Survey of American Literature II

Catalog description

In the first chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Huck, who’s a street kid by birth and experience, complains about how his new guardian, the Widow Douglas, tries to “sivilize” him. Among the things he doesn’t like is the food she serves him because “everything was cooked by itself.” Huck is used to a different way of cooking: “In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.” But Huck’s way of cooking is also a metaphor for American literature in which, like all of American culture, “things get mixed up.” This course will survey American Literature from the age of Realism in which Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn through the shocks of the Modernist era in the first half of the twentieth century and into a more pluralist and diverse twenty-first century. Things will indeed “get mixed up,” as American writers experiment wildly with different forms and voices and as we embrace more deeply the rich diversity of American culture and identities. Prerequisite: none. Credit: 4. (Offered every odd fall, alternating in this rotation with ENG 225.)