ENGL 12001 - Imagining America

Course Credit: 1
(CMLT)
Many writers of novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and theatre are preoccupied with shifting ideas of Americaness and of the American experience as seen by the diverse cultural groups that make up the country. In this introductory English course, we will compare and contrast clever descriptions of America’s landscape and promises related by people of a wide variety of races and ethnicities, socioeconomic classes, and genders. We will ask ourselves questions about the changing nature and form of the American dream, the emergence of a multicultural community, and the role of literature in creating a unified narrative of national identity. Selected texts by authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Weldon Johnson, Walt Whitman, Arthur Miller, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Murkerjee, Lorraine Hansberry, Sandra Cisneros, or Paule Marshall will be central to our evolving definition of what it means to be American in crucial period of national transformation, including the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, the age of Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s, and post-Civil Rights. Annually. [AH, W]