American Literature Since 1865

This writing-intensive course serves as both a general-education option in literature and a broad survey course for majors and minors.

Moving gradually away from the model of the representative survey, I have designed a version of this course that foregrounds a set of questions, framed by Stephen Greenblatt, that take literature as a space where cultural constraint and mobility is reproduced.  Readings are selected with an eye towards the canon, but with equal concern that they provide stimulating material for students to reflect on the very notions of: literature surveys, anthologies, canonic works, and great authors.

Orienting Questions for the Semester:

1. What kinds of behavior, what models of practice, does this work seem to enforce?
2. Why might readers at a particular time and place find this work compelling?
3. Are there differences between my values and the values implicit in the work I am reading?
4. Upon what social understandings does the work depend? [i.e. what ideas about the world, social order, history are taken as a given?]
5. Whose freedom of thought or movement might be constrained [or unleashed] implicitly or explicitly by this work?
6. What are the larger social structures with which these particular acts of praise or blame might be connected? (226) 

(Overview of Cultural Criticism)