This course will provide an overview of American Culture based on written texts from the Colonial Period to the contemporary scene. Material will be drawn from a variety of genres, among them poetry, slave narrative, captivity narrative, autobiography, novel, romance, essay, and short story.
The text for this course is The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Sixth edition, which is available at the Dyonon.
In addition, we will be reading three full-length novels: Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (also available at the Dyonon) Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (the full text included in the Norton anthology), and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.