Courses

ENG 333LEC American Literature to the Civil War

Study of such topics as Native American literature and encounters, sentimentalism, slave narratives, federalism and democracy, and of such authors as Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Fuller, Hawthorne, Melville, Sedgwick, Douglass, Jacobs, Stowe, Whitman, and Dickinson. For example: Prof. K. Dauber, Is There an American Literature? This course will survey American literature from its beginnings to the Civil War. We will discuss such topics as democratic writing, the representation of slavery, the form of the romance, and the "making" of American literature in a time when England served as the great influence to be undone as a model for writing in English. Throughout we will be asking "What makes American literature American?" "Is there such a thing as `American writing, philosophy, literature?" Are such questions still pertinent ones? For example: Prof. K. Dauber, The Idea of America A survey of American Literature during its classic period in the nineteenth century. We will discuss such issues as the idea of the American, the form of the American novel, the poetics and politics of community formation, and democratic writing.