English 250:
Introduction to American Literature

Course Introduction

Scope of the Course

"A Sampler of American Literature" would actually be a more accurate title for this course. While "sampler" doesn't have the dignity of "introduction," it probably signifies more truly the encounter with various works of American literature that this course provides. The course does not concentrate on large-scale literary, intellectual, and social tendencies of American culture spanning several eras. Rather, it looks at the details of the particular literary works assigned. You will be made primarily responsible for acquiring and demonstrating a close, intelligent familiarity with the novels, stories, essays, sermons, and memoirs on our reading list. In my opinion, the most important feature of this course is the reading you will do in the literary works assigned. Each literary work that you read makes you a little larger intellectually, and a little better equipped to read something else. When you've read the pieces assigned for this course, you will have assimilated into your working intelligence a number of writings with lasting significance.

The course material and the accompanying student handbook contain all the information you will need to complete the course, including lessons, assignments, and administrative information.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the discussion forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask me a question or preferably post your question on the discussion forum. I will reply on the same forum.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

 

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you will be able to

• identify the distinguishing characteristics of several American authors;
• compare themes and events between two or more stories assigned for the course;
• analyze how these elements relate to the meaning of the story in which they figure and what larger issues they relate to in their context;
• chart the beginning of your literary education that builds story by story, poem by poem, author by author; and
• express, in writing, some of your reactions to the things you have read, and to hone and polish your ideas into relatively finished form.

Instructor's Introduction

American literature. If we mean by that term everything written in the last several hundred years in the territory bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans on the east and west and Canada and Mexico on the north and south, it is an incalculably large and various body of writing. Even if we take American literature to mean only those works written in English with a serious or considered artistic intent (excluding thereby the ephemeral writing of people's everyday lives), the category would still contain literally millions of verbal compositions. So a course that proposes to introduce its students to American literature had best take a modest or humble stance, given the enormity and complexity of the subject to which it claims to be an introduction.

The term "introduction" itself may not be the most appropriate. To introduce something to people is to show it to them for the first time. But virtually everyone who takes this course will have already had some sort of introduction—however formally or informally—to American literature in most of its various senses.

Our sampler includes works embodying several of the "isms" or literary fashions that figure importantly in most American literary histories: Puritanism, rationalism, Gothic romanticism, transcendentalism, realism, naturalism, and modernism. The introduction of your anthology offers some ideas about what these "isms" mean. Use it and table I.1 in this introduction as a resource for understanding how the authors' writings fall into one or more of these categories.

About the Readings

In this course, you will be asked to read an assortment of prose works by American authors. They range historically from Alice Walker, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck in the twentieth century to Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century.

Also, you will explore two full-length novels—Steinbeck's East of Eden and Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables—and a number of shorter pieces, all found in the anthology The American Tradition in Literature. I assign this particular anthology because it is a good, standard compilation of significant American writing, presented with sufficient but not excessive scholarly apparatus (i.e., footnotes and introductions). You will almost certainly need to buy this anthology in order to have access to all the assigned readings. If, however, you want to use an edition of East of Eden or The House of the Seven Gables other than those listed at the head of this introduction, please feel free to do so.

Focus on the Literary Differences

Although all the writers on our reading list have in common the fact that they are all Americans, the substance of the course itself has more to do with differences than with similarities. Every writer we take up in this course has a distinctive voice, point of view, values, way of thinking, and way of writing. In sum, it is the distinguishing qualities that make an author unique that give life to a course like this one. As you move from the tense, poetic picture of James Baldwin's Harlem, to the earthy tale of Faulkner's Mississippi village, to Steinbeck's rolling saga of California's Salinas Valley, and so forth, you will inevitably be struck by how different life looks to these authors, what different parts of reality each focuses on, and what different colorations their imaginations give to what they see. My advice, here and throughout the course, is appreciate the differences. They will be many, vivid, and illuminating.

The "Isms" of American Literary History

Puritanism (Jonathan Edwards)

A profoundly religious school of thought, Puritanism sees God as the be-all and end-all of human thought, the Bible as the infallible Word of God. To the Puritan, all people are born in sin and need the atoning blood of Christ if they are to be saved. All human activity—including literature— should foster this end.

Rationalism (Benjamin Franklin)

Fundamentally scientific and empirical in its orientation, rationalism was the philosophy of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. Experience is its highest authority, rather than Divine Revelation. In politics, the rationalists were progressives and democrats, placing ultimate trust in the power of human reason to solve all social, practical, and political problems.

Gothic Romanticism (Edgar Allen Poe)

A reaction against both rationalism and Puritanism, romanticism seeks to plumb the depths of the human spirit by means of intuition and the imagination. Gothic romanticism is concerned primarily with the darker aspects of the psyche—madness, obsession, the fragmentation of the self. It tends to be both anti-political and anti-religious, in the conventional sense of those terms.

