Women in American Literature

Session 1 — The First Voices: Anne Bradstreet

Focus: American literature begins, for women, in a Puritan household in Massachusetts Bay — with a poet who had no model for what she was doing and did it anyway. Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) was the first published poet in colonial America, male or female, and she found, inside the tight constraints of Puritan theology and domestic life, room for genuine lyric feeling, dry wit, and something very close to self-assertion.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The first published American poet was a woman. Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (London, 1650) is likely the earliest collection of poetry written in and about the American colonies. Her brother-in-law carried the manuscript to England, reportedly without her knowledge — a detail that tells us how unauthorized a woman’s public voice still was.
2. Puritanism was both her cage and her instrument. The Puritan worldview held that earthly attachments were dangerous and that all loss must resolve into submission to God’s will. Bradstreet writes inside that theology — but she does not let it erase her feeling. Watch how often a poem records the struggle to submit rather than the achieved calm of submission.
3. She wrote two kinds of poems. Her early, public verse imitates Elizabethan models (Spenser, Sidney, du Bartas) and is largely conventional. Her later, private, domestic poems — on her husband, her house, her grandchildren — are personal, immediate, and far better. The course reads the personal Bradstreet.
4. Listen for the conditional and the turn. Bradstreet builds poems on small grammatical hinges — “If ever,” “and yet,” “or” — that let her assert and qualify in the same breath. The emotional life of the poems lives in those pivots.
5. Domestic life is her subject, not her limitation. A burning house, a marriage bed, a body in pain: she treats the ordinary materials of a woman’s life as worthy of the highest lyric attention, two centuries before that was a settled idea.

Reading

• “To My Dear and Loving Husband” — full text in Anne Bradstreet and Her Time at Project Gutenberg (public domain)
• “Verses upon the Burning of Our House” — full text at VIVA Open Publishing (public domain)
• Brief biographical note (provided in session)

Critical Reception

• Anne Bradstreet — Poetry Foundation — Full biography placing her as the first recognized New World poet and tracing the modern recovery of her reputation.
• About Anne Bradstreet — Academy of American Poets — Concise life-and-work overview, including the publication history of The Tenth Muse.
• Anne Bradstreet: “To My Dear and Loving Husband” — Poetry Foundation essay — A short essay on how the love poems “shattered 17th-century attitudes toward women.”
• Anne Bradstreet — Encyclopædia Britannica — Authoritative entry noting her twentieth-century critical acceptance, especially the religious sequence “Contemplations.”

In-Class Practice

Write three sentences about an object you no longer own that still matters to you. Don’t explain why it matters. Let the object do the work.

Discussion Questions

1. In “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” Bradstreet writes with remarkable directness about erotic and spiritual love at once. How does she manage that double register without awkwardness?
2. “Verses upon the Burning of Our House” begins as an elegy for lost possessions and ends as a theological affirmation. Does the ending feel earned to you, or forced?
3. Bradstreet was writing in a community that was, at best, ambivalent about women’s intellectual life. Do you find any traces of that tension in the poems?
4. What does her line “If ever two were one, then surely we” do grammatically and emotionally? Why open with a conditional?
5. The personal poems were not published in her lifetime. Does knowing they were private writing change how you read them?
6. What surprised you most about these poems — the form, the feeling, or something else?

Homework

Read “Verses upon the Burning of Our House” once more, slowly, and mark the exact line where the poem turns from grief over the lost house toward consolation in God. Write one paragraph (five to seven sentences) on whether you find that turn convincing — and bring it to next week. What would Bradstreet make of the city you can see from this building?

Session 2 — A Poet in Chains: Phillis Wheatley

Focus: Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784) was enslaved, brought to Boston at age seven or eight, and became — improbably, furiously — one of the most celebrated poets in the English-speaking world before she turned twenty. She wrote in the Neoclassical tradition, in heroic couplets, with the formal elegance of Pope and Dryden. Within that polished form, she encoded a claim to her own mind, her own soul, her own standing as a human being. She is not a curiosity. She is a major poet.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. She was put on trial for her own authorship. A panel of Boston’s leading men interrogated Wheatley to determine whether a young enslaved African woman could actually have written her poems. She satisfied them; their attestation was printed in her 1773 book. Keep that scene in mind — it is the context every poem answers.
2. The heroic couplet is both shelter and assertion. Mastery of the most prestigious English verse form was itself an argument: it proved, in public, the equal capacity of the mind that produced it. Form is never neutral in Wheatley; it is evidence.
3. Irony, sincerity, and strategy coexist. “On Being Brought from Africa to America” thanks God for her conversion and then turns sharply on the reader who would scorn “the sable race.” Do not resolve the poem too quickly into one tone — its power is that it holds several at once.
4. She claimed the highest poetic faculty for herself. In “On Imagination,” Wheatley takes up imagination — the era’s supreme creative power — and exercises it lavishly, at a moment when granting that faculty to an enslaved Black woman was radical.
5. She addressed power directly. “To His Excellency General Washington” speaks to the most powerful man in America as one public figure to another. Notice the poise of the address and the implicit argument it makes about who gets to speak to whom.

Reading

• “On Being Brought from Africa to America” — Public Domain; Wikisource
• “To His Excellency General Washington” — Public Domain; Wikisource
• “On Imagination” — Public Domain; Internet Archive

Critical Reception

• Phillis Wheatley — Poetry Foundation — Biography and analysis of her place in the Neoclassical tradition and the antislavery debates around her work.
• Phillis Wheatley — U.S. National Park Service — Historical profile of her enslavement, manumission, and Boston life.
• On Being Brought from Africa to America — Poetry Foundation — The full poem with publication context for close reading.

In-Class Practice

Choose one couplet from any Wheatley poem. Write it out. Then write a sentence about what that couplet costs her to say.

Discussion Questions

1. “On Being Brought from Africa to America” is eight lines long and has generated decades of scholarly argument. Is Wheatley being ironic, sincere, or something more complicated than either?
2. How does Wheatley use formal structure — the heroic couplet, the invocation, the classical allusion — as both shelter and assertion?
3. “On Imagination” claims the highest poetic faculty for herself at a moment when that claim was radical. What does she do with imagination in the poem itself?
4. In “To His Excellency General Washington,” she addresses the most powerful man in America. What is the tone of that address, and what is the implicit argument?
5. What do you notice about Wheatley’s diction? Does the elevated register feel authentic, performed, or both?
6. Given that her authorship was formally doubted, how does the fact of the poems’ mere existence change their meaning?

