This course will explore autobiography as a literary genre in the context of American literature and culture. We will begin with early American autobiographical accounts of settlers in the new world, and we will conclude with autobiographical narratives at the endof the twentieth century. Some of the authors we will read will include Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, Benjamin Franklin, Equiano, slave narratives, Mark Twain, Louis Armstrong, Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Gertrude Stein, Margaret Mead, Mary McCarthy, Malcolm X, Alix Kates Shulman, Annie Dillard, and Vivian Gornick. Twentieth-Century American Fiction . American Migrations .
American literature is characterized by patterns of mobility and migration.
From its beginnings to the present, American writers have celebrated geographical explorations, as well as personal and cultural change. We will read a range of American writers from Bradford and Whitman to Jack Kerouac and Joan Didion. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner has argued that the frontier has defined American experience. The fact of a vast expanse of land to be explored and developed shaped American concepts of liberty and individual rights in relationship to the community. Authors will include Twain, Whitman, Harte, Austin, Atherton, London, Robinson Jeffers, Cather, Steinbeck, Nathanael West, Kerouac, Snyder, Didion, Kingston, Erdrich, Cormac McCarthy, Hunter Thompson, Kingsolver, anaya, and Richard Rodriguez.