Mar 28, 2024  
2022-2023 Academic Catalog 
    
2022-2023 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

ENG 227-01 - American Literary Traditions I

4 credits (Fall)
American Gothic: From a City on a Hill to the Sunken Place. This course foregrounds the impact that slavery and the violence directed against Native Americans in 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, religion, 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, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.  The course concludes with the viewing of two films: Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic version of The Shining (1980), and Jordan Peele’s more recent exploration of race in Get Out (2017). Grades will be based on class discussion, collaborative presentations, several short responses and three medium-length papers. 

Prerequisite: ENG 120  or ENG 121  for majors; for non-majors, ENG 120  or ENG 121  or third-year standing.
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Andrews