Summer 2004

E f338 • American Literature from 1865 to Present

Course Description

This course in American literature ranges from 1865 (the end of the Civil War) to the 1950s (the development of the Cold War). We will read poetry by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Countee Collin, Theodore Roethke, Richard Wilbur, Richard Wright, among others; and short stories by Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Wharton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, and Sherwood Anderson, among others. We will consider how these authors struggle (1) to find something in which to believe and (2) to derive some ethical measure of human life at a time when systems of belief, such as Whitman's Transcendentalist faith and nationalism, have collapsed and seem un-replaceable. What can be affirmed in the "modern world" to give humanity the "courage to be"? Sometimes the answer is not pretty.

Grading Policy

There is a strict attendance policy. Objective, short-answer exercises emphasizing mastery provide the main measure of evaluation.

Texts

Course booklet

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