Survey of American Literature

You live in a city that was there at the beginning of this country’s story. Philadelphia is in the literature — in the pamphlets of Benjamin Franklin, in the oratory of Frederick Douglass, in the jazz-soaked streets that Langston Hughes knew. You do not have to go anywhere to find America’s literary past. Some of it happened a few blocks from where you are sitting right now.

This course is an invitation to read it together — slowly, attentively, and without any pressure to sound like you have a degree in anything. Literature is not a closed room. It is a conversation that began before any of us arrived, and it goes on as long as we are willing to keep talking.

I have been teaching literature for more than three decades. I believe strongly in one thing: the best discussions happen between equals. You bring your experience, your questions, your willingness to be surprised. I will bring the books and a few good questions. After that, the course takes care of itself.

Come as you are.

If you have opened this page, you are already the kind of person this course is for. You are curious. You have noticed that good writing does something to you — slows you down, or speeds your pulse, or makes you feel less alone — and you want to understand why.

This is a free, non-graded, discussion-based course meeting once a week in the community room. It asks nothing of you except a willingness to read a modest amount beforehand and to say what you think once you get here. There are no quizzes, no papers, no grades. Nothing said in this room is repeated outside it. You may not agree with your neighbors, and I hope you do not always agree with me.

Over sixteen weeks we will move through American literature from its earliest surviving voices to writers working in our own era. We will read poems, short stories, essays, speeches, and — if the group is willing — one longer work together. Every text we read is either in the public domain or available free through a linked public source; all links are provided below.

A chronological survey of American literature, organized by period and theme, from pre-colonial oral traditions through contemporary voices. Each major period receives two sessions — enough time to read carefully, change our minds, and follow a question further than a single meeting allows. Discussion is the center of every class. We read closely, think carefully, disagree respectfully, and follow the conversation wherever it leads.

This is also a course about Philadelphia. We live in a city that appears, directly or by implication, in the story of American literature at nearly every turn. I will point those connections out as they arise.

This is not a lecture course. I will frame the period at the start of each session — perhaps fifteen minutes — and after that, the room belongs to you.

It is not a course that requires prior literary study. If you have never read a poem for pleasure, this is a perfectly good place to start. If you have read widely, you will find things here that are new to you.

It is not a course designed to arrive at a single correct interpretation. American literature is contested ground — about who counts as American, whose voice gets recorded, whose story gets told. We will sit with that discomfort rather than resolve it too quickly.

There are no wrong answers. There are only answers you cannot yet support.

Optional anchor text (the group votes in Session 1): - The Crucible by Arthur Miller — seventeenth-century setting, mid-century political fear, easy to read aloud; pair with Sessions 2 and 6 - The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne — rich for sin, shame, and gender; expand Session 6 to two sessions on this novel - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee — narrative accessibility, race and justice; pair with Sessions 9–10, noting its limitations candidly

The Scarlet Letter is in the public domain — Project Gutenberg. For The Crucible and To Kill a Mockingbird, free borrows are available via Internet Archive (search by title). Instructor will also distribute excerpts as needed.

Title: Survey of American Literature Instructor: James F. Mulhern, Professor of English; former Department Chair; Writing Fellow, Exeter College, University of Oxford Location: Community Room, 2601 Schedule: Weekly, 90 minutes Cost: Free Credits: None Grading: None Prerequisites: None

Each session follows a consistent shape:

1. Historical frame (10–15 min) — I will place the period in brief context: what was happening politically, socially, and artistically when these texts were written.
2. Close reading (15–20 min) — We read a short passage aloud together. Someone volunteers; no one is called on.
3. Guided discussion (45–50 min) — Four to six questions, written in advance, offered to the room. The conversation goes where it needs to go.
4. In-class practice (10 min) — A short writing or reflection exercise, entirely optional. You may listen while others write.
5. Optional writing prompt — Offered at the end; something to carry home if you want it.

Readings for each session are short — typically one to three poems, a brief essay, or a story of fifteen pages or fewer. Everything is linked below.

• I will not call on you.
• I will not ask you to read aloud unless you volunteer.
• I will not embarrass you, correct you publicly, or tell you that your reading of a text is wrong.
• I will be prepared. The historical frame will be tight and useful, not a lecture that wanders.
• I will bring my honest opinion, and I will tell you when I am uncertain.
• This course will end on time.

• Read the assigned texts before class, even if only once.
• Come with at least one thing you noticed — a line, an image, a question.
• Give your neighbors the same generosity you would want in return.
• Disagree out loud. Polite silence is the enemy of a good seminar.
• Leave your phone in your pocket.

Allegory — A narrative in which characters, settings, and events stand for abstract ideas or moral qualities. Hawthorne’s veil is an allegory for hidden sin.

Bildungsroman — A novel of formation or coming-of-age. The House on Mango Street is a compressed, lyrical example.

Close reading — The practice of reading a text slowly and carefully, attending to word choice, rhythm, structure, and implication rather than simply extracting plot or argument.

Confessional poetry — A mid-twentieth-century movement (Plath, Sexton, Lowell) that used highly personal, often painful autobiographical material as its primary subject. The term is a description, not a judgment.

Dark Romanticism — A strand of nineteenth-century American writing (Hawthorne, Poe, Melville) that rejected the optimism of Transcendentalism and focused on sin, guilt, psychological complexity, and the uncanny.

Double consciousness — W.E.B. Du Bois’s term for the experience of Black Americans who must see themselves simultaneously through their own eyes and through the eyes of a white society that regards them with contempt. Dunbar and Chesnutt embody it formally.

Dramatic irony — When the reader knows something a character does not. Poe deploys it at the expense of his narrators.