Homework

Reread “On Being Brought from Africa to America” and underline every word that could be read in two directions at once. Write a short paragraph (about half a page) arguing for one reading of the poem — ironic, sincere, or strategic — using at least two of those double-edged words as evidence. One scholar writes that “she shows us the inside of a locked room.” Be ready to say what the lock is, and what is inside.

Session 3 — Dickinson I: The Self and Death

Focus: Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) published fewer than a dozen poems in her lifetime and left behind nearly 1,800. She wrote in a room in Amherst, Massachusetts, with a ferocity of attention that has never been equaled in American poetry. She reinvented the sentence, the dash, and the lyric self. We spend two sessions with her because she deserves it — and because she is genuinely difficult, in the best possible sense of that word.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A private writer of public consequence. Dickinson chose not to publish, sewing her poems into hand-bound “fascicles” found after her death; her sister Lavinia disobeyed the instruction to burn them. The poems we read were not written for us — which is part of their strange intimacy.
2. The dash is a tool, not a tic. Dickinson’s dashes create pauses that don’t behave like ordinary punctuation: they hold a word in suspension, refuse closure, and let two meanings hover at once. Learn to read a dash as a held breath.
3. She personifies abstractions to think with them. Death becomes a courtly suitor; Hope becomes a bird; the self becomes a “Nobody.” These are not decorations — they are instruments for examining experience from the outside.
4. The hymn measure, deformed. Most poems use the common meter of Protestant hymns (alternating eight- and six-syllable lines) — then break it with slant rhyme and stopped rhythm, so a familiar music keeps catching on something. The form is comforting; the content is not.
5. The speaker observes, even her own annihilation. In these poems someone watches death, watches hope, watches the self — from a cool, exact distance. That observing stance is Dickinson’s signature, and it costs her something we will try to name.

Reading

(all Public Domain)

• “Because I could not stop for Death —” (Fr 479) — Wikisource
• “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” (Fr 288) — Wikisource
• “Hope is the thing with feathers —” (Fr 314) — Wikisource

Critical Reception

• Emily Dickinson — Poetry Foundation — Comprehensive biography and critical overview of her formal radicalism and posthumous publication history.
• Emily Dickinson Museum — emilydickinsonmuseum.org — The Amherst Homestead and Evergreens, with resources on her life and writing practice.
• Emily Dickinson 101 — Poetry Foundation — An accessible primer on how to read her syntax, dashes, and meter.

In-Class Practice

Write a four-line poem using a single extended metaphor. Don’t name the thing you’re describing.

Discussion Questions

1. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” Death is personified as a courtly gentleman caller. What does that personification do to the poem’s emotional register?
2. “I’m Nobody” opens with a secret and ends with a warning. What is she warning us against, and do you believe her?
3. The extended metaphor in “Hope is the thing with feathers” — the bird that “never stops at all” — how does it hold up under pressure? Where does it almost break?
4. Dickinson’s dashes create pauses that don’t quite behave like punctuation. Pick one dash in any of these poems and explain, precisely, what it does.
5. All three poems have a speaker who is observing something from the outside — even death, even hope. What does that observer’s stance cost her?
6. Knowing she never meant these poems for print, do you read them as confessions, performances, or something else?

Homework

Copy out “Because I could not stop for Death” by hand, keeping every dash exactly where she put it. Then read it aloud once, pausing at each dash. Write a few sentences on what changed when you slowed down at the dashes. Choose the Dickinson poem that disturbed you most and write one sentence about what you think it is really about.

Session 4 — Dickinson II: Grief and Consciousness

Focus: The second session with Dickinson moves from death and the self toward grief, perception, and the internal weather of the mind. These are harder poems. “There’s a certain Slant of light” is one of the most philosophically precise poems in the American tradition. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” may be the most accurate description of shock ever written. We read slowly.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. She names states with no name. Dickinson specializes in interior conditions ordinary language can’t reach — the despair carried in winter light, the numbness after catastrophe — and finds exact words for them. This is the work of the poems: precision about the imprecise.
2. Detachment can serve feeling better than lament. “After great pain” describes shock with clinical calm — “the Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.” The flatness is the accuracy: grief at its deepest does not weep; it freezes.
3. Slant rhyme is a feeling, not a flaw. Her near-rhymes (light/Heft, breath/death) refuse the satisfaction of a true chime. The almost-match leaves a small dissonance that mirrors the poems’ unresolved emotion.
4. Paradox is her logic. “My life closed twice before its close” opens on a contradiction and uses it to think about the relation between human loss and the divine. Dickinson trusts paradox where other poets would reach for resolution.
5. A whole mind comes into view. Across two sessions, Dickinson’s intelligence emerges as restless, exact, skeptical, and unafraid of darkness. We will try to describe that mind to someone who has never read her.

Reading

(all Public Domain)

• “There’s a certain Slant of light —” (Fr 320) — Wikisource
• “After great pain, a formal feeling comes —” (Fr 372) — Wikisource
• “My life closed twice before its close —” (Fr 1773) — Wikisource

Critical Reception

• Emily Dickinson — Poetry Foundation — Biography and analysis covering her late metaphysical lyrics of grief and perception.
• Emily Dickinson — Academy of American Poets — Life-and-work profile with attention to her reclusion and the editing history of the poems.
• Emily Dickinson Museum — Poetry — emilydickinsonmuseum.org — Curated guidance on reading and interpreting individual poems.

In-Class Practice

Describe a feeling without naming it. Give it a texture, a temperature, a physical sensation. Dickinson is your model.

Discussion Questions

1. “There’s a certain Slant of light” describes a quality of afternoon winter light that produces a feeling of existential weight — “the weight of cathedral tunes.” Have you felt this? What does it mean to name it so precisely?
2. The three stanzas of “After great pain” describe the stages of shock with clinical detachment. Why does detachment serve grief better than lamentation here?
3. “My life closed twice before its close” opens with a paradox. What does the poem say about the relationship between human and divine loss?
4. Dickinson often uses slant rhyme — rhymes that almost rhyme but don’t quite. Pick one example and explain what the near-miss does to the feeling of the poem.
5. After two sessions with Dickinson, what kind of mind do you feel you have encountered? How would you describe her intelligence to someone who has never read her?
6. Which of these three poems felt truest to an experience you have actually had?

