This course provides an introduction to the study of American literature and culture. The class will focus on exploring how reality—or the concept of the real—is depicted in American literature, and the changing artistic strategies deployed throughout U.S. history to respond to the rapidly and radically changing nature of the reality of the American political, social, and cultural scene. Focusing on this issue of the real and realism in American literature will allow us to examine a wide range of themes, texts, and materials. These will likely range from the idealism of antebellum romantic fiction to the supposed objectivity of turn of the century realism to the fracturing of traditional modes of representation in twentieth century modernism. This focus will allow us to interrogate some fundamental questions regarding the role of art and society: how (and why) does fiction portray reality? how does literature respond to historical flux, and how is this a reciprocal process? what role does art and literature play in the national cultural imagination? Our primary authors will likely include Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Wallace Stevens. Short stories, poetry, and secondary material will be available through a course pack.