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BTAN3001MA
North American Department, IEAS, University of Debrecen, Fall 2009
American Literary and Cultural History:
Portraits and Landmarks 2
Basic course
Students:
4th year
Time: TH 10:00-11:40
Rm: II.
Make-up classes when needed:
Instructor:
Dr. Zoltán Abádi-Nagy, Professor
Phone:
(52) 512-900/22507 (no voice mail)
E-m: [email protected]
Office hours: TH 12:00-13:00
or by appointment;
Office: 120/2
Prospectus
This retrospective course of study has been designed to foreground, firstly, selected literary
landmarks – main trends and tendencies, peaks of development, as well as major shifts and
turning-points – pertaining to the literary culture of America in the first half of the twentieth
century. It means that students will be systematically introduced to how crucial moments of
culture and literature (naturalism, the Lost Generation, modernism, the development of
women’s literature, the Southern Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago
Renaissance, and many more) are reflected in the three literary genres of prose, poetry, and
drama between c.1900-1945. Secondly, “landmarks” will be followed by “portraits.” The
latter will involve detailed discussions of some select outstanding representatives of the
foregoing “landmarks.” Thus the second half of the semester will focus on some of these
authors as well as on some of their major works: Cather, Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald,
Hemingway, Hurston, O’Neill.
Status of course: required.
Class format: lecture.
Credit: 5 credits
Course requirements: end-of-semester examination
Required reading for the examination: see separate list of required reading below
2
SCHEDULE
Month
September
October
November
Day
Nr
Lecture topics
10
1
Orientation
Social and intellectual background:
The twentieth century and twentieth-century America
Landmarks 1: Genteel Tradition, realists and
naturalists, the muck-rakers, the economic novel, the
political novel
17
2
Landmarks 2: the sociological novel, the war novel, the
Lost Generation, the Jazz Age, High Modernism,
experimentalism
24
3
1
4
Landmarks 3: the Southern Renaissance, the stream-ofconsciousness novel, African American fiction, the
Harlem Renaissance
Landmarks 4: women’s fiction; theoretical aspects—
theorists of the novel and theoretical debates; criticism,
impressionism, symbolism, regionalism, aestheticism;
the humorists; the short story
8
5
Landmarks 5: traditionalism and experimentalism in
poetry (imagism, vorticism, objectivism, free verse,
syllabic versification, music in poetry); the “little
magazines”; sources and influences
15
6
Landmarks 6: Modernism in poetry
29
7
5
8
Landmarks 7: the poetry of social protest; women’s
poetry; regionalism in poetry, Afro-American poetry
(the New Englanders, the Chicago Poets, Southern
Renaissance, Harlem Renaissance)
Portraits 1
F. Scott Fitzgerald
12
9
Portraits 2
Ernest Hemingway
3
Month
November
Day
Nr
19
10
Lecture topics
Portraits 3
William Faulkner
26
11
Portraits 4
Willa Cather
December
3
12
Portraits 5
Zora Neale Hurston
10
13
Portraits 6
T. S. Eliot
17
14
Portraits 7
Eugene O’Neill
Required reading
assigned for the end-of-the-semester examination
Novels
Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady
Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie or Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men
Richard Wright’s Native Son
Drama
Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh
Poetry
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
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Recommended Reading
assigned for the end-of-the-semester examination
As far as preparation for the examination is concerned, no single monograph study will do.
Your best bet is to attend the classes. Monograph studies devoted to twentieth century
American literature as a whole and to the history of the two genres in the first half of the
century in general, or to decades, trends, tendencies, and single authors in particular, are too
numerous. All I can recommend is that you search for relevant material in the MLA
International Bibliography, American Literary Scholarship, Year’s Work in English
Studies, Az amerikai irodalom és irodalomtudomány bibliográfiája, and library catalogues
according to your need and interest. SUBJECT search is always the best idea when the search
is electronic. And there are some important periodicals: American Literature, Southern
Literary Journal, Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, MELUS,
Modern Fiction Studies, Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Novel, Studies in the Novel,
Studies in Short Fiction. Nevertheless, here are some selected basic suggestions,
containing only comprehensive, period, genre, or gender titles—not all of them available
in your library. Explore libraries and bibliographies for more.
Allen, Walter. The Modern Novel in Britain and the United States. New York: Dutton,
1964.
Baker, Jr., Houston. Modernism and the Haarlem Renaissance. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1987.
Baritz, Loren, ed. The Culture of the Twenties. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.
Barrish, Phillip. American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige,
1880-1995. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Bell, William Davitt. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of
a Literary Idea. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993.
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. V. Poetry
and Criticism 1900-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Vol. VI. Prose Writing
1910-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Bloom, Harold, ed. American Women Fiction Writers, 1900-1960. 3 vols. Philadelphia:
Chelsea House, 1997.
Bollobás, Enikő. Tradition and Innovation in American Free Verse: From Whitman to
Duncan. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1986.
---. Az amerikai irodalom története. Budapest: Osiris, 2005.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and Richard Ruland. From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History
of American Literature. New York: Penguin, 1991.
---. The Modern American Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Chafe, William H. The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political
Roles, 1920-1970. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1972.
Cohen, Hennig, ed. Landmarks of American Writing. Washington, D.C.: Forum, 1969.
Cowley, Malcolm. Several books: Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s; A
Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation; Think Back on Us . . .:
A Contemporary Chronicle of the 1930s; —And I Worked at the Writer’s Trade:
Chapters of Literary History, 1918-1978. Various editions.
---. Az amerikai író természetrajza. Budapest: Európa, 1976.
