Handbook

This course offers a wide-ranging survey of American fiction and poetry. Our texts will be drawn from a range of historical periods, but we will pay especially close attention to the American century—the twentieth—and its aftermath. How, we will ask, are the defining fault-lines and contradictions of contemporary American society reflected in its literature? How have American writers responded to the historical vectors that shaped America’s present and what handle can novels, short stories, poems and other literary forms give us on the defining tensions of the American experiment? We will read classic works from the American canon alongside the best contemporary writing in order both to navigate a path through the complex literary history of the United States and construct an imaginary portrait of the world's most powerful nation.