Spring 2006 Courses

English 130: American Voices (Shmurak)

M/W/F 2:20 - 3:20 pm, Old Main 009

This class investigates a range of literary responses to competing notions of what it means to live in America and define oneself as American.  Looking at literature from the last two and a half centuries, we will focus particularly on how diverse Americans have reconciled seemingly contradictory desires for individuality and for membership in a larger community.  Our inquiry will take us from the prairies (Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) to Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers) to the post-Reconstruction South (Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition) as we consider how different environments, political issues, and cultural backgrounds inform writers’ understanding of themselves as individuals and as Americans.  Other texts will likely include writings by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, the Cherokee Nation, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Abraham Cahan, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zitkala Ša, Zora Neale Hurston, and Maxine Hong Kingston. 

NOTE: THIS COURSE FULFILLS THE DIVERSITY REQUIREMENT FOR THE ENGLISH MAJOR

Spring 2006 Course Listings