This course surveys American literature from 1865 to the present. Readings in representative texts from the postbellum, modern, postmodern, and contemporary eras introduce Cadets to important literary movements and philosophical influences that accompanied the rise of the United States as a global power and the wide circulation of American culture. Cadets explore the post-Civil War reimagining of the country; realism, naturalism, and other literary innovations; phenomena such as the Gilded Age and the Lost Generation; and twentieth-century American poetry. Topics may include industrialization, nostalgia and reinvention, the rise of science fiction in the 1950s, the energies and ferment surrounding the pursuit of the American Dream.
