Helias High School English Department
Course: American Literature
Text:
Adventures in American Literature. Pegasus Edition. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1989.
Course Description:
This course is highly recommended for the college-bound student. It is a chronological study of some of the great works of literature from its beginnings to the present time. Authors include Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, modern poets and novelists. Students will be asked to respond to the literature in writing and will work to develop independent reading skills and maturity in analysis.
Objectives:
After completing this course, students will be able to:
1. Recognize major authors, periods, forms, and works
2. Demonstrate an understanding of the unifying elements of style and subject matter
3. Identify important features of the experience expressed in poetry and prose
4. Demonstrate an understanding of the cultural diversity of life as reflected in literature
5. Respond to literature through oral discussion and analytical and creative writing
6. Increase vocabulary by using contextual clues and word structure to identify the meanings of words
Outline of the course:
FIRST QUARTER
I. The Beginnings of the American Tradition
John Smith, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Jonathan Edwards
II. The Revolutionary Period
Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson,
Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur
III. First Harvest
Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe
IV. The Flowering of New England
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James
Russell Lowell, Emily Dickinson
SECOND QUARTER
I. A House Divided and Restored
Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce
II. Realism and Naturalism
Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Jack London, E.A. Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Paul Laurence Dunbar
III. Literature in Modern America
Prose: Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, James Thurber, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen Vincent Benet, John Steinbeck, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Walker,
Poetry: Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Imagism, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom,
Edna Vincent Millay, Harlem Renaissance
