American Literature introduces students to influential literary works from the American Revolution to the present. Students will consider the role of literature in shaping and responding to the history and ideology of the United States. The course also examines the relationship between American literature and other forms of cultural production in the United States. Students learn to use different types of literary theory to contextualize their interpretations of these literary and cultural texts. Students demonstrate their understanding of the aesthetic works and critical concepts of the course by composing thesis-driven essays that analyze specific works of literature from a theoretical perspective. Your coursework will include graded weekly forum posts, two formal essays, and two short tests.
While this class is comparable in scope and structure to most other college level American Literature courses across the country, this one has been designed specifically for you, the students of Labouré College. The readings have been selected with an eye to the identity of the college and your future careers as health professionals. So while we study literary genres, forms, theories, and continually practice analyzing literature and crafting persuasive interpretations of readings, our conversation will center on literature that represents issues of health, illness, caregiving, physiology, medical research, ethics, and social equality.
For example, the semester will begin with 19th century texts by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne that ask powerful questions about patriarchy and gender by representing women undergoing treatment, experimentation, and even abuse at the hands of male doctors, scientists, and scholars. Radium Girls, a play that is optional but encouraged reading for Summer semesters, dramatizes the true story of working-class factory girls poisoned by Radium at exactly the same time that Radium was promoted as a miracle cure for cancer—and their struggle for media recognition, medical care, and legal vindication.
Gender will remain important, but the texts on the syllabus examine how these representations intersect with other diverse American identities. For example, the novella Monster uses the story of an African-American burn victim to expose the problems of segregation and discrimination lurking in an all-American town. Later in the semester, Ernest Gaines’ short story “Bloodline” explores competing visions of America by showing how racism attempts to separate genetic inheritances and family roots, or “bloodline,” from fair legal inheritances and political equality. And a poetry unit centered on Rafael Campo will reveal how his writing draws on his life as a Latino, a social advocate, and a practicing physician in Boston. We’ll also read poetry by Danielle Legros Georges, the Haitian born writer who became the poet laureate of Boston and recently spoke at Labouré college. Our final text, Angels in America, captures how the AIDS crisis helped redefine America by staging, among other characters, gay Mormons and Jews re-examining their faiths.
The centerpiece of the class is Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, the only full-length novel we’ll be reading together. We will spend three weeks with this text, and follow how Tayo (a returning Native American WWII veteran) fights to overcome his post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal grief. Silko’s experimental narrative weaves together realistic prose and Indian folk poetry to create a grand story about ethnicity, cultural hybridity, concepts of “Americanness,” socioeconomic adversity, family strife, mental health, western medicine, and spirituality. While our conversation will certainly expand beyond the set of issues I’ve outlined here, they will form the spine of our course, and I’m eager to hear what you make of the readings.