American Literature II

general courses

Równoległy udział w ćwiczeniach towarzyszących wykładowi.

This lecture presents developments in U.S. literature following the Civil War, focusing on aesthetics as well as ideological sources and cultural contexts. We begin with Mark Twain and the rise of realism, examine naturalism and local color fiction, and look at the work of Henry James in some detail. After discussing the socially engaged literature of the thirties, we go on to examine key writers of Modernism, both poetry and prose, with the Harlem Renaissance discussed in a separate lecture. Major currents and schools in 20th century poetry are presented, as well as key developments in drama. Postmodernism is examined both as literary experimentation and a trend in cultural and literary theory. The final weeks are devoted to the diversity of recent American writing: the literature of various ethnic groups, key women writers since the 70s, the literary responses to 9/11 etc.

1. Introductory Lecture

Styles of interpretation – aesthetics, politics and the place of literature in American Studies; significance of debates about race to post-Civil War culture and literature.

2. Reading Race, Reading Twain

Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B DuBois – two visions of African Americans’ progress in America; Mark Twain’s development as a writer; Huck Finn and the realist conventions; innocent eye narration, symbolism, role of nature, frontier, sources of humor; politics of the novel race and the novel’s “flawed” ending.

3. Key Social and Ideological Currents at the Turn of the Century

Social Darwinism and its cultural significance in the Gilded Age; Frederick Jackson Turner and the impact of frontier myth on popular culture and literature; Conspicuous consumption – Veblen’s theory and its cultural significance; the changing role of women – domesticity under scrutiny, the suffrage movement and the rise of the New Woman (Gilman, Stanton, Chopin).

4. Realism, Naturalism and Local Color Fiction

Realism – narrative techniques, perspective, themes, philosophical assumptions; the art of Henry James; naturalism and its relation to determinism; regionalism and local color fiction as expression of nostalgia and response to industrialization; Edith Wharton’s study of the social elites.

5. Introduction to Modernism

Sources of the modernist turn (philosophical, social, ecoomic, cultural); The Lost Generation and the Jazz Age; Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby - narrative structure, symbolism, treatment of American Dream; Hemingway’s and Stein’s stylistic innovations

6. Modernist Poetry

Modernist poetics – key features of a modern poem; the idea of impersonality and tradition; focus on Pound and Eliot; Williams, Stevens and other important poets.

7. Modernist Prose - Focus William Faulkner

Faulkner’s formal experimentation (representing time and consciousness); Faulkner’s South and his politics (history, race and gender); modernism’s relation to realism and postmodernism; Sinclair Lewis - realism in the 20s.

8. The Harlem Renaissance

Social and political background of the Harlem Renaissance; debates concerning racial identity; major texts and authors; visual art and music; primitivism as a part of modernist aesthetic and subject of controversy; Harlem Renaissance as integral part of Modernism.

9. Literature and Social Responsibility (the 30s and 40s)

The Great Depression and the turn towards social issues in art and literature; Federal Writers’ Project and the turn to the left; Southern Agrarians, the New Critics and 30s conservatism; John Dos Passos and his U.S.A. trilogy; John Steinbeck and his social protest novels; Richard Wright and his naturalist treatment of American racism.

10. American Drama in the 20th Century

Overview of American drama, its aesthetic developments, cultural significance, key representatives O’Neill, Odets, Miller, Albee, Williams, Mamet and beyond…

11. The 1950s and 60s – Conformity and Rebellion

American postwar conservatism; the value of tradition and the problem of conformity; suburbia as a state of mind and literary theme; post-war realist prose (Bellow, Roth, Updike); New Journalism; new literature of the South (O‘Connor, Welty); literature and civil rights (Baldwin, Ellison); new generation of women writers and the impact of feminism.

12. Major currents in American poetry since 1945

Confessional poetry; the Beat poets; Black Mountain Poets; New York School; African American and ethnic poets.

13. Postmodernism

Postmodernism in cultural theory; the impact of post-structuralism; postmodernism as an aesthetic: meta-fiction; self-reflexivity; simulacra; inter-textuality; irony; parody; pastiche; postmodernism as a current in literature; key authors, key texts.

14. Multiculturalism

The impact of ethnic diversity and changing attitudes towards race and ethnicity on the canon of U.S. literature; the canon wars in historical perspective; key texts of the multicultural turn, their distinctive structural and thematic features.

