ENG 341 - Studies in American Literature

Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll
How do the central questions, topics, and methods of the blue humanities change our understanding of nineteenth-century U.S. fiction and its environmental legacy? This course engages with Melville’s construction of personhood, individual and collective, in Moby Dick (1851) and its wide-ranging intertexts, from Shakespearean tragedy to maritime adventure stories. We will read the novel both as a representation of the Yankee whaling industry and as a search for its broader moral, social, and spiritual meanings. Seeking “a marine tint to the imagination,” as Henry David Thoreau puts it, we will read lesser-known works of authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Stoddard, Walt Whitman, and Louisa May Alcott. Our final unit examines posthuman and interspecies frameworks in contemporary environmental activism, as advocates seek to expand definitions of legal personhood to extend rights to nonhuman entities. Topics include marine biology and animal studies, petrofiction and materialist ecocriticism, environmental justice and humanities.

Literature of Reconstruction: “Postbellum - Pre-Harlem”
This course engages with the construction of race in Reconstruction-era literature, history, and law through the work of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). Born too late for the slave narrative and too early for the Harlem Renaissance, Chesnutt fell between two major African American literary movements: the nineteenth-century slave narrative and twentieth-century modernism. Examining storytelling and activism in his regionalist fiction, we trace the rise of Black print culture through the founding of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. Methodologically, we will draw on recent work in Black Bibliography and archival recovery, examining the cultural politics of publication and canonization and the history of the regions in which Chesnutt used as settings of his fiction: North Carolina and Ohio. Fictional genres will include sentimentalism, realism, regionalism, and naturalism; the slave narrative and the social problem novel; journalism, legal writing, and essays. Authors may include Frederick Douglass, Albion Tourgée, Pauline Hopkins, Thomas Nelson Page, Ida B. Wells, and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s):

Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll: Two ENG courses at the 200 level or higher
Literature of Reconstruction: “Postbellum - Pre-Harlem”: Two ENG courses at the 200 level or higher

Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 3 times for credit if different topics.
Cross-listing(s): Literature of Reconstruction: “Postbellum - Pre-Harlem”: CRES 331
Notes:

Not all topics offered every year.
Review schedule of classes for availability.
Review specific descriptions for applicability to department requirements.
Humanity at Sea: Personhood from Moby Dick to Moby Doll: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.
Literature of Reconstruction: “Postbellum - Pre-Harlem”: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.

Not offered: 2026-27
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.