Course Guidelines

Adam Frank
Buchanan Tower 503
adafrank@mail.ubc.ca
Office hours: Wednesday 2-3 or by appointment

English 223/001: Literature in the United States (3 credits)
Some U.S. literature and a few environments (1830s – 1930s)
Term two:M/W/F 12:00-1:00, Buchanan B313
Course website: blogs.ubc.ca/engl2232012

This course offers a selective introduction to literature written in the United States between the 1830s and the 1930s. The course material ranges from essays (by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and W.E.B. Du Bois), to short stories (by Edgar Allan Poe and Dashiell Hammett), poetic projects (Emily Dickinson’s and Walt Whitman’s), novels (by Frank Norris and Nella Larsen), autobiography (by Gertrude Stein), and comics (by George Herriman). Our work will be to read and think about this writing in relation to a number of different kinds of environments: literary or aesthetic, theoretical, historical, and political. We will be interested in thinking both about what is going on in the text under consideration, and what is going on around it – sometimes in its historical moment, sometimes in the present of our reading, and (with luck) both. The span of roughly one hundred years covered in this course saw enormous transformations which helped to compose the texture of contemporary North American life: rapid industrialization, shifting centers of power towards big urban centers, a civil war (1861-66) and the economic changes following the end of slavery, political consolidation and the emergence of an America with imperial interests, and changes in relations among and between genders, races, classes, ethnicities, and sexualities. A main goal of the course is to introduce students to literary critical reading practices in order to develop techniques for beginning to describe how a given text engages with its various moments, including this one.

This course will run as a mixture of lecture and discussion. It was initially developed in mixed-mode format, which means that there is a certain amount of online material that introduces historical or theoretical background that students are expected to read. This material is written by Adam Frank (AF), Sarah Banting (SB), and Brook Houglum (BH).

©Adam Frank. Except when used by students enrolled in this course, no material on this blog/website is to be copied, used, or revised without explicit written permission from the copyright owner.