This survey course is designed to provide a thorough overview of a pretty broad and complicated landscape. To put this overview in perspective, there are less than twenty weeks to make sense of 140 year's worth of incredible literature. Considering the formidable size and diversity of the American population, this is no easy task.

It's important to know that this version of English 263 carries an Ethnic Studies, or ES, designation. This course achieves that designation by including an added focus on African-American literature. What does this mean for the course?

First, this course's heartbeat remains a traditional, American Literature survey. The ES designation is not about political agendas or replacing canonical writers with non-white writers. To the contrary, the traditional canon is an essential element of this course, and the syllabus includes writers like Mark Twain, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway. The goal is to juxtapose their work with African-American writing, and actively pursue discussions arising from the similarities, differences, and variations that may present themselves.

Race will frequently be a focal point of study and discussion. Students will be discussing how race is represented in the works that they read. For example, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the semester's first novel, and race assumes a crucial, if not dominant role in that text. W.E.B. Dubois, one of America's preeminent thinkers, said “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” In many ways, we as a class are going to explore and test Dubois' assertion.

By placing an added focus on African-American writers and issues of race, a specific “lens” is applied to this course. Thus, the parameters for this vision are defined. This can be the most effective way to approach American literature. As a whole, American literature is too massive to magically be “taken in” by a general method of study. For example, America has so many writers and publishes so many books, it would be impossible to read, in a semester, the works published in the year 2004. The best way to enter into American literature is by applying a series of lenses. Race may be our focus now, but beyond this class, students may approach the works of other ethnic groups, like Chinese-Americans. Students might apply a broader, economic lens to their reading, and subsequently spend a lot of time reading John Steinbeck and Theodore Dreiser. Maybe nature writing interests a student, and that lens will lead them down entirely different trails. By narrowing their focus students are actually expanding their potential for learning.

All of that said, students will also be discussing the important, basic elements of American literature: realism, naturalism, modernism, regionalism, etc.