ENG 426 - Advanced Studies In American Literature

Dates: 01/12/2026 - 05/02/2026

Location: Adlai E. Stevenson Hall 132 (STV 132)

Instructor: Susan Kalter

Class Notes: This semester's topic: The Gulf of Mexico: Readings in the Black Legend and other dabblings in the relations between Mexico/Greater Spanish America and the United States Ever since Queen Elizabeth I, her father, and her grandfather clocked the rising power of Spain as a result of the first voyage of Columbus to the western hemisphere, the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds have been pitched in rivalry with one another over its Native lands. Their sparrings in language over these lands and their people have matched their tremendous wills-to-power on the global stage. Writers in England and then the United States piggybacked on internal controversies and criticisms of the Spanish monarchy from within its Empire, hoping to break its power and raid its riches (in gold and slaves), as exemplified by their amplifications of the Black Legend. Meanwhile, that legend—a narrative conceived by the first modern European crusader for human rights, Bartolomé de las Casas—exposed horrific abuses of Native peoples in the Caribbean and in North and South America by his own people: fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors. In this course, we will look at writings from seven periods of geopolitical and discursive conflict and consensus involving Native, Spanish/Latin American, British/US, and other actors and forces: the US and Mexico in the nineteenth century; the Spanish American War and its aftermaths in Puerto Rico; 1492 as narrated in the 1820s, 1870s, and 1990s; the sixteenth-century invasion of Tenochtitlan in its own later echoes; De Soto’s rampage through the Mississippian civilizations of the Floridas, the Appalachias, and that very storied river; revolutions in the French-speaking Caribbean as seen through Cuban and US lenses; and the present and future of today. Writers we’ll discuss include Cormac McCarthy, Frank Norris, Rosario Ferré, Washington Irving, Thomas King, Manuel de Jesús Galvan, William H. Prescott, Mercy Otis Warren, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Robert J. Conley, Joy Harjo, Alejo Carpentier, Herman Melville, Yuri Herrera, and Valerie Luiselli.