Addiction in American Literature

elective courses

The course discusses the representation of alcohol and drug use as well as addiction and abstinence in American literature and culture.

1. Introduction.

2. American temperance movements.

3. Temperance literature.

4. Alcohol and naturalist fiction.

5. Prohibition and the Lost Generation.

6. The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance.

7. Drug use and the Beat Generation.

8. Drug use and the Black Arts Movement.

9. Blaxploitation and Urban Fiction.

10. Post-countercultural works of the 1970s.

11. Alcohol in Native American Literature.

12. Drug use in Native American Literature.

The course opens with an introduction of fundamental theoretical concepts in addiction studies and historical discourses on the use of drugs and alcohol in the US. On the basis of historical texts, we will discuss the shift from the religious concept of intemperance as sin to the medical notion of addiction and the relationship between gender, racial, and class identity and alcohol and drug use. The reading list features selected works of American literature that focus on intemperance as well as alcohol and narcotics, spanning from the 1840s to the present. When discussing the texts, we will examine both their formal aspect as well as their relation to the historical context.

1. Introduction.

2. American temperance movements.

3. Temperance literature.

4. Alcohol and naturalist fiction.

5. Prohibition and the Lost Generation.

6. The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance.

7. Drug use and the Beat Generation.

8. Drug use and the Black Arts Movement.

9. Blaxploitation and Urban Fiction.

10. Post-countercultural works of the 1970s.

11. Alcohol in Native American Literature.

12. Drug use in Native American Literature.

Education at language level B2+.

Alexie, Sherman. The Alcoholic Love Poems. 1994.

Arthur, Timothy Shay. Ten Nights in a Bar-room and What I Saw There. 1854.

Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues.” 1957.

Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch.1962.

Cain, George. Blueschild Baby. 1970.

Crane, Stephen. George’s Mother. 1896.

Dunbar, Paul. The Sport of Gods. 1901.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. 1934.

Hemingway, Ernest. Selected short-stories.

London, Jack. John Barleycorn. 1913.

Sanchez, Sonia. Selected poems.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. 1971.

Thurman, Wallace. Infants of the Spring. 1929.

Whitman, Walt. Franklin Evans; or The Inebriate. 1842.

Barr, Andrew. Drink: A Social History of America. Darby, Pennsylvania: Diane Publishing Company, 1999.

Bloom, Harold, ed. American Naturalism. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004.

Crowley, John William. The White Logic: Alcoholism and Gender in American Modernist Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

Epstein, Barbara Leslie. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.

Fleissner, Jennifer L. Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Fletcher, Holly Berkley. Gender and the American Temperance Movement of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 2007.

Foreman, Pier Gabrielle. Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon, 1965.

Frick, John W. Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Lerner, Michael A. Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Levine, Harry Gene. Demon of the Middle Class: Self-Control, Liquor, and the Ideology of Temperance in the 19th-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Lilienfeld, Jane, and Jeffrey Thomas Oxford. The Languages of Addiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Murdock, Catherine Gilbert. Domesticating Drink: Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Parsons, Elaine Frantz. Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Tracy, Sarah W. Alcoholism in America: From Reconstruction to Prohibition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Knowledge:

- knowledge of fundamental theoretical concepts in addiction studies and new historicism

- acquaintance with the assigned texts

- acquaintance with the historical context necessary for the understanding of the assigned texts

Skills:

- the ability to apply the introduced theoretical tools in a literary analysis

- 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

Attitudes:

- increased aesthetic and ethical sensibility

- increased awareness of the historically changeable signification of drug and alcohol use.

Assessment methods and criteria for this course

Requirements:

Continuous assessment (class preparation and participation): 50%

Final test: 50%

Attendance: no more than 3 absences allowed

Make-up test: oral or written in the instructor's office hours.