Fall 2007 Courses

English 374-01: The American Novel (Cohen)

M/W/F 9:40-10:40am, Old Main 002

This course will bring together an array of novels written in the United States between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Cold War. This period saw the flourishing of a number of important literary movements, including realism, naturalism, regionalism, the Harlem Renaissance, and Modernism. While we will carefully read each of our novels in and by itself, we will also seek to understand these broader aesthetic movements and their ways of using narrative to express particular beliefs about literature and the world at large. As part of this effort, we will think through the many relations between the worlds that novels depict, the ways they depict those worlds, and the social and political moments of their writing. Readings may include works by Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Jean Toomer, Carson McCullers, and Ralph Ellison.

Fall 2007 Course Listings