ENGL 376
Landscapes in American Literature
Last Offered Fall 2019
Division I
Cross-listed AMST 376 / STS 377
This course is not offered in the current 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#: 1752
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 I
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
AMST 376 Division II ENGL 376 Division I STS 377 Division II
Attributes: ENGL Criticism Courses

Class Grid

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