ENG 227-01 - American Literary Traditions I

4 credits (Spring)

American Gothic: from a City on a Hill to the Sunken Place. In this course, we explore the personifications and demonizations that haunt America’s clearings, those spaces and places in which genocidal violence and slave labor were so often instrumental. Given that, it makes a great deal of sense to read early American literature for the “gothic effects” that arise when the hard facts of slavery, racism, misogyny, and paternalism merge with utopian fantasies of regeneration, renewal, and equal rights for all. With that in mind, in addition to focusing on novels by Charles Brockden Brown, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Alison Bechdel, we will read poems, stories, and essays by various authors, including Mary Rowlandson, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Jacobs, and Emily Dickinson. Throughout the course, we will view films that complement course materials, including Robert Eggers’ exploration of one Puritan family’s encounter with the wilderness in The Witch (2015), Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic version of The Shining (1980), and Jordan Peele’s more recent exploration of racialized terror lurking within an ostensibly privileged exurban setting in Get Out (2017). No exams. Grades to be determined by attendance and participation, “blackboard” postings and comments, and three mid-length essays.

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