ENG 410: The American Novel | Dr. Kristen Doyle Highland | MW 12:30- 1:45 LAN 109
Office Hours: MW, 3:30 – 5pm and by appointment | khighland@aus.edu
In popular films and narratives, America is a conceptual and physical space of reinvention. Here it is promised, the individual can overcome historical, familial, and cultural constraints to remake him or herself. The act of reinvention is a common and complex trope in American literature. On the one hand, it highlights the primacy of the individual, the fluidity of identity categories, and the possibility of transgressing social and cultural boundaries. At the same time, the trope of reinvention reveals an anxiety over this very fluidity. How do we know each other? How do we trust each other? Is there a line between reinvention and its dark sides – deception and imposture? Further, these promises (and their anxieties) extend beyond the individual to larger intersecting categories of racial, class, gender, and national identity.
To unpack this complexity, this course focuses on frauds, fakes, and fictions of identity in American novels. As a form tied to exploring and engaging issues of subjectivity and experience, the American novel offers valuable insights into the literary and social contexts of identity formation and boundary crossing. We will examine novels across multiple historical periods and genres, including the 18th-century Gothic novel, 20th-century realism, and 21st-century speculative fiction in order to ask how the novel and its diverse genres challenge our understandings of ourselves, each other, and our relationships to society.
We will be reading the following novels, along with additional primary and secondary sources:
- Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale. Norton Critical Edition. ISBN: 978-0393932539
- Nella Larsen, Passing. Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0142437278.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Penguin Classics. ISBN: 9780241341469
- Louisa Hall, Speak. Orbit. ISBN: 978-0356506098
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
| Demonstrate an understanding of the evolution and interrelationships of significant literary genres and movements including social and psychological realism, naturalism, modernism, magic realism, fantasy and science fiction within American literature |
| Analyze the political, cultural and social conditions to which particular novels were responding |
| Develop an understanding of significant critical and theoretical approaches primarily from the new critical, feminist, and cultural perspectives |
| Develop a 3500-word (minimum) research paper using primary and secondary sources to support an argument answering a critical or interpretive question about one (or more) of the novels in relation to the American social, political and cultural landscape |