This is a stand-alone independent study designed by the student and faculty sponsor that involves frequent interaction between instructor and student. Qualitative and quantitative enrichment must be evident on the proposed contract before consent is given to undertake the study.

Special problems. Department consent required.

Special problems. Department consent required.

Special problems. Department consent required.

Special problems. Department consent required.

Special problems. Department consent required.

Interdisciplinary approach to the study of American culture. Focus on issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Readings drawn from literature, history, the social sciences, philosophy and fine arts. Supplemented with audio-visual materialsofilms, slides of paintings, architecture, photography and material culture, and music. Required for students with a concentration in American Studies. (Gen. Ed. AL, DU)

"Realism" as the mode and attitude that dominates American literary expression. Major texts from the period 1865-1925; writers defining, refining, revising, and reversing the realist aesthetics of the age as they cope with new facts and ideas-Darwin, freed slaves, big business, immigrants, "the woman problem," crime in the streets, the making of new fortunes, the loss of a usable past.

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.