ENGL 050. Hemispheric American Literature

This course explores the emergence of American literature as a fundamentally transnational process. From the London publication of Washington Irving's Sketch Book to the popularity of travel narratives and dime novels about Spanish America to the oceanic scope of Melville's Moby-Dick, even the most insistently nationalist works emerged from and circulated within a much more expansive network. In this course, we will examine a wide variety of genres and media, including not only novels and poetry, but also newspapers, maps, personal narratives, and indigenous literacies. We will work with these texts in both physical and digital formats, spending one class session at Penn's Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books & Manuscripts and another in a lab learning to manipulate data on American fiction. There will be a total of four digital assignments that will introduce you to various methods of computational analysis for literary studies, including mapping, text analysis, working with metadata, and 3D printing. No previous experience with digital methods is required.
18th/19th c.
GATEWAY English Literature.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Eligible for DGHU

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