American Literature 3301-L1AL
The classes acquaint the students with the most important tendencies and phenomena in the history of American literature. The material for discussion is arranged chronologically and the thematic core of the course is as follows: Native American oral tradition, Puritanism, the Enlightenment, transcendentalism, nineteenth-century prose, nineteenth-century poetry, realism, naturalism, modernist prose, modernist poetry, post-war fiction, post-war poetry, drama, postmodernism, ethnic writing.
Type of course
Prerequisites (description)
Learning outcomes
Knowledge:
- rudimentary knowledge of the history of American literature
- acquaintance with the assigned texts
- understanding of relations between literary texts and their cultural context
Skills:
- the ability to recognize the texts from the reading list: their titles, authors, and historical contexts
- the ability to discuss and interpret the assigned texts
- In class discussions students acquire skills of expressing their thoughts in a clear, coherent, logical and precise manner, with the use of language which is correct grammatically, lexically and phonetically.
Attitudes:
- aesthetic and ethical sensibility and awareness of cultural differences
Assessment criteria
Being prepred for classes (reading the assigned texts in a timely manner)
Participation in class discussions
Attendance as a prerequisite of the final test. A maximum of 3 absences is allowed.
Final test: oral or written test, in person or online depending on the mode of teaching of the specific group
Make-Up: written or oral test (same formula as original test)
Practical placement
N/A
Bibliography
1. THE BEGINNINGS
Tsimshian tribe “Raven Makes a Girl Sick and Then Cures Her”
Anne Bradstreet “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of
Our House”
Edward Taylor “Upon the Sweeping Flood”
2. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING
Jonathan Edwards “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
Benjamin Franklin “Continuation of the Account of my Life, begun at
Passy, near Paris 1784” (from Autobiography)
3. ROMANTICISM 1
Ralph Waldo Emerson “Self-Reliance”
Nathaniel Hawthorne “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”
4. ROMANTICISM 2
Herman Melville “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Edgar Allan Poe “The Cask of Amontillado”
5. NINETEENTH -CENTURY POETRY
Walt Whitman “Song of Myself” (parts 1-6)
Emily Dickinson poems 258, 712, 986
6. REALIST FICTION
Henry James Daisy Miller
Jack London “To Build a Fire”
7. MODERNIST POETRY
Ezra Pound “Pact,” “In a Station of the Metro”
W. C. Williams “The Young Housewife,” “This Is Just To Say”
Langston Hughes “Mulatto”
8. MODERNIST FICTION
Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
9. TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETRY
Allen Ginsberg “Howl” Part One
Sylvia Plath “Lady Lazarus”
Elizabeth Bishop “One Art”
10. TWENTIETH-CENTURY DRAMA
Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire
11. LATE -TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION 1
Robert Coover “The Babysitter”
John Barth "Night-Sea Journey"
12. LATE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION 2
Toni Morrison “Recitatif”
Shirley Jackson "The Lottery"
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: