Course Overview

Course Overview

Course Overview:

English 11H is a chronological and thematic study of American Literature.  We will focus on the literary movements of Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Realism, Naturalism, and Modernism as we explore the works of Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Twain, Douglass, Chopin, Hurston, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Miller, Wilson, and more.  We will write extensively, including informal pieces in group work, personal reflections, and analytical essays, and we will find intersections between the course readings and our own lives.  We will also work closely with secondary sources—articles of literary criticism—in order to deepen our own understanding of texts and actively engage in an ongoing intellectual dialogue with critics.

Course Essential Questions:

Let’s approach American Literature through the lens of overlapping questions, ones that repeat and evolve and—I hope—compel and inspire deep thinking.  This year we will be focusing our discussions and writing around the following questions.  Please reread these questions frequently; we will be revisiting them throughout the year.

Overarching Questions (adapted from the American Passages film series at Learner.org)

• What is an American?

• What is American Literature?

• How do place and time shape an author’s works and our understanding of them?

• What characteristics of a literary work have made it influential over time?

• How are American myths created, challenged, and re-imagined through this literature?

Essential Questions

• What values are distinctly American and how are they revealed in literature?  How do these values shape the immigrant experience and the reaction to immigrants?

• How do we reconcile the American emphasis on individualism with a society’s need for conformity?

• If America was an Eden, what went wrong?

• What is the American dream?  How is it distinct from the dreams that other cultures may have for themselves?

• How do stories and memories from our pasts shape our presents and visions for our futures?

• How has the land, the American wilderness, defined our sense of self?

• How is our culture distinctly American?

• How do we deal with the tension/conflict between illusion and reality as themes in our literature?

• How has the experience of women in America been presented in our literature?

• How have race, class, and gender in America been presented in our literature?