AMST 338
The American Renaissance Fall 2014
Division II Writing Skills
Cross-listed AMST 338 / ENGL 338
This is not the current course catalog

The mid-nineteenth century was evidently a good time to be an American writer. Thoreau’s Walden and Melville’s Moby-Dick, Emerson’s essays, Hawthorne’s and Poe’s fiction, abolitionist writings by Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson, and the groundbreaking poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were all produced around this time. We will read through this essential period of American literature by asking how key authors imagine the relationship between the self and its community. Does the individual exist in splendid isolation? Or are we terrifyingly open to the people around us? These texts will help us explore the politics of belonging as they played out in a nation headed toward Civil War and conscious of its fractures. We’ll see how much we can make this past work speak to our present moment. And we will jump in to arguments among scholars about who belongs in the canon of great American literature, whether it’s a good idea to categorize texts by time and place, and what we should be reading literature for.