ENG 227-01 - American Literary Traditions I

4 credits (Fall)

American Gothic: The Impact of Slavery and the Frontier on American Literature “The proper subject for the American gothic,” according to Leslie Fiedler, is “slavery.” More recently, Allan Lloyd-Smith has argued on behalf of the significance of frontier expansion in the construction of American gothic, an expansion that obliterates or displaces indigenous populations. With those ideas in mind, this course will explore the personifications and demonizations-literary, legal and political-that haunt the clearings in which violence and slave labor were so often instrumental. We will start with discussion of an iconic painting by Grant Woods, “American Gothic” (1930), and end with discussion of the “problem” of American writing as presented in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining. In between we will focus on novels by Charles Brockden Brown and Catharine Maria Sedgwick; shorter works of fiction by Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville; and autobiographical accounts, poems, or essays by Thomas Hariot, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman. The last month of the course leading up to The Shining will be devoted to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. Grades will be based on class discussion, collaborative presentations, several short responses and two medium-length papers.

Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121, or any course in the study of literature in another language department.
Instructor: Andrews