American Literature, 1800-2000
Taught by:
About the course
This course is designed to prepare the student for college-level literary analysis and writing. The work will involve close reading and discussion of chronological selections from American works, including novels, plays, poems, short stories, and essays. Students will be assigned a weekly pre-recorded lecture, required reading, and relevant reading questions for class discussion. Class discussion will also include a brief grammar review. Two 500-word essays are assigned per quarter. Grades are given for first and final drafts and require one teacher conference per essay.
By the time the student completes this course, he will be able to analyze literary devices and techniques and communicate how they contribute to the overall meaning of the work. The goals of the course are to develop increasingly independent readers with apt strategies for reading various texts and to develop competent, persuasive writers.
Course Objectives:
- Move effectively through the stages of the writing process, with careful attention to inquiry and research, drafting, revising, editing, and review.
- Learn and master the revision process using peer review and teacher conferences.
- Implement clear organization and development, as well as clear and varied sentence structure, in both informal and formal writing.
- Demonstrate the ability to cite primary and secondary sources using MLA documentation standards.
- Consider each work’s structure, style, theme, and purpose.
- Recognize the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism, and tone.
Texts:
- Billy Budd and selections from Typee by Herman Melville
- Short stories by Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Wordsworth
- Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau
- Huckleberry Finn and The Damned Human Race by Mark Twain
- Selections from Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
- Short stories by Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, and Sarah Orne Jewett
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Short stories by Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
- A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean
- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy