Knowledge and understanding of Transatlantic interaction in American literary history
Insight into and the ability to analyze the role of Transatlantic “othering” in identity- formation in American literature.
The ability to employ relevant concepts from diverse disciplines in examining literary texts in social, cultural, and historical context.
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Literary critic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury has argued that the development of American literature can only be properly understood as an expression of the intensive transatlantic exchanges during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course explores these “Transatlantic mythologies, ” as Bradbury calls them, by studying the various ways in which Europe is represented in the great tradition of American literary expression. As transatlantic literature adopts perspectives from the other side and negotiates and explores the mental space in between, it also serves to construct and define national, ethnic, and individual identities in opposition to an imagined other. This course will examine these transatlantic encounters in American literature by studying works from the 17th century to the present, with a particular focus on the 19th and 20th centuries. Primary texts will be drawn from the mainstream tradition of canonical American literature and/or from the rich body of ethnic (immigrant) literature in which Europe inevitably looms large.
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