Our North American Literature section seeks to do justice to the cultural and ethnic diversity of the United States and Canada and invites students to study classical texts such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter alongside works written by authors from a wide variety of backgrounds: from the Yugoslavian-born poet Charles Simic or the Native American novelist Leslie Marmon Silko to transcultural American writers like Teju Cole and Canadian authors such as Margaret Atwood and Sheila Heti. Texts as diverse as Anne Bradstreet’s elegies, Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative or Isabella Bird’s letters are part of our courses. At our department, we pay close attention to the richness and the intricacies of individual literary texts but also ask ourselves how these texts relate to visual culture (e.g. TV, photography, cinema) and how they are embedded in larger social, cultural and economic contexts. We encourage students to develop awareness of the interesting transatlantic connections between North American literature and other Anglophone literatures. Our teaching covers a wide historical range, reaching from Puritanism to Post-Postmodernism, and reflects our staff members’ research interests and activities.
