College Course Content Summary
Course Prefix and Number -- Course Title
ENG 246: Major American Writers (3 cr.)
VCCS Course Description
Examines major writers in American literary history. Involves critical reading and writing.
Lecture 3 hours per week.
General Course Purpose
Major American literature perhaps begins after 1820, and breaks logically into five major
periods: The Romantics, the Naturalist/Realists, the Modernists, and the Post-Modernists, or
Contemporaries. In this course we will consider a cross-section of American literary prose,
poetry, and drama written between 1820--present. Our focus will be on the works themselves,
but the framework for our discussions and discovery will be the social, cultural, religious, and
historical climates from which these works emerged. And ultimately, we will address the greater
question: what do these works tell us about ourselves, and what it means to be "American"?
Course Prerequisites
Prerequisite: ENG 112
Course Outcomes
Upon completing the course, the student will be able to:
• identify representative works of Major American writers
• place these writers in their intellectual-historical context
• read critically and write analytically about works by major American authors
Major Authors to be Included
Representative works of any of the following and others as determined by the professor:
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edgar Allan Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Henry David Thoreau
Departmental Approval: Spring 2014
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Herman Melville
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Mark Twain
Henry James
Stephen Crane
Jack London
Kate Chopin
Carl Sandburg
Robert Frost
T.S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
Zora Neal Hurston
e. e. cummings
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
Flannery O’Connor
Allen Ginsburg
John Cheever
John Updike
J. D. Salinger
Alice Walker
Toni Morrison
Tim O’Brien
Departmental Approval: Spring 2014