Course Syllabus

ENGL 2510 American Literature I

Course Description

This course focuses on the development of ideas, movements, and genres in American literature spanning periods including exploration and settlement through to Romanticism and Transcendentalism, as illustrated through representative texts.

Justification

A lower division survey of American literature is standard at most colleges and universities. This course will transfer as general education, elective, or major credit. It fulfills general education credit within the Humanities category (HU) and a major requirement for English majors.

General Education Outcomes

1. A student who completes the GE curriculum has a fundamental knowledge of human cultures and the natural world. Students will be able to examine the relationships between human cultures and the natural world in that this literature is strongly characterized by the desires and efforts of various stakeholders and communities to claim and shape relationships with these regions and places. Students will be able to recognize and enjoy the value of literary works for intellectual as well as aesthetic reasons.
2. A student who completes the GE curriculum can read and research effectively within disciplines. Students will be able to read a variety of primary texts and may research surrounding historical context through secondary source material.
3. A student who completes the GE curriculum can draw from multiple disciplines to address complex problems. Students will use insights from history, geography, ecology, fine arts, current events, and/or other relevant fields and areas in order to better contextualize, understand, and respond to works of early American literature.
4. A student who completes the GE curriculum can reason analytically, critically, and creatively. Students will be able to critically analyze, and aesthetically evaluate rhetorical and stylistic choices authors make, in order to understand and interpret the literature in context.

General Education Knowledge Area Outcomes

1. Students will be able to closely read a variety of modes and genres of texts and use this reading as the basis for analysis that reflects on the ongoing relevance of these texts. Students will be able to closely read a variety of modes and genres of texts and use this reading as the basis for analysis that reflects on the ongoing relevance of these texts.
2. EXPLAIN: Explain how humanities artifacts take on meaning within networks or systems (such as languages, cultures, values, and worldviews) that account for the complexities and uncertainties of the human condition. Students will carefully examine and clearly articulate how these texts and other artifacts generate meaning with various audiences, both on their own, and dialectically in relation to others such artifacts.
3. ANALYZE: Analyze humanities artifacts according to humanities methodologies, such as a close analysis, questioning, reasoning, interpretation, and critical thinking. Students will be able to respond to existing arguments, and create new, original ones, wherein students may demonstrate their understanding of appropriate terms and concepts, experiment with and apply certain critical lenses and frameworks for critical analysis.
4. COMPARE AND CONTRAST: Compare and contrast diverse humanistic perspectives across cultures, communities, and/or time periods to explain how people make meaning of their lives. Students will deepen their understanding of various cultural and intellectual traditions evident and/or exemplified in literature, gaining insight into varieties of difference and pluralism across the Americas and gaining greater perspective consciousness regarding their own particular experience, positionality, and/or worldview.
5. APPLY: Using humanities perspectives, reflect on big questions related to aesthetics, values, meaning, and ethics and how those apply to their own lives.  In responding to representative American literary texts, students will be able to evaluate, appreciate, engage with, and challenge big questions from respective contemporary periods, as well as those of students’ own.

Student Learning Outcomes

Course Content

English 2510 covers a selection of major works of American literature across various modes and genres that include Native American oral and written traditions; literatures of exploration, conquest, and settlement; religious/theological and colonial writings; literatures of revolution and nation building; transatlantic discourses of slavery and abolition; field reports and travel writing; and Romanticism and Transcendentalism. While emphasis is on Anglophone literatures of North America, readings may also extend to some works in translation, as well as adjacent geographies, as appropriate to various periods framing early America. The course will focus on close reading, literary conventions, historical influences, textual and contextual analysis, interpretation, synthesis, critical thinking, and writing.