Survey of American Literature: 1865-Present

This course surveys US writing from the close of the Civil War to the present, focusing on short fiction and the novel, addressing the development of literary fiction and its relation to American culture and society in the period. We will examine the emergence of various approaches to literary fiction (realism, naturalism, modernism, postmodernism) but also the politics of what critics counted as literary fiction--what kind of writing was included and and what was excluded, and why, and how those designations changed over time. We will be asking what literary fiction has been understood to do and what it has been held to be good for over the period, and how we can read those works today. Writers may include Henry James, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Upton Sinclair, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin, James Welch, and Toni Morrison. Course work will include a presentation, brief response papers, in-class tests, and two papers, one critical and the other a reflection on the reading.