“The real war will never get in the books,” Walt Whitman once wrote. And yet few topics have received as extensive a treatment by American literature as the Civil War. In this course we will analyze 19th and 20th-century literary works on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction in an attempt to address questions about the relationship between the literary and the political. Is literature shaped by political debates, and does it shape them in turn? What literary tools are available to writers who are politically committed, and which of these tools is most ethical or effective? How do writers give shape to a chaotic and traumatic historical event, and to what political purposes? How is the American literary canon itself shaped by political considerations?

Requirements: short writing assignments, final exam. Students who wish to enroll in this course are required to attend film screenings in the second half of the semester.

Texts include: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave; Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind.