Intro to American Studies

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)

American Realism

"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.

American Romanticism

The cultural life of 19th-century America in selected poetry and prose by Hawthorne, Thoreau, Douglass, Cooper, Whitman, Poe, Melville, and Lincoln. Emphasis on the symbolic and ethical idealism of selected ante-bellum poetry and prose, and on the themes of Puritanism, Transcendentalism, Manifest Destiny, Jacksonian democracy, and slavery.

AmericanLit&CultureAfter1865

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.
Subscribe to