Marrs, Cody
TR 12:45 PM
Park Hall 259
Is there a Great American Novel? If so, what might it be? In this class, we will study seven influential narratives that could be called “the Great American Novel”: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon. We will read each of these novels carefully, examining their style, structure, and philosophy. Throughout the semester, we will try to discover what precisely makes a novel great, and what these narratives tell us about American civilization.