This course is designed to cover techniques and practices in reading and enjoying literature in its various forms and to examine such features of literary meanings as imagery, characterization, narration, and patterning in sound and sense. In order to consider how literature “works,” we will be focusing on a specific period of literature and thinking about the various ways that literary meaning is both produced by as well as produces its historical and cultural moment. The period of American history and literature which we will be focusing on, the “antebellum” or pre-Civil War period, offers a great opportunity for
thinking through what it means to read literature, as writers of this period were themselves grappling with the role of literature in the still new nation. Of particular concern in this class will be the ways in which authors of the antebellum period attempted to self-consciously articulate their own sense of a national, American identity in the face of the social and cultural pressures of westward expansion, slavery, colonization, Indian removal, Manifest Destiny, and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. We will also be considering what these interpretations reveal about our own contemporary understandings of history and identity.

Our readings will cover short stories, novels, sensational fiction, poetry, autobiography, and essays. Our primary authors will likely include Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Rollin Ridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fanny Fern, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, among others. Because this class satisfies the “W” credit, the course will also be writing intensive, with 10-15 pages of writing and required revision. There will also be reading quizzes, tests, group presentations, and in-class activities.

Required Texts:

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Edition, Volume
B, 1820-1865.
ISBN: 978-0-393-92740-5

Ridge, John Rollin. The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta,
Celebrated California Bandit.
ISBN: 9780906114293