This course will ask how African American writers sustain and manipulate a culturally specific literary tradition at various historical moments, ranging from the Colonial period to the post-Civil Rights era.

Seminar-sized course in literary and rehtorical criticism. Organized around themes, it stresses analysis from critical and theoretical perspectives that sharpen understanding of texts, their contexts, and our reading of them. This course fulfills the Junior-Year Writing Requirement. See the English Department course description guide for various sectional sub-titles and descriptions.

This course explores the definition and evolution of a national literary tradition in the United States from the Civil War to the present. We will examine a variety of issues arising from the historical and cultural contexts of the 19th and 20th centuries, the formal study of literature, and the competing constructions of American identity. Students will consider canonical texts, as well as those less frequently recognized as central to the American literary tradition, in an effort to foster original insights i9nto the definition, content, and the shape of ?literature? in the United States.

In this course we will read narratives of individual and collective cultural transformations from the colonial and early republican periods in American literature. We will trace throughout these narratives various figurations of "American" subjectivity, such as the captive and the redeemed; the slave, the servant, and the freeman; the alien and the citizen; the foreign and the native. Through such textual figures, we will explore as well the cultural production of a broader narrative of the ?imagined community? of the nation.

Primarily for nonmajors. Introduction to the interdisciplinary study of American culture, with a wide historical scope and attention to diverse cultural experiences in the U.S. Readings in fiction, prose, and poetry, supplemented by painting, photography, film, and material culture. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)

Writer's workshop with emphasis on fiction. May be repeated by M.F.A. candidates for a total of 24 credits.

This course looks at selected plays by significant 20th Century American playwrights, with attention to dramatic form, historical context, influence and innovation. Students read at least one play per week. Requirements include participation in discussion sections, papers, a midterm and final. (Gen.Ed. AL)

Writer's workshop with emphasis on poetry. May be repeated by candidates for the M.F.A. for a total of 24 credits.