Journalism and American Literature

Catalog description

This course will survey the rich history of American journalists who have either produced creative works or who have relied upon literary techniques in their journalistic endeavors. Beginning with Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, the course will move through the revolutionary period of essayists and pamphleteers, proceed to the nineteenth century and the romantic writings of political activists like Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, and the realist and naturalist fictions of writers like Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The course will end by surveying the works of black and white writers of the early twentieth century--W.E.B. Dubois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemmingway, and H.L. Menken--who negotiate their critiques of modern American culture and political life both as journalists and creative writers. Throughout the course, we will be exploring the relationship between the world of the American journalist and his or her subsequent influences upon American literature.