Featuring discussions of the transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism; Alexander Pope's "Windsor-Forest"; pastoralism; the graveyard school; fancy and imagination; Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"; Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads; William Cullen Bryant; and the Doppelgänger.

1. Introduction
2. Moby-Dick (I)
3. The Literature of Settlement
4. American Puritanism (I)
5. American Puritanism (II)
6. American Puritanism (III)
7. American Neoclassicism
8. Edwards and the Transition to Enlightenment
9. The American Enlightenment
10. American Gothic (I)
11. American Gothic (II)
12. American Gothic (III)
13. American Transcendentalism (I)
14. American Transcendentalism (II)
15. American Transcendentalism (III)
16. American Transcendentalism (IV)
17. American Transcendentalism (V)
18. Frederick Douglass
19. Uncle Tom's Cabin (I)
20. Uncle Tom's Cabin (II)
21. Nathaniel Hawthorne (I)
22. Nathaniel Hawthorne (II)
23. Moby-Dick (II)
24. Moby-Dick (III)
25. Moby-Dick (IV)
26. Moby-Dick (V)

This course is a survey of American literature and literary history, from the early colonial period to the eve of the Civil War. Our goal will be to acquire a grasp of the canon of American literature as it is typically conceived and the various logics behind its construction.

Topics to be considered include: the rise of “literature” as a discipline unto itself; the meaning of American individualism; the conflict between liberty and equality in American social thought; the mythology of American exceptionalism; the relation between history and cultural mythology; the dialectic of freedom and slavery in American rhetoric; the American obsession with race; the ideology of domesticity and its link to the sentimental; the aesthetics of American romance; the role of biography in literary criticism and historiography; the nature of the “American Renaissance”; what it means to say “NO in thunder!” and why so many American writers seem to say it; deliberative democracy and cosmopolitanism.

View the official course website for a list of readings used for this course: http://www.nyu.edu/academics/open-education/coursesnew/ameri...