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Rewriting American Classics

ENGL 255.302
instructor(s):
TR 3-4:30bentl

This course will examine the way of number of classic American novels, by authors ranging from Hawthorne to Faulkner, have been vividly rewritten by contemporary novelists. What happens when a novelist seizes the characters, plots, and themes of an earlier, foundational novel and transposes that material into his or her own literary property? How do such revisions ask us to see and understand US history and invite us to imagine its contemporary dilemmas and its future possibilities?  We will read Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter together with Bharati Mukherjee’s The Holder of the World; Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin along with Ishmael Reed’s Flight Into Canada; Whitman’s poetry and Speciman Days together with Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days; and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying with Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body. Assignments will probably consist of two short papers and a longer research paper.

fulfills requirements