U.S. Literature Description
Course Goals
Engl 229 is an “introduction to selected American authors and themes” (Pacific Catalogue 65). Our basic goal will be to acquaint or re-acquaint ourselves with a) key texts by U.S. writers, b) with some of the literary terms commonly employed in analyzing literature, c) with the social, political, religious, biographical, intellectual, and aesthetic contexts to U.S. lit, and d) with reading strategies that help us better understand literature's power, pleasure, and beauty.
Course Description by Epigraph
"The unread story [poem, play, novel] is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story." (Ursula Le Guin)
"The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers." (Stan Barstow)
"To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object." (Henry David Thoreau)
"All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet...There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet—if one wants to extract the full flavor of the content." (Henry Miller)
'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear." (R.W. Emerson)
"A book should serve as the axe to chop the frozen sea within us." (Franz Kafka)
"He ate and drank the precious Words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was Dust." (Emily D.)