Course topic when Professor Grossman is the instructor:
This course surveys the history of US literature in relation to feelings. Beginning in the settler colonial period and working our way to the present, we will look at how a literary tradition forms its “Americanness” around the idea of shared, public, or collective emotions. Reading across fiction and poetry, we’ll examine the emergence of genres like the captivity narrative, the Southern Gothic, and the presidential inauguration poem. Some of these works attempt to distill a national perspective--revolutionary resentment or liberal optimism, for instance--into the individual feelings of a character or poetic speaker. Others aim to implicate the reader in feeling and thinking across difference. We will pay particular attention to connections between discourses of race and antiracism as they consolidate in and around literary thinking. Throughout our discussions, we will consult a range of essays grappling with the limits of literature-induced sympathies, and consider how contemporary writers respond to the enduring legacy of “sentimental” imperatives. Our authors will include Mary Rowlandson, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Zitkla-Sa, Sui Sin Far, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Pauline Hopkins, Henry James, Langston Hughes, William Faulkner, Younghill Kang, Carlos Bulosan, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, James Baldwin, Karen Tei Yamashita, N. Scott Momaday, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Elaine Castillo, among others.
Course topic when Professor Ford is the instructor:
This survey grapples with the centrality of war to American literature--indeed, to American life. The course moves chronologically through Early American and the American Revolutionary Wars and ends with the War on Terror. We will examine the strengths and limits of depicting war through lyric poetry, short epic poetry, political pamphleteering, oratory, autobiography, and the novel. In addition to considering literary forms, this course considers what understudied voices have to say about what leads to war, the experience of war, and its aftermath. Our readings will include Phillis Wheatley, Timothy Dwight, Philip Freneau, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Philip Metres, and Solmaz Sharif, among others.