ENG 228-01 - American Literary Traditions II

4 credits (Fall)

Reconstructing Nature’s Nation: The “Salve” of Race. This course will explore the interplay of literature, law, environment and identity during the period of 1865-1925, as the United States reconstructs itself out of and around the trauma of the Civil War and the massive influx of immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will start by reading the Civil War poetry of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, and we will then proceed to explore the ways in which the Civil War Amendments, Supreme Court cases including Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and legislative enactments such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) and the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924), helped shape the plots and inform the characterizations in novels by Albion Tourgee (A Fool’s Errand, 1879), Henry James (The Bostonians, 1886), Mark Twain (Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894), Pauline Hopkins (Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self, 1903), and Willa Cather (The Professor’s House, 1925). Early 20th century magazine pieces by writers such as John Muir, Sui Sin Far, Zitkala-Sa, Harriet Monroe, Madison Grant, and Franklin Lane will enable us to discuss the poetics of “Americanization” in relation to the discourses of environmental preservation and eugenics. Grades will be based on class discussion, collaborative presentations, several short responses and two medium-length papers.

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