Description: This course will focus on picaresque themes in American literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In it we will discuss why the limits of traditional social structures as family and community are an impossibility for American heroes and what their “lighting out” into the territories suggest about attitudes toward individual and society in American culture. The course will begin with Huckleberry Finn and proceed to writings by Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Kerouac.