American Literature, Fall 2002

Abstract:: Studies the national literature of the United States since the early nineteenth century. Considers novels, essays, and poems, focusing on efforts to define and reform a sense of American identity amidst increasing awareness of cultural diversity. Readings usually include works by Hawthorne, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Dickinson, Frost, Faulkner, Maxine Kingston, and Amy Tan. This is a HASSD -CI course. Like other communications-intensive courses in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, it allows students to produce 20 pages of polished writing with careful attention to revision. It also offers substantial opportunities for oral expression, through presentations of written work, student-led discussion, and class participation. The class has a low enrollment that ensures maximum attention to student writing and opportunity for oral expression, and a writing fellow/tutor is available for consultation on drafts and revisions.

Evaluated

"Civil Disobedience" excerpt seminar

Abstract:: This lesson plan is to be used for a seminar on an excerpt of Henry David Thoreau's work, "Civil Disobedience." The plan will follow the Paideia concept to discuss the great ideas of the text. The plan will provide a pre-guide activity, coaching activity, inner circle seminar questions, outer circle questions and a post writing assignment.

Abstract:: Global exploration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries radically changed Western science, orienting philosophies of natural history to more focused fields like comparative anatomy, botany, and geology. In the United States, European scientific advances and home-grown ventures like the Wilkes Exploring Expedition to Antarctica and the Pacific inspired new endeavors in cartography, ethnography, zoology, and evolutionary theory, replacing rigid models of thought and classification with more fluid and active systems. They inspired literary authors as well. This class will examine some of the most remarkable of these authors—Herman Melville (Moby-Dick and "The Encantadas"), Henry David Thoreau (Walden), Sarah Orne Jewett (Country of the Pointed Firs), Edith Wharton (House of Mirth), Toni Morrison (A Mercy), among others—in terms of the subjects and methods they adopted, imaginatively and often critically, from the natural sciences.

Abstract:: This course uses readings and discussions to focus on a series of short-term events that shed light on American politics, culture, and social organization. It emphasizes finding ways to make sense of these complicated, highly traumatic events, and on using them to understand larger processes of change in American history. The class also gives students experience with primary documentation research through a term paper assignment.