Homework

Pick the single line from this week’s poems that struck you hardest and write it at the top of a page. Underneath, write half a page on why that line, and not another, lodged in you. Then decide: which Dickinson poem from either session do you think you will remember a year from now, and why?

Session 5 — The Reformer's Eye: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Focus: Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1851–52, and Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting her, reportedly said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” We read a focused excerpt — the opening chapters — and a short related text, attending not only to its political argument but to its literary technique: its sentimental rhetoric, its domestic framing, its strategic use of the reader’s sympathy.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Sentiment was a deliberate political weapon. Stowe makes her case through domestic scenes, mothers, and the suffering of children because nineteenth-century readers — especially women — were trained to feel through exactly those images. The “sentimental” is a strategy, not an accident.
2. The home is both crime scene and proposed cure. Slavery’s cruelty in the novel is felt most sharply as the breaking of families; Stowe’s imagined remedy is also domestic — the Christian home. Notice that her ideology runs entirely through the hearth.
3. A white Northern woman builds moral authority on uncertain ground. Watch where Stowe’s claim to speak for enslaved people holds and where it cracks — in caricature, in condescension, in the limits of her sympathy. The book’s power and its failures are entangled.
4. Effectiveness is not the same as aesthetic perfection. Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold over 300,000 copies in its first year and changed public opinion as few novels ever have. It raises a permanent question: can a flawed book matter more than a perfect one?
5. Prose rhythm is doing rhetorical work. Stowe’s long, accumulating, emotionally pitched sentences are built to sweep a reader toward feeling. Compare their movement to the compression of Wheatley’s couplets to see how each form aims at a different audience.

Reading

(Public Domain)

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chapters I–II (excerpt) — Project Gutenberg
• Short essay or prefatory note (provided in session)

Critical Reception

• Harriet Beecher Stowe — Library of America — Author page summarizing her career and the historical impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe — Encyclopædia Britannica — Authoritative biography placing the novel within the abolitionist movement.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1811–1896 — Library of Congress — Primary-source portrait record from the national collection.

In-Class Practice

Rewrite one paragraph of the Stowe excerpt using only observable detail — no editorializing, no emotional commentary. What do you lose?

Discussion Questions

1. Stowe deploys “the sentimental” — emotional appeal through domestic scenes, motherhood, and the suffering of children — as a political weapon. Is that a legitimate literary strategy or a form of manipulation?
2. How does Stowe establish moral authority for a white Northern woman writing about the experience of enslaved Black people? Where does that authority hold, and where does it crack?
3. The domestic interior — the home, the hearth, the family — is both the site of slavery’s cruelty and the site of Stowe’s proposed salvation. What does that tell us about her ideological framework?
4. Compare Stowe’s prose rhythm to Wheatley’s couplets. What does each writer’s chosen form tell us about their intended audience?
5. Uncle Tom’s Cabin shaped public opinion more than almost any other American novel. Does literary effectiveness require aesthetic greatness? Can a flawed book matter more than a perfect one?
6. Where in these opening chapters did you feel Stowe working hardest to move you — and did you let her?

Homework

Find one passage in the excerpt where Stowe directly addresses or steers the reader’s feelings. Copy it out, then write a paragraph on how the passage works and whether it earns the response it asks for. Come ready to answer: what does it mean that a novel helped end slavery — what can literature do that argument cannot?

Session 6 — The Subversive Alcott: Louisa May Alcott

Focus: Everyone knows Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) as the author of Little Women. Far fewer know “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873), a sharp, hilarious, and deeply unsentimental account of her family’s disastrous experiment in utopian communal living at Fruitlands. In this essay-story, Alcott turns a dry eye on idealism itself — and on the particular way that high-minded idealism tends to fall on women’s shoulders. It is one of the funniest things in nineteenth-century American prose.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The famous author had a savage comic gift. The writer of a beloved family novel was also a working professional who wrote thrillers under a pseudonym and supported her family with her pen. “Transcendental Wild Oats” shows the unsentimental Alcott most readers never meet.
2. It is satire built from real pain. The piece fictionalizes Bronson Alcott’s 1843 Fruitlands commune, which nearly destroyed the family. Comedy here is a way of surviving and judging a father’s idealism — laughter with a blade in it.
3. Watch the technique of distance. Alcott controls her satire through renamed characters (the Lambs), mock-elevated diction, and a narrator who reports absurdity with a straight face. The humor comes from the gap between lofty theory and squalid fact.
4. Idealism has a gendered bill, and women pay it. While the men philosophize, Mrs. Lamb (a stand-in for Alcott’s mother, Abigail) works herself to exhaustion. Alcott dramatizes this imbalance without ever stating it outright — the labor is simply, relentlessly visible.
5. Comedy is a moral instrument. The essay argues, through laughter, that ideals untethered from work and care are not noble but parasitic. Notice how the funniest passages carry the sharpest ethical charge.

Reading

(Public Domain)

• “Transcendental Wild Oats” — Project Gutenberg

Critical Reception

• Louisa May Alcott — Library of America — Author page covering her reform commitments, professional career, and range beyond Little Women.
• Louisa May Alcott — Encyclopædia Britannica — Authoritative biography with attention to Fruitlands and her family circle.
• Susan Cheever on Louisa May Alcott — Library of America — Interview on Alcott as “a writer who refused conventional ideas of women’s roles.”

In-Class Practice

Write a short paragraph describing an absurd situation you have witnessed — but from the perspective of someone who is trying very hard to remain polite about it.

Discussion Questions

1. “Transcendental Wild Oats” is ostensibly a satire of Transcendentalism — specifically of Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands experiment. But who is its true target?
2. How does Alcott establish her satirical distance from the events she describes? What are her primary techniques?
3. Mrs. Lamb (a stand-in for Alcott’s mother Abigail) works herself nearly to exhaustion while the men philosophize. How does Alcott dramatize that imbalance without ever stating it directly?
4. What is the relationship between idealism and the labor that sustains it? Alcott seems to have a very specific answer. What is it?
5. How does this essay change or complicate your image of Alcott as a writer?
6. Is the piece finally affectionate toward its idealists, contemptuous, or both at once?

