COURSE SYLLABUS - AMERICAN LITERATURE I

Prof. Anderson Soares Gomes

1. Excerpts from An Illustrated History of the United States – “The First Americans” and
“Explorers from Europe”
2. John Smith – “A Description of New England”
“The Puritan Legacy”, from From Puritanism to Postmodernism
3. John Winthrop – “A Model of Christian Charity”
Jonathan Edwards – “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
4. Thomas Paine – “Common Sense”
Thomas Jefferson – “The Declaration of Independence”
Benjamin Franklin – “The Way to Wealth”
Team Presentation 1 (about colonial America & puritanism): create memes or spoof
of viral video connected to a text or theme learned in this section
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson – “Self-reliance”
Henry David Thoreau – “Civil Disobedience”
Team Presentation 2 (about the Revolutionary Period): choose a current event in
American news and relate it to one of the texts in this section
6. Nathaniel Hawthorne – “Young Goodman Brown” & “The Minister’s Black Veil”
7. Edgar Allan Poe – “The Raven”, “The Philosophy of Composition”, “The Black Cat” &
“The Tell-Tale Heart”
8. Herman Melville – “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
9. Frederick Douglass – “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Team Presentation 3 (about Romanticism)
10. James M. McPherson - “Why the Civil War Still Matters”
11. Abraham Lincoln – “The Gettysburg Address” & “The Second Inaugural Address”
12. Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson – selected poems
13. Flexibility
14. EXAM
PORTFOLIO presentation