LIT 332 Major American Writers

This course will survey American literature from the Colonial period to the present. Emphasis will be placed on writers who have significantly influenced the national literature, such as Native American writers, Thomas Jefferson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Conner, and others. Students will use thematic and historical analysis (The Adventure of the Wilderness) as well as various critical frameworks (Structuralism, Formalism, Reader-Response, New Historicism, etc.) to understand, analyze and synthesize the literature across genres and periods. Students will engage in close reading: they will be asked to analyze literature inductively, using clues from the surface level of literature (literary devices) to create larger truths they see in the literature. Student analysis of literature will be expressed through essays, presentations, and other activities.