Transcendentalism (Henry David Thoreau)

A parallel to Gothic romanticism, transcendentalism is the sunny, optimistic side of the romantic tendency. To the transcendentalist, the psyche of the soul is part and particle of God; ultimate spiritual fulfillment is to be found by following the inmost promptings of the individual soul. The transcendentalist finds as much to admire in the Eastern religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) of the cultivation of the spirit as in traditional Christianity.

Realism (Mark Twain and William Dean Howells)

A literary reaction against what it saw as the excess and delusions of the romantics, realism seeks to view humans not as gods or demons, not as damned sinners or reasoning machines, but as ordinary-sized humans. Realistic literature tends to focus on homely situations, the "facts of life" accessible to the reporter, the historian, the student of society.

Naturalism (Stephen Crane and Jack London)

Naturalism takes the down-scaling tendency of realism a step farther, and to picture humans as small, helpless beings in the grip of forces far beyond their control—forces of biology (sex, hunger, disease, and death) and society (economics, politics, war). To the pessimistic naturalists, the freedom of the human will is a delusion, and life is inherently a losing proposition.

Modernism (Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck)

A complex of movements emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernism has roots in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (famous for saying "God is dead"), the sociology of Karl Marx (human history is the record of conflict among economic classes) and the psychology of Sigmund Freud (the psyche explained in terms of primal energies, basically sexual in nature). The vast, senseless carnage of World War I prompted modernists to a wide variety of literary experimentation, attempting to define a viable position for the self in social and philosophical predicaments of many kinds.

Organization of the Course

This course is arranged in nine lessons. For Lessons One through Eight, I will provide objectives and some introductory and background information; and I will point out certain aspects of the reading assignment that I believe will repay close attention. (Lesson Nine prepares you for the final examination.) Often I will propose questions for you to think about as you read, questions that, in my experience, can lead you to some interesting features of the work. At the end of my commentary I provide you with a few practice questions and suggestions that will help you prepare for the final exam. These are generally in the section, "Lesson Strategy and Practice Exercise." Finally, at the conclusion of each lesson is a writing assignment—two or three essay topics from which to choose. You will be asked to write a short paper—two or three pages—for each of Lessons One through Eight.

Your Writing Assignments

Here's what I recommend. For each lesson, begin by reading through the course material for that assignment, including the lesson objectives and essay topics. Then (for those reading assignments from The American Tradition in Literature) read the introduction in the anthology. Next, as you complete the reading assignment, keep the essay topics in mind, underline passages that pertain to the topics, and make notes in the margin. Finally, reread the course material, thinking more particularly this time about which topic you want to write about. Of course, as you write your essay you'll go back over the literary work you are writing about, reexamining sections particularly relevant to your paper. Also be sure to keep the lesson objectives in mind as you shape your paper.

Table I.1—Course At a Glance

Lesson	Content	Assignments
Intro	Course Overview	Read course overview, instructor's expectations, and Distance Learning guidelines. Submit student information form with Assignment 1
One	African American Writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Alice Walker	Read the instructor's commentary, the featured short stories, and working through the practice exercise. Review the essay samples in Lesson Nine. Write and submit essay 1.
Two	Country-Bred American Modernists Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner	Read the instructor's commentary, the featured short stories, and work through the practice exercise. Write and submit essay 2.
Three	Myth, Morality, and Modernism John Steinbeck	Read the instructor's commentary, the featured novel, and work through the practice exercise. Write and submit essay 3.
Four	Age of Realism Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Stephen Crane, Jack London	Read the instructor's commentary, the featured short stories, and work through the practice exercise. Write and submit essay 4.
Five	Transcendentalism Henry David Thoreau	Read the instructor's commentary, the featured chapters and essay, and work through the practice exercise. Write and submit essay 5.
Six	Puritanism in a Romantic Age Nathaniel Hawthorne	Read the instructor's commentary, the featured novel, and work through the practice exercise. Write and submit essay 6.
Seven	Gothic Romanticism Edgar Allan Poe	Read the instructor's commentary, the featured short stories, and work through the practice exercise. Write and submit essay 7.
Eight	Eighteenth-Century Thinkers Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin	Read the instructor's commentary, the featured writings, and work through the practice exercise. Write and submit essay 7.
Nine	Review	Read the instructor's review information. Re-examine the sample essay and identification questions provided and review the assigned works. Take the final exam at a testing site or through your approved proctor.

Focus on the primary materials (i.e., the reading assignments). The topics I propose are intended to draw on your own reading of the primary material. You are of course free to do secondary reading if you wish (biography of the authors or published criticism or analysis of the writings), but it is not necessary for creditable handling of the essay topics.

Use of Secondary Resources

If you do use secondary sources for ideas in your essays, be sure to acknowledge them either in footnotes, as in the following example:

1. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (World Publishing Co.: New York and Cleveland, 1960), p. 29.

or in more informal reference in the body of your paper, as follows:

As Leslie Fiedler says in Love and Death in the American Novel, "Poe represents the artist as outcast or outsider, surrogate for all in himself that the common reader secretly regrets having to reject in the name of morality or success."

