English 132

American Novel

Section	Semester	Instructor	Time	Location	Course Areas
	Fall 2009	Lee, Steven Sunwoo	MWF 3-4	60 Evans	American Literature



Book List

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850); Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); Henry James, Daisy Miller (1878); Abraham Cahan, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896); Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900); W.E.B. DuBois, Dark Princess (1928); Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust (1939); Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957); Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (1980); Toni Morrison, A Mercy (2008); separate course reader: short works by Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos

Description

Rather than define a canon, this survey will trace how the novel has contributed to nation-formation in the U.S. How has the novel helped to define what it means to be American, starting from the country’s fledgling days as an outpost of Europe? To what extent has the novel been able to incorporate the diversity of American experiences—and to what extent has it promoted exclusions of race, gender, and class? What are the limitations of both novel and nation—and how has the American novel expressed these limitations?

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