American Literature and Its Appearances

Catalog description

In 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared America to be “a poem in our eyes” that “will not wait long for metres,” giving voice to the idea—still reverberating today—that there is something poetic about the idea of America. In another of his essays, to this end, he calls for American writers to establish “an original relation to the universe” through “a poetry … of insight and not tradition.” Taken together, Emerson’s lines describe a vision for American literature in which American writers not only find new and "American" ways of writing literature but, furthermore, use literature to inspire new and more ethical ways of living in the so-called “New World.” But what place is there in American literature for those who suffered and continue to suffer from the New World project to speak to the full reality of America’s poetic ideals? This course introduces students to major figures in the American literary tradition: some who are blinded by America’s surface appearance and some who do everything in their literary power to address this blindness. Students in this course will consistently ask what makes a work of literature “American,” considering how different writers called “American” have used literature as a means of describing how America appears from their perspective as well as how America ought to be. Students who complete this course will have the tools to write fluently about different figures and genres in American literature as well as the space and time to compare representative works of American literature to the America that appears in their own eyes.