Courses
English 120 - Critical Reading and Writing: Poetry
Identifies and examines prosodic and figurative elements of poetry as well as the historical context
of poems of various periods, authors, and kinds. Equal emphasis falls on the student’s production of
critical essays, which logically organize and persuasively present responses to the poems from a close
reading. Required of all English majors. One unit.
English 120 - Critical Reading and Writing: Fiction
Course topics are the elements of fi ction: narrative structures, various aspects of style, and point of
view. This course is also devoted to the writing of student essays on the literature. One unit.
English 293 - Readings in 19th-Century American Literature
Covers poetry, prose essays, short stories, and novels that refl ect the scope of this century’s engagement with issues of race, gender, Transcendentalism, science and technology, and the Civil War and its aftermath. One unit.
English 350 - Early American Literature
A study of the development of cultural contact between Native Americans and Europeans, the Puritan
experiment, and the founding of the nation from 1600-1830. One unit.
English 351 - American Renaissance
A study of the American Renaissance through selected prose and poetry of Poe, Emerson, Thoreau,
Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville. One unit.
English 352 - American Realism
A study of the rise of variant expressions of realism, its evolution into naturalism, the revival of local
color and the fl owering of regionalism, all in response to the changing American scene through
immigration, segregation, business, technology and other forces between the Civil War and World
War I. One unit.
English 354 - Civil War & Reconstruction Literature
A survey of how the Civil War and Reconstruction periods have been described in American literature,
from both the northern and southern perspective. Possible works include selected Civil War
poetry and speeches, Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the
Wind, and Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. One unit.
English 401 (Seminar) - Other American Renaissance
This course takes its subject from the current debate among American literary scholars regarding the sacred position we assign to the five key male authors of the American Renaissance (Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau). The course seeks to put those authors into the broader context of the literary marketplace at the time in which they were writing. Specifically, it sets those male authors against the best-selling women authors of the century. All three American bestsellers of the 19th century were by women and written during between 1850 and 1854. Together they represent, in the words of critic Jane Tompkins, the “Other American Renaissance.” Proceeding from Hawthorne’s famous complaint against that “damned mob of scribbling women,” the participants in this course will attempt to come to their own evaluation of those women’s novels. To what extent was sentimentalism a woman’s aesthetic, and to what degree do we embrace the devaluation of sentimental literature that originated during that period? In reading current literary criticism, literary reviews from the 1850s, correspondence (between Melville and Hawthorne, Hawthorne and his wife, etc.), sentimental novels, and canonical texts, the course will engage with the present day debate to come up with its own conclusions. One unit.
