ELA

Declaring Independence, 1710-1850

The Enlightenment brought new ideals and a new notion of selfhood to the American colonies. This program begins with an examination of the importance of the trope of the self-made man in Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, and then turns to the development of this concept in the writings of Romanticist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

American Expansion, 1820-1900

Ethnic Writers and the Literary Mainstream, 1945-1969

American Prose Writers

Poetry of Liberation

Southern Resaissance

Migrant Struggle

Americans have often defined themselves through their relationship to the land. This program traces the social fiction of three key American voices: John Steinbeck, Carlost Bulosan, and Helena María Viramontes.

Gothic Undercurrents

What was haunting the American nation in the 1850s? The three writers treated in this program <Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson> use poetry and prose to explore the dark side of nineteenth-century America.

Race and Identity in Antebellum America

How has slavery shaped the American literary imagination and American identity? This episode turns to the classic slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, and the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe. What rhetorical strategies do their works use to construct and authentic and authoritative American self?

Depicting the Local in American Literature, 1865-1900

Modernist Portraits

Jazz filled the air and wailed against the night. Caught in the sway, American prose writers sought out the forbidden - the slang, the dialects, and the rhythms of the folk and of everyday life. Writers such as Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald forged a new style: one which silhouetted the geometry of language, crisp in its own cleanness.

Ethnic Writers and the Literary Mainstream

The Minoans, a prosperous, peaceful island people in the Mediterranean region, influenced the Greeks, as seen in the Greek Minotaur and Theseus myth. Minoan art suggests a peaceful life without war, with violence sublimated in their bull-worship rituals. Females seem to have been more influential here than anywhere else in the Ancient World.