ENGL 253 - Topics in American Literature

Semester Offered: Fall and Spring
1 unit(s)

The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing). Hiram Pérez-Piña, Blevin Shelnutt.

Topic for 2026/27a: Narratives of Passing. (Same as AFRS 253 and ANAS 253) The phrase “passing for white,” peculiar to American English, first appears in advertisements for the return of runaway slaves. Abolitionist fiction later adopts the phenomenon of racial passing (together with the figure of the “white slave”) as a major literary theme. African American writers such as William Wells Brown and William Craft incorporated stories of passing in their antislavery writing and the theme continued to enjoy great currency in African American literature in the postbellum era as well as during the Harlem Renaissance. In this class, we examine the prevalence of this theme in African American literature of these periods, the possible reasons for the waning interest in this theme following the Harlem Renaissance, and its reemergence in recent decades. In order to begin to understand the role of passing in the American imagination, we look to examples of passing and the treatment of miscegenation across literature, film, and the law. We consider the qualities that characterize what Valerie Smith identifies as the “classic passing narrative” and determine how each of the texts we examine conforms to, reinvents, and/or writes against that classic narrative. Some of the themes considered include betrayal, secrecy, lying, masquerade, visibility/invisibility, and memory. We also examine how the literature of passing challenges or redefines notions of family, American mobility and success, and the convention of the “self-made man.” Gender provides a central focus from the start, keeping in mind how the trope of the “tragic mulatto” much more frequently casts a mulatta as protagonist. We consider too how the sentimental novel and melodramatic mode historically have been directed toward audiences of women (often white women specifically). Although much of the syllabus is devoted to African American literary heritage, we also look to Asian American and Native American literature on miscegenation. Native American writing in particular provides a radically different perspective on American racialism and what we might term an American “blood symbolic.” Hiram Pérez-Piña.

Topic for 2026/27b: Popular Women Writers and the Work of Art. (Same as GNCS 253 and WFQS 253) Women wrote much of the bestselling literature of the nineteenth century, but popular works by American women of the period frequently get overlooked in the literature classroom. This course considers why that has been the case and what we gain by taking seriously nineteenth-century American women’s writing, in its myriad forms. Reading works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, we examine how authors such as Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Frances Harper, Louisa May Alcott, and Sui Sin Far successfully navigated an expanding literary marketplace and drew power as well as artistic inspiration from the challenges they faced to publish their writing in print—and get paid for it. We attend especially to how authors formulate reflexive artfulness by drawing attention to the economic circumstances of their writing, whether cultivating authorial personas as marketable brands, channeling the renown of celebrity authors and bestselling texts, or embracing the periodical format’s intensifying association with mass production. Blevin Shelnutt.

This course satisfies the REGS requirement for the English major.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS