Focus

The move away from romantic idealization toward realist representation after 1865, using Whitman’s Civil War poetry as a bridge between traditions.

Required Reading

1. How the Titular Character in William Dean Howells'
2. "Editha" Grasps Agency A Study of the Reasons for
3. Failure in Resolving Cultural Conflicts in Daisy Miller
4. Drum-Taps: Whitman's Problematic Legacy as a War Poet Handout: Three Lenses on American Conflict

Focus
How writers use place, dialect, and custom to represent a diverse nation and expose tensions around race, gender, class, and regional identity.

Required Reading

1. An Intercultural Reading of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Goophered Grapevine and of Thomas Page’s Marse Chan: Racial Representation in Postbellum Southern Short Stories
2. Huckleberry Finn’s Conscience: Reckoning with the Evasion
3. Handout: The Nation in Narrative

Focus
Human outcomes are shaped by environment, heredity, money, and social systems. Practice distinguishing naturalism from realism.

Required Reading

1. The Forces of Fossil Capital: Sister Carrie and American Literary Naturalism’s Industrial Middle Class Ideology
2. The Undecidable Miss Bart: Edith Wharton’s Naturalism in The House of Mirth
3. Handout: Naturalism’s Fatal Design

Focus
Formal experimentation and new representations of consciousness through fragmentation, ambiguity, interiority, and image-driven writing.

Required Reading

1. The Modern Man as Represented in Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
2. Sherwood Anderson’s “Mother” and the Evaluation of the Genre
3. Handout: Paralysis Portraiture: Anderson and Eliot

Focus
Mature modernism and Harlem Renaissance writing in the 1920s and 1930s emphasized debates about modernity, memory, cultural expression, and class power.

Required Reading

1. The Harlem Renaissance: Cultural Rebirth and Literary Expression
2. Modernist Memories: Mnemotechnics, Transmissions, Temporalities
3. A Comparative Study: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Winter Dreams Through Marxist Literary Criticism
4. Let the Timid Speak: The Woman Nature Metaphor in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat”
5. Critical_Lenses_for_1920s_Literature

Focus
Post World War II literature, social conformity, disillusionment, and pressure surrounding success and identity, using Death of a Salesman as a case study.

Required Reading

1. Post World War II: Analysis of American Literature
2. An Anti-social Socialist: A Critical Reading of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
3. Arthur Miller's Death of A Salesman: A Harsh Confrontation between Dream and Reality
4. Handout: Salesman Critique or Confirmation

Focus
Postmodern narrative play, skepticism about truth, consumer culture, and the idea that American life contains competing voices rather than a single shared story.

Required Reading

1. Emilse B. Hidalgo, The Iconic and the Symbolic: The Consumer Society in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Andy Warhol’s Serigraphies
2. Sangeetha Priya J., Exposure of Artifices of Fiction in John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse
3. Maria Bose, Branding Counterculture in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
4. Handout: Art_Simulation_Brands
   Primary texts required this week: Don DeLillo, White Noise; John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”; Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49