Unit 1: The Colonial Period
Readings: Oral folklore of indigenous Americans, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Jonathon Edwards
Focus: oral tradition, “The American Dream,” Puritanism, individuality vs. collectivism, work ethic, plain/ornate style, determinism, Utopia/American Eden
Unit 2: The New Nation
Readings: Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson
Focus: Neoclassicism, quest for freedom and justice, power and politics, rhetoric
Unit 3: American Individualism
Readings: Bryant, Washington Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Last of the Mohicans (film) and Rebel without a Cause (film)
Focus: Romanticism, Transcendentalism, search for self, individual vs. society, spiritualism vs. materialism, nature
Unit 4: Civil War
Readings: Kindred by Octavia Butler, Frederick Douglass, Whitman, primary sources and journals
Focus: realism, search for values, quest for justice, individualism vs. collectivism, search for self
Unit 5: Changing America in the 19th Century
Readings: Spoon River Anthology, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Mark Twain, Jack London, Kate Chopin
Focus: urban vs. rural, realism, naturalism, local color, progress/poverty, quest for justice, determinism
Unit 6: Alienation and Conflict in the early 20th Century
Readings: Lesson Before Dying by Earnest Gaines, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, short works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck, excerpts from American Mosaic
Focus: immigrant experience, search for self/values, quest for justice, The Great Depression, capitalism, Lost Generation, spiritualism vs. materialism, individualism vs. collectivism
Unit 7: Modern American Literature
Readings: if time allows Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, representative works of modern poetry and non-fiction to be determined by interest
Focus: The Beat Generation, Modernism and Post-Modernism, “The American Dream”
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