Free verse — Poetry without a fixed metrical pattern. Whitman is its great American pioneer; Williams extends the experiment into pure image.

Gothic — A mode of writing that uses darkness, decay, secrecy, and psychological terror to explore what a culture represses or refuses to acknowledge.

Harlem Renaissance — The flourishing of Black art, literature, and music centered in Harlem from approximately 1920 to 1940. More than a movement: a declaration of cultural citizenship.

Image — A concrete sensory detail in a poem or prose that carries emotional and often symbolic weight. Williams’s wheelbarrow; Whitman’s wound; Dickinson’s fly; Hurston’s ships on the horizon.

Naturalism — A late-nineteenth-century literary movement that applied the methods of natural science to fiction, depicting human beings as products of heredity, environment, and social forces largely beyond their control.

Oral tradition — Literature transmitted through performance and memory rather than writing. The Indigenous texts in Sessions 1 and 16 originate here; what we read is a transcription of something that was always meant to be spoken.

Persona — The voice or speaker of a poem, which may differ from the author. Plath’s mirror is a non-human persona; Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius is a fictional persona who tells a story within a story.

Realism — A literary mode that seeks to represent life as it is actually lived, without idealization. Chopin and Gilman are realists who are also, in their different ways, early feminists.

Rhetoric — The art of persuasion through language. Douglass, Lincoln, Paine, and King are all virtuoso rhetoricians. Understanding their specific choices helps you understand why they work.

Transcendentalism — An American philosophical and literary movement of the 1830s–1850s that held that the individual soul has direct access to divine truth through nature and intuition, without the mediation of institutions or tradition.

Voice — The distinctive personality and perspective that a writer projects through language. Voice is what makes a sentence unmistakably Whitman and not Dickinson — and what each writer in this course spent a lifetime learning to trust.

How to Read American Literature

There is a question underneath every text we will read this term, and it is not a literary question. It is a political one: Who gets to be American?

Every generation of American writers has answered that question differently — or refused to answer it, or answered it and been ignored, or answered it and been punished for the answer. The history of American literature is, among other things, the history of that argument about belonging: who speaks, who is heard, who is written out of the record, and who writes themselves back in. The arc is not smooth or progressive. Writers who were central in their own time have been forgotten. Writers who were forgotten have been recovered. The canon is a negotiation that never ends, and we are part of it when we sit down to read.

You do not need to know all of this in advance. But it helps to hold the question in mind, because it is almost always operating beneath the surface of even the most apparently private literary work.

On reading poetry. Many people who love fiction feel uncertain about poetry, as though it requires a special training they lack. It does not. Poetry requires only what fiction requires — attention — plus one additional thing: a willingness to slow down further than you think is necessary. A poem wants to be read at least twice. The first time, let it wash over you. The second time, stop at anything that gives you a small shock — a surprise, a question, a confusion — and ask why the poet made that particular choice. The confusion is usually the poem. The place where you think you do not understand is almost always the place the poem is doing its most interesting work.

On reading old texts. The earliest texts in this course were written in a different world. The Puritans believed things about God, salvation, and communal accountability that most of us do not share. Jefferson owned human beings while drafting a document about inalienable rights. Irving wrote in a comic register that can feel airless to modern ears. Do not let historical distance become an excuse to dismiss these writers. They are strange because they are from a different world — but it is our different world. We live in the consequences of their ideas. That is precisely what makes them worth the effort.

On disagreeing. American literature is a contentious archive. Some of these writers will make you uncomfortable. Some of them contradict each other. Some said one thing and did another. The most useful response to discomfort is not to dismiss the text but to stay with the discomfort long enough to understand what it is telling you. The friction between what a text claims and what you know from your own life is not a problem to solve. It is the place where reading becomes thinking.

On your own experience. You are not a blank slate who receives pure literary meaning from a text. You are a person who lives in Philadelphia in the twenty-first century, and everything you have seen and done and lost and hoped for is part of how you read. That is not a contamination of the reading experience. It is the reading experience. The writers in this course were also people who lived in particular places at particular times, with particular bodies and particular histories, and their particularity is what makes their writing matter. Yours does too.

On what is missing. Any sixteen-week survey leaves out more than it includes. We do not read Melville, or Twain, or Henry James, or Willa Cather, or Richard Wright, or Ralph Ellison, or James Baldwin. We read almost no drama. We read very little fiction from the twentieth century’s second half. These are real absences, not oversights — we have to stop somewhere, and no stopping place is innocent. Consider this course a beginning, not a summary. Every writer we read is a door into a dozen writers we did not read. The Internet Archive is always three clicks away — free digital borrows, no library card required.

A closing word. The great project of American literature, taken as a whole, is an argument about what this country could be — and a reckoning with what it has done and failed to do. The most honest texts hold both sides of that story at once: the aspiration and the failure, the speech and the silence beneath it, the dream and the long, difficult morning after. To read that literature attentively — to sit with Douglass and Dickinson and Hurston in the same room and ask what they have to say to each other — is not an academic exercise. It is a way of understanding where you live, and why, and what you might do with the time you have here.

I am glad you are here. Let us begin.

I am James F. Mulhern — a Philadelphia writer and teacher. I taught English at the secondary and college levels for more than thirty years and served as Department Chair. I was awarded a fully funded Writing Fellowship at Exeter College, University of Oxford — a grant that brought together writers selected from around the world — and have written fiction and essays that have appeared in literary journals in the United States and abroad.

I have been offering free courses for the residents of 2601 because I believe that literary education should not end when formal schooling ends — and because the best literary conversations I have had in my life have not happened in classrooms. They have happened in rooms like this one, among people who have no obligation to be there except their own curiosity.

You can reach me through the building’s community board, or through the course site at art-of-telling.com.

I look forward to reading with you.