🗽 FA2024 Course: ENGL2007: American Literature Survey I

Course Description: In this course, students will examine major works and ideas in American literature from 1776-1865. Centered on themes reimagined by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 musical Hamilton, we will explore questions of revolution, race, freedom, and equality. Through reading novels, short stories, poetry, letters, and essays by important figures (both “canon” figures as well as marginalized voices) we will consider how authors from this time period sought to answer these questions, and, most importantly, how we continue to “revise” this time period and its relevant issues. 

Reading List: Bradely, Adam. Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop. | Miranda, Lin-Manuel. Hamilton: An American Musical. | Selected poetry of Phillis Wheatley. | Sansay, Leonora. Secret History. | Anonymous. Theresa; A Haytien Tale. | Irving, Washington. “Sleepy Hollow.” | Selected stories and poems of Edgar Allan Poe. | Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “Minister’s Black Veil” and "The Birth-Mark." | Douglass Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. | Selections from Frances Harper. | Selection of Dickinson Poems. | Whitman, Walt. Selections from Leaves of Grass. | Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. |  Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno. | Tarantino, Quention. The Hateful Eight.