Preface:

A seminar led by Peter Conn, Vartan Gregorian Professor of English

The seminar will offer a selective but intensive introduction to American literature and American painting in the century between the antebellum years and World War II. The authors to be studied will include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Edith Wharton, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway, the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and William Faulkner, among others.

The painters will include Thomas Cole, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, the “Ash Can School” of the early 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe, the artists of the Harlem Renaissance, the Regionalists of the 1930s, and Edward Hopper. We will try to arrange at least one visit to either the Philadelphia Museum of Art or the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, both of which house some of the finest collections of American painting in the country.

Seminar Fellows will be able to create curriculum units that focus either on literature or painting or comparisons between them.