This course surveys major movements in American literature from early foundations to the late twentieth century, with an emphasis on how literature reflects, resists, and reimagines the cultural and political forces that shaped the United States. Through poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, and novels, we will examine how authors have engaged with foundational questions around identity, freedom, race, gender, labor, and belonging. Major literary movements covered include Romanticism and Transcendentalism, Realism and Naturalism, Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, Postmodernism, and contemporary experimentalism. Authors could possibly include Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, Hart Crane, Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard, William Carlos Williams, Alison Hedge Coke, Toni Morrison, and David Foster Wallace. Students will engage in literary analysis, historical contextualization, and critical writing through a combination of essays, short reflections, and/or digital creative projects.