This course will introduce you to a wide range of American fiction from the 1790s to the present, including 19th-century classics like Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, and modern masterpieces like William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Our other authors will include Washington Irving, Lydia Maria Child, Philip K. Dick, Cynthia Ozick, Allen Barnett, and Leslie Marmon Silko. While enjoying these authors' tremendous diversity of style and subject matter, we'll be paying special attention to the relation between fiction and memory--a relation at the heart of American traditions of storytelling.