Introduction to American Literature: American Literature(s)

What does it mean for literature to be “American”? Is there only one “American literature”? This course will explore these and other questions by introducing you to a variety of written works dating from the seventeenth-century to the present, some of which have long been part of the standard American canon, and some of which have only more recently been given the considerable attention they deserve. We’ll consider the ways in which these diverse works by diverse authors have constructed, complicated, resisted, or otherwise related to notions of American-ness, or of identity, more broadly, and we’ll orient much of our discussion through an in-depth consideration of the formal elements of literature.