Homework

Write Louisa May Alcott’s response to being known only as the author of Little Women — one paragraph in her voice. Then reread the funniest passage you marked in “Transcendental Wild Oats” and write a sentence identifying the exact moral judgment hidden inside the joke.

Session 7 — The Body and Its Desires: Kate Chopin

Focus: Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was largely erased from the American canon after the scandal that followed The Awakening (1899) and was not rediscovered until the 1960s. The selections this week show Chopin’s range — from delicate compression in the short stories to her great novel of awakening.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A career destroyed and recovered. The hostile reception of The Awakening effectively ended Chopin’s career; she died five years later. Sixty years on, second-wave feminist scholars restored her to the center of American fiction. Her story is a case study in how canons are made and unmade.
2. She trusts the reader to judge — or not to. In “A Pair of Silk Stockings” and “Regret,” Chopin withholds moral commentary. The endings land without instruction, leaving us to supply (or withhold) judgment. Notice how much she leaves unsaid.
3. Awakening, not transgression, is her subject. The Awakening traces a woman’s growing consciousness of her own desire and selfhood. Read the novel’s opening and close as near-mirror images — a woman in the sea, looking out — and ask what has changed between them.
4. Form enacts meaning. Her stories end abruptly, sometimes violently, because she sees meaning as arriving suddenly, not by gradual accumulation. The structural shock is the point.
5. She wrote within and against Naturalism and the New Woman. Chopin engages the era’s ideas about heredity, environment, and the emancipated modern woman, but bends them to her own ends — neither fully determinist nor fully celebratory.

Reading

(Public Domain)

• “A Pair of Silk Stockings” — Project Gutenberg
• “Regret” — Project Gutenberg
• The Awakening — Chapter I (opening) and Chapter XXXIX (the close) — Project Gutenberg

Critical Reception

• Kate Chopin: The Awakening, stories, biography — KateChopin.org — The Kate Chopin International Society’s authoritative resource on her life, texts, and criticism.
• Kate Chopin Archives — KateChopin.org — Digital scans of Chopin’s published stories, essays, and letters in their original form.
• Kate Chopin — Encyclopædia Britannica — Authoritative biography tracing the scandal of The Awakening and the twentieth-century revival.

In-Class Practice

Write the last sentence of a story in which everything changes. No context — just the last sentence.

Discussion Questions

1. “A Pair of Silk Stockings” gives us a poor mother who comes into a small amount of money and, instead of buying for her children, buys for herself. Map the moral movements of the story. What is Chopin asking us to feel — and is she asking us to judge?
2. “Regret” follows an aging unmarried woman thrust temporarily into caring for four children. The ending lands without commentary. What does Chopin trust the reader to understand without being told?
3. The opening of The Awakening and its close are nearly mirror images — a woman in the sea, looking out. Read them side by side. What has changed by the end? What has not?
4. All three of these texts end abruptly — even violently. What does that structural choice say about Chopin’s view of how meaning arrives?
5. The Awakening was so scandalous on publication that Chopin’s career effectively ended. What is the cost of writing a book one’s culture is not ready for? What is the cost of NOT writing it?
6. Is Edna Pontellier’s final act a defeat, a liberation, or something the novel refuses to settle?

Homework

Read the opening and closing chapters of The Awakening side by side and list, in two columns, what is the same and what has changed. Write a paragraph on what that comparison reveals about Edna’s “awakening.” Then ask yourself: what would Chopin make of the word “freedom” as it is used now?

Session 8 — The Country of the Pointed Firs: Sarah Orne Jewett

Focus: Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) is one of the great American masters of regional fiction — small, exact, and quietly radical. Her work centered on rural Maine and the lives of women, especially older women, in coastal communities the larger national literature ignored. “A White Heron” (1886) is her most celebrated story: a tiny act of moral resistance in a child too young to know what she is doing.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Regionalism as serious art. Jewett’s “local color” — the dialects, customs, and landscapes of coastal Maine — is not quaint decoration but the substance of her vision. She insisted that small, particular lives deserved the full attention of literature.
2. She centers the lives others overlooked. Her subjects are rural women, especially older, unmarried, and widowed women, living in communities the national literature treated as minor. To put them at the center is itself a quiet argument.
3. A narrative voice that shifts scale. In “A White Heron,” the telling moves from close to the child Sylvia outward to something almost cosmic, then back. Tracking those shifts is the key to the story’s effect.
4. A child’s choice carries a worldview. Sylvia chooses the heron over the hunter’s money and over her first romantic stirrings. Jewett uses that small refusal to weigh nature against commerce, solitude against attachment, the girl against the woman she will become.
5. Recovery and the cost of forgetting. Central in her own time, Jewett was nearly forgotten for much of the twentieth century and recovered only as scholars asked which writers the canon had dismissed as “too rural” or “too female.” Her case shows what a literature loses when it decides such subjects are minor.

Reading

(Public Domain)

• “A White Heron” (1886) — Project Gutenberg
• The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), opening chapters — Project Gutenberg

Critical Reception

• Sarah Orne Jewett — Poetry Foundation — Biography placing her among the major American regionalists.
• Sarah Orne Jewett — Encyclopædia Britannica — Authoritative entry on her Maine fiction and The Country of the Pointed Firs.
• Sarah Orne Jewett — Academy of American Poets — Concise life-and-work profile with attention to her craft.

In-Class Practice

Describe a place you have known well using only what an outsider arriving for the first time would notice. Then describe the same place again, using only what you, the local, know that they cannot see.

Discussion Questions

1. Sylvia chooses the heron over the hunter’s money — and over her own first stirrings of romantic feeling. What is Jewett saying about a girl, about the world she is choosing between, about the older woman she will become?
2. The narrative voice of “A White Heron” is unusual — close to the child, then suddenly broadening into something almost cosmic. Trace those shifts. What do they accomplish?
3. Jewett was writing at the height of industrialization, but her world is almost wholly rural. Is that nostalgia, resistance, or something else?
4. The opening of Pointed Firs introduces a community of older women and the narrator who has come among them. What does Jewett value about that community? What is she preserving?
5. Jewett was central to her own moment and then nearly forgotten through much of the twentieth century. What gets lost when a literature decides the rural and the female are minor subjects?
6. Where in the prose did you most feel Jewett asking you to slow down and look — and what did slowing down reveal?