15. Contemporary U.S. literature

Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a key text of recent US literature (postmodern technique, political impact; question of collective memory; the trauma slavery, guilt, identity); literary responses to 9/11; a brief look at important and popular writers active today (Franzen, Foer, Munro, Lahiri)

Primary literature (note that not all texts are obligatory)

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (3-4 of the following chapters: 1-9; 12, 14,15, 16 19, 31, 39, 42-43; but Chapter 31 is required for all)

Bret Harte, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat”; Jack London, "The South of the Slot"; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and "Why I Wrote…”; Kate Chopin, "Desiree’s Baby”

Henry James: “Daisy Miller: A Study,” “The Jolly Corner”; Hart Crane, “The Open Boat,” Jack London, “The Law of Life”; Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron,” Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, “A New England Nun”; Edith Wharton, from: The House of Mirth (Chapter XV of book I) or “The Other Two”

F. S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Gertrude Stein, from The Making of Americans (Introduction); Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “The Indian Camp,” “The Battler”

Ezra Pound: “To Whistler, American”; “Portrait d’une Femme”; “A River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”; “In a Station of the Metro”; Canto I; T.S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; “The Wasteland” (part I); Wallace Stevens: “Of Modern Poetry”; “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”;“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”; “The Snow Man”; William Carlos Williams: “Spring and All”; “To Elsie”; “The Red Wheelbarrow”; “This is Just to Say”; “Young Sycamore”; H.D.: “Mid-Day”; “Helen”; Robert Frost: “After Apple-Picking”; “The Wood-Pile,” “The Road Not Taken”; “Home Burial”

William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily”, “Barn Burning,” “That Evening Sun” ; Sinclair Lewis: from Babbit (a fragment)

Langston Hughes: “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” ; Jean Toomer: Cane (as excerpted in Norton); Claude Mc Kay: “If We Must Die,” “The Lynching,” “America”; Langston Hughes: “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”; “The Weary Blues”, “I, Too”; “Mulatto”; Zora Neale Hurston: “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”’; Countee Cullen: “Yet Do I Marvel”

John Dos Passos, from U.S.A (the selection from Norton); John Steinbeck, “The Leader of the People” (Norton), a fragment of Grapes of Wrath; Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow”; Ralph Ellison, from Invisible Man (Prologue; Chapter 1) (Norton)

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman; Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire; Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night; David Mamet, Glengarry Glenn Ross, or any other major American play of your choice

John Updike, “The Happiest I’ve Been”; Philip Roth,“Epstein”; Norman Mailer, “The Time of Her Time”; James Baldwin, “Going to Meet the Man”; Eudora Welty, “Where is that Voice Coming From?”

Allen Ginsberg, Howl (I); Robert Lowell, “Man and Wife,” “For the Union Dead”; Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus”; Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish,” “At the Fishouses,” “Questions of Travel”; Frank O’Hara, “Digression on Number 1, 1948,” “Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!),” “The Day Lady Died”, “Why I Am Not a Painter” Gwendolyn Brooks, “a song in the front yard,” “We Real Cool,” “The Ballad of Rudolph Reed”

John Barth, “Nightsea Journey,” Toni Morrison, “Recitatif,” Sandra Cisneros, “Mericans”; Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue”; Sherman Alexie, “This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”; Bharati Mukherjee “A Wife’s Story”

Jonathan Franzen, “Good Neighbors,” (opening chapter of Freedom); Raymond Carver, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love?” (1981); Alice Munro, “Meneseteung” (1989); Annie Proulx, “The Half-Skinned Steer” (1999)

Secondary literature

a. Malcolm Bradbury, Richard Ruland, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. New York 1992

b. Richard Gray, A Brief History of American Literature. Chichester 2011

Students gain a general knowledge of the key genres, aesthetic developments and representatives of US literature since the Civil War.

They develop an understanding of how these developments are linked to broad cultural trends as well as social and political transformations in America in this period.

They gain a sense of the variety of methodologies and perspectives and methods available in literary American studies and how these perspectives affect the interpretation of literature.

They understand and develop their own positions on critical controversies concerning the study of American literature (canon construction; race and identity as contested constructs; politics and aesthetics; multiculturalism, etc.).

Final exam: quotes recognition; multiple choice brief essay questions (maximum 50 points)

• Note: exam includes both general questions based on the lecture and background reading and questions referring to specific texts assigned in sections.

• For students who pass the exam (earn at least 26 points), the exam result is then increased by credit earned in sections: 10 extra points for a 5+; 8 extra points for a 5; 6 points for a 4+; 4 points for a 4.