ENG 227-01 - American Literary Traditions I

4 credits (Fall)

A City, a House, and the Overlook Hotel: American Gothic. The city is Philadelphia. The house has seven gables and a secret past. The hotel? Why, that’s our shining city on a hill. Here’s Jack, to show us around the grounds. Welcome to Eng. 227! In this course we foreground the impact that slavery and the settlement of the frontier has had on our national literary culture, with particular attention focused on what is called “American gothic.” Being mindful of the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality, we will explore the personifications and demonizations-literary, legal and political-that haunt the clearings in which violence and slave labor were so often instrumental. In addition to focusing on novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Stephen King, we will also read works by Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Harriet Jacobs, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The course concludes with a viewing of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic version of The Shining. 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 third-year standing.
Instructor: Andrews