Department of English

An introduction to the greatest literature (and song) of the United States in the Nineteenth Century, with an emphasis on poetry. The featured writers are Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allen Poe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane, along with a segment on African-American spirituals, works songs and chants. See syllabus for the full reading list: http://writing.upenn.edu/bernstein/syllabi/253.html This a “reading workshop” in which students are asked to do weekly commentaries and writing experiments  (translations, imitations, deformations of the assigned reading). The focus of the class will be on the aesthetics (style and form) of the poetry, philosophy, fiction, and songs.