Homework

Write the paragraph that follows the last line of “A White Heron” — the one Jewett did not write. Keep her voice and her restraint. Then write one sentence on what your continuation reveals about how you understood Sylvia’s choice.

Session 9 — Society's Grip: Edith Wharton

Focus: Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She wrote with a scalpel — precise, cool, and utterly without mercy for the social world she both inhabited and despised. We read “The Other Two” (1904), a story about a woman’s three marriages that is also one of the most elegant comedies of manners in American fiction.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The novelist of the cage. Wharton’s great subject is the way social convention confines its members — especially women — while pretending to protect them. Manners in her work are instruments of power.
2. Point of view is a trap she sets. “The Other Two” is told entirely through the husband Waythorn’s consciousness; we never enter Alice’s mind. That limitation is a deliberate device — it makes Alice unreadable and lets the story’s comedy and unease build inside Waythorn’s slow realization.
3. Comedy of manners, with teeth. The story’s humor depends on a man gradually grasping that his wife was shaped by her two previous husbands. Wharton uses the dinner party, the business lunch, and the well-run household as both social ritual and quiet exposure.
4. Is Alice survivor, victim, or both? Alice adapts seamlessly to every man around her. Wharton refuses to tell us whether this is a moral failing, a strategy of survival, or simply what such a world requires of a woman. Hold the ambiguity open.
5. The specific and the permanent. Wharton wrote at the height of the Gilded Age, yet the pressures she describes — performance, adaptation, the management of appearances — feel far from dated. Part of the discussion is sorting what belongs to 1904 from what is simply human.

Reading

• “The Other Two” (1904) — Public Domain; available at Project Gutenberg / The Descent of Man and Other Stories
• Note: “Roman Fever” (1934) remains under copyright; it is included in Wharton’s collected stories — search Internet Archive or ask the instructor for a distributed copy.

Critical Reception

• Edith Wharton — Library of America — Author page surveying her novels, novellas, and short fiction.
• Edith Wharton — Encyclopædia Britannica — Authoritative biography, including her Pulitzer Prize and place in the American novel.
• Edith Wharton, “The Other Two” — Library of America Story of the Week — Index linking the LOA text and notes for the story we read.

In-Class Practice

Write a scene in which a character reveals something important about themselves entirely through the management of a social situation — without ever stating it directly.

Discussion Questions

1. “The Other Two” is told entirely from the husband Waythorn’s perspective. What does Wharton gain and lose by giving us no access to Alice’s inner life?
2. The story’s comedy depends on a man slowly realizing that his wife was shaped by her previous marriages. What is the story’s final image, and what does it mean?
3. How does Wharton use the conventions of social life — the dinner party, the business lunch, the well-run household — as instruments of both control and revelation?
4. Alice adapts to every man around her with seamless efficiency. Is she a survivor, a victim, or something else entirely?
5. Wharton wrote this story at the height of the Gilded Age. How much of what she describes is specific to that moment, and how much is simply permanent?
6. Wharton was herself an insider to this world. Does the story read as critique from within, or from a distance she has won?

Homework

Make the case, in a short paragraph, that Alice is a sympathetic character — then, in a second paragraph, make the opposite case. Decide which you actually believe and underline the single sentence in the story that most supports it. Bring both paragraphs to class.

Session 10 — The Misfit and the Open Road: Willa Cather

Focus: Willa Cather (1873–1947) wrote, among other masterworks, My Ántonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and The Professor’s House. “Paul’s Case” (1905) is the story that announced her. It follows a young man in Pittsburgh who is alienated from his world, who loves beauty with a desperate intensity, and who cannot survive the gap between his imagination and his life. It is one of the great portraits of the artistic temperament in American fiction.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A portrait of the aesthetic temperament. Paul is not an artist but a worshipper of beauty — of theaters, music, luxury, the glow of a world he can glimpse but never enter. Cather studies the danger of a sensibility with no outlet.
2. Sympathy without exoneration. Cather draws us close to Paul’s longing while never quite excusing his lies, his theft, or his contempt. Watch how she keeps us feeling for him without letting us feel he is right.
3. Place as moral geography. Pittsburgh (drab Cordelia Street, the schoolroom, the father’s house) and New York (the hotel, the spending, the brief blaze of luxury) carry the story’s symbolic weight. Each city is a state of the soul.
4. The cost of not belonging. Paul is a misfit everywhere the story sets him. Cather uses him to ask what a society owes — and does not owe — to the person who cannot find a place in it.
5. Biography and art, held apart. Cather herself lived outside many expectations placed on women of her era, and readers have long heard her own outsiderness in Paul. The session weighs how much, and how little, an author’s life should govern our reading.

Reading

(Public Domain)

• “Paul’s Case” — Project Gutenberg / The Troll Garden

Critical Reception

• Willa Cather Archive — cather.unl.edu — The University of Nebraska’s free scholarly archive of Cather’s writing, letters, and biography.
• Willa Cather Biography — Willa Cather Foundation — Authoritative life-and-work overview from the foundation in Red Cloud, Nebraska.
• Willa Cather — Encyclopædia Britannica — Concise authoritative entry on her major novels and reputation.

In-Class Practice

Write a paragraph about a place you longed for before you had ever been there. What did it mean to you? What did it turn out to be?

Discussion Questions

1. Paul is drawn to beauty, to performance, to a world he can glimpse but not enter. How does Cather establish our sympathy for him while never quite excusing him?
2. The two settings of the story — Pittsburgh and New York — carry enormous symbolic weight. What does each city represent?
3. The ending of “Paul’s Case” is quietly devastating. How does Cather prepare us for it, and what keeps it from feeling melodramatic?
4. Paul is a misfit in every environment the story puts him in. What does the story say about the cost of not belonging?
5. Cather herself was a person who lived outside many of the social expectations placed on women of her era. Do you read any of her own experience in Paul? What is the relationship between biography and art?
6. Is “Paul’s Case” finally a story of an individual temperament, or an indictment of the world that has no room for it?

