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Andrzej Diniejko 

AN INTRODUCTION

TO AMERICAN LITERATURE

LECTURE NOTES

WITH ASSIGNMENTS

(Work in progress)

Kielce 2004

Contents

I.                    Syllabus, Reading List and Examination Topics

I.                    An Introduction to American Literature. Lecture Notes with Assignments

1.           The Colonial Period (Puritan Literature)

1.1        Features of Puritan Religion, Ethic,Mentality and Imagination.

1.2        Meaning of America to the Earliest Settlers.

1.3        Puritan Literature; Major Motifs, Language and Style; John Winthrop, Anne

           Bradstreet, Edward Taylor.

2.           The Revolutionary Period

2.1.                                                                                                                                                         The American Enlightenment; Native and Foreign Roots.

2.2.                                                                                                                                                         Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards: Pragmatism of Secular Mentality     

           Versus Puritan Tradition.

2.3.                                                                                                                                                         Literature Voicing Political Ideas: Jefferson, Franklin, Crevecoueur as Makers of

           American National Myths.

3.          The Rise of National Literature

3.1.      Washington Irving's Preromanticism.

4.            The Early Development of National Literature, 1820-1865

4.1      American Romanticism, 1820-1865

4.2      American Mythology in The Leatherstocking Tales BY James Fenimore    

                        Cooper.

4.3.          Edgar Allan Poe's Prose and Poetry. Tales of Horror and Ratiocination; The Motif of Imagination and Logic; Significance of Poe's Literary Criticism.

4.4.          American Transcendentalism; Its Basic Tenets and Their Implications for Literature; Emerson's and Thoreau's Concepts of Individualism and Nonconformism; Impact of Transcendentalism upon later American Literature.

4.5.          The Poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Notions of the Nation and the Individual. Concepts of the Poet's Task, Means and Objectives.Formal Characteristics of Their Poetics.

4.6.          American Romantic Fiction: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Moral Issues, Elements of Romance, Allegory and Symbol, Ambiguity and Paradox; Elements of Puritan Tradition.

5.                The Birth of Realism in American.

5.1.          The Gilded Age; Forces in the Shaping of American Realism.

5.2.          Local Colour and Journalism.

5.3.          Mark Twain's Writings; Social Judgement, Humour; Narration.

6.                Psychological Realism at the Turn of the Century.

6.1.                 Henry James; His Study of Characters and Manners; International Theme;  

           Features of Narration.

6.2.                              Kate Chopin as a Representative of the Century Women Writers - Their    

                        Concerns and Literary Methods.

7.                       American  Naturalism; Its Social and Philosophical Background.

7.1.                             Stephen Crane as an Early American Naturalist.

7.2.                             Theodore Dreiser's Vision of Man and Society.

8.                      American Poetry at the Beginning of the 20th Century. Poets of Transition:

                      Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sadnburg.

8.1.              The Achievement of Robert Frost; The Realistic and Symbolic Layers of His  

        Poetry.

9.        Modernist Poetry and Its Distinctive Features.

9.1.              Ezra Pound and the Significance of Imagism.

9.2.              T.S. Eliot's Role in the Shaping of American Modernism.

9.3.              The Poetry of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens.

10.    The “Lost Generation” Writers and Other Major American Prose Writers Before  

        World War II.

10.1.        Francis Scott Fitzgerald as the Chronicler of the Jazz Age.

10.2.        Ernest Hemingway's Prose and Literary Techniques.

10.3.        Hemingwayan Hero and the Portrait of American Expatriates.

10.4.        William Faulkner's Prose. The Picture of the South and His Formal

            Innovations.

10.5.        Sinclair Lewis's Middle Class America.

10.6.        John Steinbeck's Prose.

11.        The Post-war American Novel. Its Social and Historical Background. Major

            Figures of the Realistic Novel.

11.1.        The Fiction of Saul Bellow, John Updike; Their Concepts and Techniques.

11.2.        Changes in American Prose in the 60s and 70s: Postmodernism and

            Metafiction. John Barth and Kurt Vonnegut.

11.3.        American Ethnic Writers of the 20th Century. Afro-American Literature:  

            James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison.

12.       American Drama. Formal Innovations. The Motif of Alienation and the

13.       American Dream.

13.1.        Eugene O'Neill.

13.2.        Arthur Miller.

13.3.        Tennesssee Williams.

13.4.        Edward Albee and the Theatre of the Absurd.

14.        Major American Poets After Modernism: the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat 

           Generation Poets.

14.1              Allen Ginsberg

14.2              Confessional Poetry: Sylvia Plath.

14.3              Other Forms of Contemporary Poetry: Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke,

           Creeley, Bly and Their Diverse Concepts of Poetry.

Preface

The Lecture Notes acompany an introductory course in the history of American literature offered to college students. We shall consider some of the shaping ideas and forms in American literature from its beginnings in the late 17th Century and follow these ideas and forms through the 19th Century into the end of the 20th Century. Along the way we will be reflecting on the ways in which literature we are examining engages with ideas and with social conditions and historical moments. We shall consider to what extent the literary texts promote  such national myths as the "American Dream" and to what extent they may subvert or argue with them. You will find most of the American poetry texts in my booklet A Poet’s Corner. Selection of English and American Poetry. Skrypt dla studentów. Kielce, 2000. This material will be referred to in the lectures.

Lecture Notes is a compilation from various sources. Extensive quotations from one source are presented in boxes and acknowledged.

Periods of American literature