123210 VO Literatures in English (2011W)

The course is conceptualized as an introductory lecture series to American literature from the Early Republic to the Modern Era. It will start by looking at the first major attempts to formulate a unique ‘American’ consciousness during the American Revolution Hector de Crevecoeur’s famous question ‘What then is the American, this new man?’ (famously asked in his ‘Letters from an American Farmer’ from 1782) has since led to a number of literary discourses either manifesting or challenging the idea of ‘American Exceptionalism.’ This lecture course will explore a number of cultural images and self-concepts developed in American writing since the Revolutionary Era. To what extent have notions such as the ‘American Dream’ and the ‘Frontier’ permeated canonized literary works? The writing of American literature, in a way, also implies the writing of America itself. In writing about America, representative authors have also attempted to negotiate the underlying promises, challenges and limits of American society. Among others, we will discuss texts by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Frank Norris, and Ernest Hemingway.