of the Beat Generation (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. A study of a revolutionary literary movement, focusing on the ways in which cultural and historical context have influenced the composition of and response to literature in the United States. This course examines the writings of several American authors (Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder) active from the mid-1940s through recent decades, loosely grouped together as the Beat Generation. What cultural, literary, historical, and religious influences from the U.S. and other parts of the world have shaped their work? What challenges did their boldly different writings face, and how did their reception change over time? What are their themes? Their notions of style? What have they contributed to American (and world) life and letters? The goal of this course is to lay a strong foundation from which such questions can be richly addressed and answered. (HL) Ball.

Winter 2021, ENGL 293F-01: Topics in American Literature: Memoir (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. In this course we’ll read a variety of memoir forms, from the expected prose to documentary memoir, poetic memoir, graphic memoir and visual memoir. Readings include primary texts such as Belonging, by Nora Krug, Hardly War by Don Mee Choi, One! Hundred! Demons! by Lynda Barry, and others. The final project will be devoted to writing and constructing a mixed-media, documentary memoir. (HL) Miranda.

Winter 2021, ENGL 293G-01: Topics in American Literature: Environmental Literature in the Anthropocene (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. In this course we study American ideas of Nature and Self in environmental literature. We discuss wilderness, cultivation, loss, hope, and interconnection for humans as members of societies and of ecosystems. Texts come from the cutting edge of EcoWriting (Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Ross Gay, Camille Dungy, and many more) with a framing in traditional environmental literature (Thoreau, Whitman, etc.) and in environmental theory (William Cronon, Robert Macfarlane, etc.). With the help of these thinkers, we test our own understandings of human relationships to the more-than-human world. (HL, EXP) Green. 

Winter 2021, ENGL 293H-01: Topics in American Literature: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Fiction (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. This class offers an immersion in contemporary American fiction by focusing on Pulitzer winners and finalists. We begin by studying the history of the prize, and the selection process. Then we read some past winners, including Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, Paul Harding’s Tinkers, and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. Students individually survey past finalists by reading the first ten pages of twenty novels of their choice, keeping a log of their impressions and reporting back to the class. For the final project, the class plays the role of the Pulitzer committee, and chooses a winner for 2012—the last year in which no prize for fiction was awarded. We read the three finalists from that year: Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia, and David Foster Wallace’s unfinished The Pale King (limited excerpts). Each student will write a final paper that makes their case for the novel that should have won in 2012, through close attention to the novel’s style and structure, discussion of how the book meets the Pulitzer criteria of portraying American life, and comparison with the other finalists. (HL) Brodie.

Fall 2020, ENGL 293B-01: Topics in American Literature: Asian American Literature (3). Prerequisite: Completion of the FDR FW writing requirement. A study of literatures by Asian-American authors, with a focus on how Asian Americans—broadly and inclusively defined—have transformed the social, political, and cultural landscapes of the United States. With such topics as immigration and refugee politics, racism and xenophobia, exclusion and internment, civil-rights activism, the post-9/11 period, and the model-minority myth, our selected texts (novels, poetry, short stories) present both a historical and an intimate look into the lives of individuals who articulate what it means to identify as Asian American in the modern and contemporary United States. Potential texts include John Okada’s No-No Boy, Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, R. O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. (HL) Kharputly.

Fall 2020, ENGL 293E-01: Topics in American Literature: The American Short Story (3). A study of the evolution of the short story in America from its roots, both domestic (Poe, Irving, Hawthorne, Melville) and international (Chekhov and Maupassant), tracing the main branches of its development in the 20th and 21st centuries. Among the writers we read: Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, John Updike, Philip Roth, Tobias Woolf, T.C. Boyle, Amy Hempel, Elizabeth Strout, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, and others. Additionally, we 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 see how they were influenced by their predecessors and by each other and how each helped to shape the genre. (HL) Oliver. FDR: HL