FSEM 164   American Texts and Contexts

Faculty Profile for Professor Johnson

An introduction to American literature exploring the relations among key texts and various contexts—critical, cultural and historical. Coursework engages a wide range of issues in American literary history, from Native American oral traditions and the European “discovery” of Indigenous lands through the colonial period and Revolution to the emergence of the women’s rights movement and debates over slavery and its legacy in the decades before and after the Civil War. A central focus is the impact of race and gender on the writings of all periods; the diverse authors studied include Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, William Apess, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Charles Chesnutt. Students who successfully complete this seminar earn credit for ENGL 201 and satisfy the human thought and expression area of inquiry requirement.

Linck Johnson, a professor in the English Department, teaches a range of courses in American literature. He is the author of numerous works, with a focus on the literature of reform and writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Threau. He is also the co-editor of the primary textbook used in the seminar, the Bedford Anthology of American Literature.