This course offers an introduction to American literature and culture. As we read a survey of texts ranging historically from colonial times to the present, we will track the way thinkers and writers have defined and challenged the relationship of American identity to the social and political institutions that shape our lives, including government, religious institutions, education, the military, and the “peculiar institution” of slavery. We will examine the utopian, revolutionary project of inventing the institutions of a new society and contrast this with the equally American idea of rugged individualism, paying special attention to the way that authors have represented American national character as caught between these two understandings of the individual “self” as part of a nation, culture, and society.

Course requirements will include extensive reading, quizzes, a presentation, and two papers. Course texts may include fiction, poetry, and political writing by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W.E.B. DuBois, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Toni Morrison.