Homework

Reread the final two pages of “Paul’s Case” and mark every detail Cather plants earlier that prepares for the ending. Write a paragraph on how she keeps the conclusion from feeling melodramatic. Then write the one sentence Paul himself could never say — the sentence that names what he wants.

Session 11 — Saying "I" in Full: Zora Neale Hurston

Focus: Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was the most dazzling prose stylist of the Harlem Renaissance, a trained anthropologist, a collector of Black folklore, and one of the great American novelists. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) is one of the most remarkable personal essays in the language: exuberant, complex, strategically joyful, and absolutely serious. We will also read the opening pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) — just enough to hear the prose.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The voice is the achievement. Hurston’s prose is so specifically, exuberantly itself that every sentence announces a consciousness unlike any other in the tradition. Voice — that quality of presence on the page — is precisely what we are reading for.
2. A refusal that opens the essay. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” begins by declining “extenuating circumstances.” Hurston refuses the role of victim and the apology expected of her, and that refusal sets the terms for everything that follows.
3. Two registers held at once. The essay swings between exuberant celebration and a sharp, almost philosophical meditation on race and identity — including the contested jazz-club passage, “I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way.” Don’t flatten the tonal complexity.
4. The image that does the argument’s work. Hurston ends with every human being as “a brown bag of miscellany” — a figure that says something about shared humanity that argument alone cannot. Pay attention to how her images think.
5. The anthropologist behind the artist. Trained under Franz Boas, Hurston collected Black Southern folklore and built her fiction from its rhythms. The opening of Their Eyes Were Watching God shows that ear at work — narration that does what conventional prose cannot.

Reading

• “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” (1928) — Public Domain; Project Gutenberg
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, opening pages (excerpt) — Project Gutenberg (public domain).

Critical Reception

• Zora Neale Hurston — Encyclopædia Britannica — Authoritative biography of the Harlem Renaissance writer, folklorist, and anthropologist.
• What Zora Went Looking For — National Endowment for the Humanities — Essay on Hurston’s anthropological fieldwork and its relation to her fiction.
• Zora Neale Hurston (Author Page) — African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology, Lehigh University — University course resource on her career and the significance of “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.”

In-Class Practice

Begin a paragraph with “I am —” and write three sentences about yourself that you would not say in ordinary conversation. Keep them.

Discussion Questions

1. Hurston opens the essay with “I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances.” What is she refusing, and why does that refusal matter?
2. The essay moves between exuberant celebration and a sharp, almost philosophical meditation on race and identity. How does she hold those two registers together?
3. The jazz-club passage — “I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way” — is one of the most contested passages in the essay. What is she doing there?
4. Hurston uses the image of “a brown bag of miscellany” for every human being. What does that image accomplish that argument alone cannot?
5. The opening pages of Their Eyes Were Watching God are almost impossible to describe without quoting them directly. What do you notice about the prose? What is it doing that conventional narration cannot do?
6. Hurston was largely ignored and died in poverty before Alice Walker recovered her in the 1970s. What does a literature do to writers it ignores?

Homework

Copy out the single sentence of Hurston’s that you found most alive on the page, then write half a page on exactly what makes it sound like her and no one else — diction, rhythm, image, stance. Bring the sentence and your analysis to class.

Session 12 — The Art of Seeing: Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop

Focus: Marianne Moore (1887–1972) and Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) are two of the finest poets America has produced — in any era, of any gender. Both are poets of observation: precise, patient, and convinced that the world seen clearly is inexhaustible. Bishop was Moore’s protégée and in some ways her heir. Together they represent a mode of American poetry — cool, scrupulous, profoundly intelligent — unlike anything else in the tradition.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Observation as a way of thinking. For both poets, looking closely at the world is not a preliminary to meaning — it is the meaning. The poem’s intelligence lives in the precision of what it notices.
2. A poet’s skepticism about poetry. Moore’s “Poetry” opens, “I, too, dislike it,” and then defends the art on the strict condition that it be genuine. The poem enacts its own argument: it earns the right to be a poem.
3. Form as participant in meaning. Bishop’s “One Art” is a villanelle — a tightly repeating form — about loss. The obsessive return of the refrain (“the art of losing isn’t hard to master”) does emotional work the statement alone could not.
4. The moment of change. “The Fish” turns on a release; “In the Waiting Room” turns on a child’s sudden knowledge that she is a self. Locating the exact line where the poem turns is the discipline of the session.
5. The philosophical bet. Moore and Bishop trust objects and observations more than abstractions. That is a wager about where truth is found — in the particular, not the general. Decide whether it is a bet you would make.

Reading

• Marianne Moore, “Poetry” (1919) — Poetry Foundation
• Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish” — Poetry Foundation
• Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” — Poetry Foundation
• Elizabeth Bishop, “In the Waiting Room” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Marianne Moore — Poetry Foundation — Biography and analysis of her syllabic precision and famous revisions of “Poetry.”
• Elizabeth Bishop — Poetry Foundation — Biography tracing her relationship to Moore and her poetics of observation.
• Elizabeth Bishop — Academy of American Poets — Concise life-and-work profile with selected poems.

In-Class Practice

Describe a single object in the room — or an object you carry — with the kind of sustained attention Bishop brings to the fish. Seven to ten sentences. No metaphors yet.

Discussion Questions

1. Moore’s “Poetry” begins with a famous line: “I, too, dislike it.” What is the argument of the poem, and how does the poem itself enact that argument?
2. “The Fish” follows a speaker who catches a fish and lets it go. What is the moment of change? What causes the release?
3. “One Art” is a villanelle — a highly formal poem — about loss. How does the form itself participate in the meaning of the poem? What does the repetition do?
4. “In the Waiting Room” is a poem about the moment a child realizes she is a self, separate from the world and continuous with it. Where exactly in the poem does that realization arrive?
5. Moore and Bishop both trust objects and observations more than abstractions. What is the philosophical bet they are making? Is it one you would make?
6. Bishop was Moore’s protégée. What do they share as observers, and where do you hear Bishop becoming her own poet?

Homework

Take the object description you began in class and add a final two or three sentences in which a single, quiet metaphor finally appears — earned by all the looking that came before. Then write four lines of your own in which a repeated phrase changes meaning each time it appears, after the example of “One Art.”

