Department of English

The course will offer a selective but intensive introduction to American literature and American painting in the decades between the Civil War and World War II. The authors to be studied will include Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, among others. The painters will include Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, the “Ash Can School” of the early 20th century, Georgia O’Keefe, the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and Edward Hopper. We will visit at least two museums, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, both of which house some of the finest collections of Ameican painting in the country.  Requirements will consist of critical and creative short papers, class discussion of the literary and visual material, quizzes, and a final exam.