The final week has just been finished of the Survey of American Literature class. Throughout this lecture, I hope, students have obtained literary knowledge that covers not only mere biographical information about American literary writers but what these writers wrote as well as what they expressed through their literature. This experience will surely encourage the students to think about themselves by connecting directly what they learned with what happens (and is about to happen) in the 21st-century Japan. As we look backward, we started from semi-literary works written in the 17th-century America (prior to the American independence) and surveyed down through the modernist works that dominated the early 20th-century America (just before the World War II). The country was, is and will be so drastic that never stops changing. One of the important fruits that have been made by these changes might be called “American literature.” It is expected that the students would kick out the narrow frame of “literature” and move onto another academic realm adjacent to literary studies which I have focused on throughout this lecture.
