AMST 376
Landscapes in American Literature Fall 2019
Division II
Cross-listed STS 377 / ENGL 376
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

This course examines representations of American landscapes in selected texts from the British colonial era to the present. Critical approaches will include narrative theory, formalism, eco-criticism, and science and technology studies. The central questions are: (1) How do authors adapt narrative and poetic forms to the representation of particular landscapes? (2) How do literary landscape representations change when new technologies arise for traversing and transforming them? (3) What effects can literary landscapes have on the landscapes we live in? Landscapes include settlements, cities, wildernesses, “frontiers,” suburbia, and infrastructural scenes. Relevant technologies include the postal service, the railroad, the telegraph and telephone, the automobile, commercial aviation, and Skype. Texts may include: letters of Columbus, American Indian creation stories, early American religious texts, captivity narratives, slave narratives, and poems, short stories, and novels from the 17th to the 21st centuries, as different from one another as Dickinson’s “Nature-sometimes sears a Sapling-” and Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 15
Expected: 12
Class#: 1753
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: discussion participation; five brief response papers (~2 pages); a mid-semester essay (~5 pages); a final essay (12- to 15-pages)
Prerequisites: none
Distributions: Division II
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
STS 377 Division II AMST 376 Division II ENGL 376 Division I
Attributes: ENGL Criticism Courses

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