Several of the works in this course include characters struggling to either live by a set of standards created for them by society or by their own internal guidelines.
Choose two characters from the works on the mandatory reading list for this course (they must come from different works).
Compare and contrast these characters, addressing issues of race, gender, and class as applicable.
Explore how these characters embody what it means to be an American. Make sure to support your explanation with examples from the text.
Reading List
Colonial & Early National Period –
James Fenimore Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans
Mary Rowlandson: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
Johnathan Edward: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
Thomas Paine: Common Sense
Romantic & Dark Romantic Period –
Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving: Rip Van Winkle
Washington Irving: The Devil and Tom Walker
Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe: The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Transcendentalism Period –
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Self Reliance
Henry David Thoreau: Walden
Henry David Thoreau: Civil Disobedience
Walt Whitman: Song of Myself
Realism in American Literature –
Frederick Douglass: A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Modernist Prose in American Literature –
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men
Modernist Poetry in American Literature –
T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Harlem Renaissance – Please read the following:
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
The Contemporary Period –
Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie
Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
Richard Wright: Black Boy
J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street