Again, I want to emphasize that secondary reading is not required or expected; you can satisfactorily do the writing assignments purely through your own thoughtful reactions to the assigned reading and the questions I've asked about it.

Use Your Imagination

When you tackle a writing assignment for this course, do not think of it as a challenge to guess what I, the instructor, would do if I were writing the paper. Take over the topic; make it your own. Look at it broadly, giving your imagination room to move in and out of it and around it. You need to find an idea about the topic that you can be interested in. When you do that, you can be sure that I, too, will find your ideas interesting and worthwhile.

Avoid Drifting from the Central Themes

When you write, keep the assigned reading in the foreground of your thinking. Your analysis should be deeply involved with the primary material—the story, the memoir, or the essay. Resist the temptation to let your mind drift off into purely subjective and abstract thoughts about God, humanity, love, hate, the individual, the community, and so on. Our first responsibility in this course is to examine what our particular authors say about such things, not what you or I may believe in our own philosophies.

Make Your Essay Have a Pointed, Clearly-Stated Central Thesis

There should be a focus to which everything you say in the paper contributes. The old formula applies here. Make clear from the start what you consider your main point to be, provide the evidence from the assignment that leads you to your conclusion, and explain your reasoning. If you conscientiously do that, your essays can hardly fail to be satisfying, both to you and to me.

Submitting Assignments

You should submit your assignments directly to me. Please see the "About Your Instructor" page on the course syllabus and the Student Handbook for more information on submitting assignments.

Please Submit Your Essays One at a Time

You will be better prepared for each assignment if you have had a chance to read and digest my comments on one essay before submitting the next. It is, however, perfectly appropriate for you to begin your reading and thinking on a lesson before receiving my comments on the preceding assignment. I will return comments on each paper to you as quickly as possible. If there are particular reasons why you feel you must submit more than one paper at a time, include a note to me explaining those reasons. Otherwise, the essays must be sent in singly.

Include Questions with Essay Submissions or Call My Voice Mail

If you have particular questions or comments to address to me outside the regular format of the assignments, please include them with your essay submissions. I will do my best to respond to them. You may also opt to take advantage of the voice mail system to ask questions.

The Final Exam

The final exam will be a two-hour, closed-book, proctored examination. It will consist of a single essay question and eight quotations for you to identify.

Essay Portion

The essay question will ask that you spend 45 to 60 minutes writing on a topic that takes in more than one of the readings assigned. The exam will give you two topics from which to choose. The following is an example of the sort of topic the essay question will pose:

Is it a good thing to belong to the community—the ordinary, workaday society within which one lives? Nathaniel Hawthorne and Benjamin Franklin, in their respective ways, suggest that it is good, and that one is better off relating naturally to and cooperating with one's fellow citizens. William Dean Howells and Henry David Thoreau, on the other hand, suggest that it is not, and that there are some serious moral drawbacks in "going along with the crowd." Choose one of these "pro-community" authors, and one of these "anti-community" authors, and describe and explain their contrasting viewpoints. According to your selected authors, what are the pros and cons of accepting full membership in the life of the community?

Identification Portion

The second part of the exam will present assorted quotations for you to identify and comment on, very briefly, in three or four sentences each. The quotations will be pivotal passages, crucial to the main idea or plot of the work from which they are taken. Consider the following example:

And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suffered her white arms to fall, and returned solemnly to her bed of Death. And as she breathed her last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips. I bent to them my ear and distinguished, again, the concluding words of the passage in Glanvill—"Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."

By the time you've done the readings for this course, you should have no difficulty recognizing that this is from Edgar Allan Poe's story "Ligeia," a spooky tale about a woman who refuses to stay dead, but returns to inhabit or possess the body of her husband's second wife. The idea that death is only a "weakness of the will," and that the determined soul can overcome it, is central to Poe's story. The quoted passage contains Ligeia's last words, before her body dies and her spirit launches its occult campaign to re-enter the world of the living.

The exam will ask you to provide no more information or interpretation than I've given in those few sentences.

Preparing for the Exam

When you finish each lesson, you should be sure you know who the main characters are in the stories or novel, and what happens to them. That is fundamental to any question that might appear on the exam, whether informational or interpretive. You should know the stories in the sense that, if people asked you, "What happens in this story? What's it about?," you could tell them.

Remember, before the final examination can be scheduled, all eight short essays must be completed, submitted, and returned to you. See Lesson Nine for more information on preparing for the examination.

Grading

Your grade in this course will be based on

• eight short essays (all weighted equally, worth 70 percent of the course grade)
• a final examination (30 percent of the course grade)

For many years, the University of Washington has used a numerical system of grade notation (4.0 for the best, 0.0 for failure, with all gradations available in between); I will put a number grade of this sort on each paper that you submit. The equivalences between these numbers and the old letter grades (A, B, C, D, E) are given in the "Grading" section of the Distance Learning Student Handbook.

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