Session 13 — Walking the Worn Path: Eudora Welty

Focus: Eudora Welty (1909–2001) was a Mississippi master of the Southern short story — and one of the great writers of American place. Her stories pay attention to people the broader culture overlooks: poor Black women, eccentric small-town families, the rural and the marginal. “A Worn Path” (1941) is her most beloved story — a journey, a meditation on endurance, and a portrait of dignity carried across rough ground. “A Visit of Charity” (1941) is a chillier companion piece.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Place is character. Welty’s Mississippi — its woods, weather, roads, and small towns — is not a backdrop but a presence that shapes everyone who moves through it. Her famous essay “Place in Fiction” makes the case her stories embody.
2. Phoenix Jackson and the dignity of endurance. In “A Worn Path,” an elderly Black woman makes a long, hard journey to town for her grandson’s medicine. Welty lets the walk itself — its obstacles, its small comedies, its persistence — carry the story’s meaning.
3. Comedy that turns. Phoenix is a comic figure for much of the story. Watch for the precise moment she becomes something else; the turn is quiet, and it is where the story’s emotion gathers.
4. What the story withholds. Welty never confirms whether the grandson is still alive. The ambiguity is deliberate — it shifts the story’s subject from outcome to the act of love and endurance itself.
5. A colder mirror. “A Visit of Charity” sets two old women and a girl’s obligatory visit against the warmth of “A Worn Path.” Reading them together reveals Welty’s range and her unsentimental clarity about charity, age, and obligation.

Reading

• “A Worn Path” (1941) — Freely available at American Literature.
• “A Visit of Charity” (1941) — In Welty’s Collected Stories; instructor will distribute in class. (For the full collection, search Internet Archive.)

Critical Reception

• Eudora Welty — Library of America — Author page on the Mississippi writer’s stories, essays, and memoir.
• About Welty — Eudora Welty House & Garden (Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History) — Authoritative biography from the museum at her Jackson home.
• Eudora Welty — Encyclopædia Britannica — Concise entry on her career and Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction.

In-Class Practice

Write a scene in which a character makes a long, ordinary journey — to a store, across a city, up a flight of stairs — and let the obstacles along the way reveal who they are, without any direct commentary.

Discussion Questions

1. Phoenix Jackson is a comic character for much of the story. When, exactly, does she become something else? What triggers the change?
2. Welty never tells us for certain whether the grandson is alive. Why does she withhold that, and how does the withholding change the story’s subject?
3. “A Worn Path” is built almost entirely from a single journey. What does Welty gain by trusting the walk itself to carry the meaning?
4. Welty wrote that place is one of “the lesser angels” of fiction that is in fact essential. How does place function as a force in this story?
5. Read against “A Visit of Charity,” what does the colder story reveal about the warmth of “A Worn Path”? What is Welty’s view of charity and obligation?
6. Where did you find yourself moved, and where amused — and what does Welty do to hold those responses so close together?

Homework

Reread “A Worn Path” and choose the one obstacle on Phoenix’s journey that you think reveals the most about her. Write a paragraph explaining your choice. Then write one sentence on why you think Welty chose never to tell us whether the grandson is still alive.

Session 14 — Silences and Interruptions: Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley

Focus: Tillie Olsen (1912–2007) and Grace Paley (1922–2007) are two great short-story writers of the American mid-century who wrote about the lives of working women, mothers, and daughters with an attention, humor, and moral seriousness that mainstream literary culture was slow to recognize. “I Stand Here Ironing” and “A Conversation with My Father” are small, perfect stories — and they say more about love, failure, parenthood, and the limits of narrative than almost anything else we will read.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Olsen’s idea of “silences.” Olsen argued that literature is haunted by the works never written — by people who had no time, no room, no permission. Her own decades of interrupted writing, while raising children and working, are part of the story she tells.
2. The domestic task as form. “I Stand Here Ironing” is shaped by the back-and-forth motion of the iron; the rhythm of the chore becomes the rhythm of the mother’s thought. The ordinary gesture organizes the whole story.
3. Understanding without judgment. Olsen’s narrator asks us to understand a daughter’s life without condemning the mother’s choices. The session tests whether understanding and judgment can be held apart — and whether they should be.
4. Paley’s stories about stories. “A Conversation with My Father” stages an argument between a dying father who wants a plain, plotted “Chekhov” story and a daughter who resists plot because plot forecloses possibility. It is fiction thinking out loud about what fiction does to people.
5. Ambiguity as honesty. Both stories end without resolution. The session asks whether that openness is a failure of structure or a deliberate refusal to pretend that real lives resolve.

Reading

• Tillie Olsen, “I Stand Here Ironing” — Free borrow via Internet Archive — Tell Me a Riddle.
• Grace Paley, “A Conversation with My Father” — Free borrow via Internet Archive — Enormous Changes at the Last Minute.

Critical Reception

• Grace Paley — Poetry Foundation — Biography of the short-story writer, poet, and activist, with attention to her political voice.
• Appreciating Tillie Olsen — The Center for Fiction — Essay on Olsen’s career, her interrupted writing life, and the idea of literary “silences.”
• Tillie Olsen — EBSCO Research Starters — Concise scholarly biography and overview of her work.

In-Class Practice

Begin a story with a character in the middle of a physical task — doing dishes, folding laundry, walking to the corner store. Let the task be the frame. Write for eight minutes without stopping.

Discussion Questions

1. “I Stand Here Ironing” is narrated by a mother ironing. The rhythm of the iron is the rhythm of the story. What does Olsen’s use of that domestic gesture accomplish?
2. The narrator of “I Stand Here Ironing” asks us to understand without judging. Can we do both? Should we?
3. “A Conversation with My Father” is a story about writing stories — about what plots do to people. What is Paley’s argument? Do you agree with her?
4. The father in Paley’s story wants “the kind of story Chekhov wrote.” What does he mean, and why does the daughter resist?
5. Both stories end in a kind of unresolvable ambiguity. Is that a failure of structure or a form of honesty?
6. Olsen wrote that “silences” are the works never written by people who had no time, no room, no permission. What silences do you know?

Homework

Take the eight-minute draft you began in class and finish it as a single paragraph — but end it on a genuine ambiguity, refusing to resolve what happens. Then write two sentences on what you learned about plot and honesty from Paley’s argument with her father.

