CLASSICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

Catalog description

The study of great American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Henry James, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, and Flannery O’Connor. Topics may include the tension in the American experience between religious and commercial culture in early America, the development of a democratic sensibility, the emergence of American individualism, the role of Nature in the American Imagination, American Transcendentalism and its dissidents, Realism and Regionalism, Modernist literature a nd the emergence of secular modernity, the Southern literary renaissance, and Postmodern literature. Special attention may be paid to the role of Catholicism in the American literary tradition. (4 credit s) LITR 245 CLASSICS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE The study of major great writers in the English literary tradition, such as William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf. Topics may include the history of the development of the English language, the effect of the Reformation in England, 18 th Century Neoclassicism, Romanticism and the emergence of modern individualism, the rise of the Realist novel, the Gothic, and the literary changes due to Modernism and World War I.