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ENGL 3611

Imagining America: Beginnings to Modernism

0.5 credits · Undergraduate

Fall 2020

Topics

  • Unit One: Narratives of Origin
  • The Iroquois Creation Story (N A33–35)
  • Christopher Columbus letters (N A45–53)
  • “First Encounters: Early European Encounters of Native America” (N A80–
  • Excerpt from John Smith, The General History of Virginia, New England
  • and the Summer Isles (N A111–122)
  • Unit Two: The Puritan Imagination
  • William Bradford, excerpt from Of Plymouth Plantation (N A129–167)
  • Thomas Morton, excerpt from New English Canaan (“The Incident at
  • Merry Mount”) (N A169–72)
  • Anne Bradstreet, selected poems (N A218–46)
  • Unit Three: What is an American?
  • American Farmer (N A636–45)
  • Excerpt from Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, Part Two, (N A515–30)
  • Phyllis Wheatley, selected poems (N A788–800)
  • Unit Four: Imagining American History
  • Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (N A1004–15))
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The -Pole of Merry-Mount” (N B361–368))
  • James Fenimore Cooper, “Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook” (N B80–86))
  • Unit Five: American Individualisms
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (N B237–53)
  • Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener” (N B1470–96)
  • Unit Six: Imagining Freedom
  • Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (N B1164–1229)
  • Unit Seven: Halloween Special: American Nightmares

Readings

  • Required: Nina Baym and Robert Levine, eds., Norton Anthology of American Literature, 9th Edition, vols. A and B. Norton, 2017.
  • Required: Willa Cather, My Ántonia. Norton, 2015 [1918].
  • Required: Hannah ENGL-3611-FA/FAO 3 OF 9
Sources