Session 15 — The Political Lyric: Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Lucille Clifton

Focus: Three poets. Three voices. Three ways of making the personal radically political without sacrificing a word of the lyric’s power. Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), Audre Lorde (1934–1992), and Lucille Clifton (1936–2010) are among the essential American poets of the second half of the twentieth century. Together, they represent a tradition that insists on the self’s full complexity — race, gender, body, history — as both subject and instrument.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The personal made political — and still lyric. These poets inherited and transformed confessional poetry, turning private experience outward toward race, gender, and history without ever abandoning the music and compression of the lyric.
2. Rich’s descent and juxtaposition. “Diving into the Wreck” sends a speaker down into the self, history, or myth to find “the wreck and not the story of the wreck”; “Power” sets Marie Curie beside a young Black woman killed by police. Rich thinks by putting images in tension.
3. Lorde and survival as the ground of speech. In “A Litany for Survival,” Lorde writes for those “for whom survival is not an academic question.” Her poems address specific, marked, historical people — and find in that specificity a wider reach.
4. Clifton’s celebration as defiance. “won’t you celebrate with me” turns the bare fact of having survived as a Black woman into a triumph; “homage to my hips” reclaims the body as a source of power. Brevity and plainness are her instruments.
5. The marked body creates, not limits, reach. All three write from particular bodies — Black, female, lesbian, ill, aging. The session’s central claim: specificity is what makes a poem universal, not what confines it.

Reading

• Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck” — Poetry Foundation
• Adrienne Rich, “Power” — Poetry Foundation
• Audre Lorde, “Coal” — Poetry Foundation
• Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival” — Poetry Foundation
• Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me” — Poetry Foundation
• Lucille Clifton, “homage to my hips” — Poetry Foundation

Critical Reception

• Adrienne Rich — Poetry Foundation — Biography of the poet-essayist as one of America’s foremost public intellectuals.
• Audre Lorde — Poetry Foundation — Biography of the self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and her body of work.
• Lucille Clifton — Poetry Foundation — Biography of the Ruth Lilly Prize winner known for her spare, powerful lyrics.

In-Class Practice

Write a poem — or a prose poem — that begins with the words “I come from —” and says three true things in three lines.

Discussion Questions

1. Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” is a poem about descent into the self — or into history — or into myth. What is the wreck? What is the diver looking for?
2. “Power” juxtaposes Marie Curie with a young Black woman killed by police. What holds those two figures together, and what is the argument the juxtaposition makes?
3. In “A Litany for Survival,” Lorde writes to people “for whom survival is not an academic question.” Who is she addressing, and how does she make that address feel specific?
4. Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me” begins with the line “what did i have to do with it / except be a black woman.” What does she mean? What is the achievement being celebrated?
5. All three poets write from the body — from specific, marked, historical bodies. How does that specificity create rather than limit the poem’s reach?
6. Audre Lorde wrote that “poetry is not a luxury.” After reading these poems, what do you think she meant — and do you agree?

Homework

Choose the one poem from this week that most resisted you and read it aloud three times. Write half a page on what opened up between the first reading and the third. Be ready to make the case, for or against, Lorde’s claim that “poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”

Session 16 — Capstone: What We Carry

Focus: Our final session is a gathering rather than a lecture. We read briefly from three contemporary voices — Toni Morrison, Tracy K. Smith, and Joy Harjo — as a way of tracing the line from Anne Bradstreet to the present day. Then each of you will share a passage, a line, or a poem from the course (or from your own reading) that you want the room to carry with you. The conversation that follows will be ours to shape.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The line runs unbroken to the present. Bradstreet to Morrison, Wheatley to Harjo: the writers of this course are not isolated curiosities but a continuous tradition. Today we hear its living end and feel the whole arc at once.
2. Morrison and the weight of inheritance. The opening of Beloved shows how Morrison carries the entire history we have studied — slavery, motherhood, memory, the unspeakable — into prose of extraordinary force. She said, “If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
3. Smith and Harjo: the contemporary lyric. Tracy K. Smith (b. 1972) and Joy Harjo (b. 1951) extend the line into our own moment — Smith ranging from intimate to cosmic, Harjo, the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, rooting poetry in memory, breath, and survival.
4. A tradition that empowers its readers. Across centuries these writers hand something forward — a way of seeing, a permission, a proof. Virginia Woolf’s “a woman writing thinks back through her mothers” names the conversation we have been listening to all term.
5. The course belongs to you now. What you carry out of this room — a line, a stance, a writer you will return to — is the real syllabus. The final hour is yours to decide what stays.

Reading

• Toni Morrison, selected excerpt from Beloved (opening pages) — Free borrow via Internet Archive.
• Tracy K. Smith, “An Old Story” — Poetry Foundation
• Joy Harjo, “Remember” — Poetry Foundation

Students: Please bring to this session one passage — a sentence, a stanza, a line, even a single phrase — from anything we have read together, or from any other work by a woman writer that matters to you. Be ready to read it aloud and say one sentence about why you chose it.

Critical Reception

• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993: Toni Morrison — NobelPrize.org — The official citation honoring her “visionary force and poetic import.”
• Joy Harjo — Poetry Foundation — Biography of the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate.
• Living Nations, Living Words — Library of Congress — Harjo’s signature Poet Laureate project mapping Native poets across the country.
• Tracy K. Smith — Poetry Foundation — Biography of the Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate.

In-Class Practice

Write a letter to one of the writers on this syllabus — a writer whose work affected you. One paragraph. You don’t have to send it anywhere.

Discussion Questions

1. Over sixteen weeks, has your understanding of “American literature” changed? If so, how?
2. Which writer surprised you most — and why?
3. Is there a question these writers keep asking, across centuries and genres? If so, what is it?
4. Morrison said: “If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” How do these writers do that for their readers?
5. Woolf wrote that “a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.” Where in this course did you most feel one writer thinking back through another?
6. What do you want to read next?

Homework

This is your final take-home, and it is open-ended. Choose one writer from the course you intend to keep reading, find one work by her we did not assign, and read its opening pages this week. Write a short paragraph on why you chose her and what you hope to find. If we had one more session, what would you add to this course?