A study of representative American texts culled from the latter half of the nineteenth century and deliberately selected to span a gamut of genres: the novel, the short story, the extended verse form or the short, intricately woven poem, along with mixed genres featuring song, narrative, philosophical meditation, and lyric utterance within a single text. Students should expect that in taking this course, they will keep needing to re-test the aesthetic ground-rules, and to keep re-adopting to radically different varieties of voice, ranging from Huck Finn’s down-home utterances to Dickinson’s gnomic phraseology to Henry James’s elaborately woven syntax. Themes will include race, immigration, industrial revolution, class, the frontier—lots of long-familiar subjects. Even so, there’s no getting around the absence of a single perspective or voice through which to treat these themes. What is representative about the America texts selected, that is to say, is the fact that either individually, or often in juxtaposition, they force one to think from several different standpoints all at once, to read different voices, to span a gamut of social milieus, and to accept the necessity of what one of the authors selected calls a “double consciousness.” Throughout this course the threshold will often be more important that whatever it seems to separate and divide.