5
Curnutt, Kirk. Ernest Hemingway and the Expatriate Modernist Movement. Literary
Topics, vol. 2. Farmington Hills, MI, Gale, 2000.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. 1977. London: Macmillan, 1996.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American
Poetry, 1908-1934. Cambridge: Cambridge UOP, 2001.
Eisinger, Chester. Fiction of the Forties. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963.
Elliott, Emory, gen. ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York:
Columbia UP, 1988.
---. Columbia History of the American Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion, 1960.
Ford, Boris, ed. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Vol. 9. American
Literature. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
Gray, Richard. American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. London: Longman, 1990.
---. A History of American Literature. London: Blackwell, 2004.
Hapke, Laura. Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work and Fiction in the
American 1930s. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1995.
Kamp, Jim, ed.. Reference Guide to American Literature. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press,
1994.
Kardos László, and Sükösd Mihály, eds. Az amerikai irodalom a XX. században. Budapest:
Gondolat, 1962.
Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose
Literature. New York: Overseas, 19.
Kodolányi Gyula. Amerika ideje: esszék modernizmusról, modernségről. Debrecen:
Kossuth Egyetemi, 2003.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. The Modern Temper.New York: Harcourt, 1929.
Marek, Jane. Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History.
Lexington, KY: UP of Kentucky, 1995.
Országh László, and Virágos Zsolt. Az amerikai irodalom története. Budapest: Eötvös
József, 1997.
Parini, Jay. The Columbia History of American Poetry: From the Puritans to Our Time.
New York: Columbia, 1993.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition.
Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985.
---. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric. Evanston:
Northwestern UP, 1990.
Reynolds, Guy. Twentieth-Century American Women’s Fiction: A Critical Introduction.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
Rubin, Louis D., and Robert D. Jacobs, eds. South: Modern Southern Literature in its
Cultural Setting. 1961. Westport: Greenwood, 1974.
---, gen. ed. The History of Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985.
Stevick, Philip, ed. The American Short Story, 1900-1945. Boston: Twayne, 1984.
Swados, Harvey, ed. The American Writer and the Great Depression. Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
Tallack , Douglas. Twentieth-Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural
Context. London: Longman 1991.
Vadon, Lehel. Az amerikai irodalom és irodalomtudomány bibliográfiája Magyarországon
2000-ig. Eger: EKTF, 2007.
6
Van O’Connor, William, ed. Forms of Modern Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1948.
---,ed. Seven Modern American Novelists: An Introduction. New York: Mentor, 1959.
---, ed. Modern American Novelists. New York: Washington Square, 1973.
Virágos Zsolt. A négerség és az amerikai irodalom. Budapest: Akadémiai, 1975.
---. The Modernists and Others: The American Literary Culture in the Age of the
Modernist Revolution. Debrecen: Angol—Amerikai Intézet, 2006.
---. Cf. Országh László.
Westbrook, Max, ed. The Modern American Novel: Essays in Criticism. New York:
Random, 1966.
Wintz, Cary D. Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance. College Station, TX: Texas
A&M UP, 1996.

BTAN 3001 MA
AMERICAN LITERARY AND CULTURAL HISTORY:
Portraits and Landmarks II
A lecture course in 19th-century American literature
Instructor:
Gabriella Varró
Time:
Th 12.00–13.40
Place:
MBlg. II
Instructor’s Office Hours: M. 11.00–12.00, Th 11.00–12.00, 116/1
Phone:
52-512-900/22152
Email:
[email protected]
PROSPECTUS:
This retrospective course of study has been designed to foreground selected literary and
cultural historical processes, peaks of development, theoretical issues, authorial
achievements, as well as major shifts and turning-points pertaining to the literary culture of
19th-century America. Representative examples of selected themes will include varieties of
American thought in classic U.S. literature, shifting paradigms in American culture,
canonicity, the restructuring of U.S. literature, the special problematic of American
naturalism (as opposed to European naturalisms), contradictory impulses of American
naturalism, peaks of literary maturity (the 1850s), cultural myths in America, the cultural
situation of the American writer, institutions of the literary culture, and literary awards.
I. SCHEDULE of CLASSES
1. Sept. 10. The American Renaissance: major cultural currents: Puritanism versus
Transcendentalism; Classification of American authors in the 19th century
2. Sept. 17. Transcendentalism and Its Legacy (I): Emerson – The Foundations of
Transcendental Philosophy (Native and Foreign sources, credo), the essays
3. Sept. 24. Transcendentalism and Its Legacy (II): Thoreau and his Walden and
“On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” Notions of progress, social development and
social change
2
4. Oct. 01. Transcendentalism and Its Legacy (III): Transcendentalism and Utopia,
Brook Farm, Fruitland, Walden, and other reform experiments/movements: labor,
anti-slavery, education.
5. Oct. 08. The Making of American Myths (I): Benjamin Franklin and the Myth of
the Self-Made Man (vertical mobility, Horatio Alger, The Great Gatsby)
The Making of American Myths (II): The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of
Industrialisation.
6. Oct. 15. The new literature, major figures of the 19th century (I) – New York and the
Knickerbocker group: George Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and
William Cullen Bryant
7. Oct. 29. The new literature, major figures of the 19th century (II): Edgar Allan
Poe and the beginnings of Literary Theory: “The Poetic Principle,” “Philosophy of
Composition”—The Bicentennial Anniversary of Poe’s birth
8. Nov. 05. The new literature, major figures of the 19th century (III): Nathaniel
Hawthorne, allegories of Puritan America in his tales.
9. Nov. 12. The new literature, major figures of the 19th century (IV): Herman
Melville’s unique vision of race and ethnicity. The writing of the great American
epic: Moby-Dick and its relevance
10. Nov. 19. The new literature, major figures of the 19th century (V): Feminist
writing in 19th -century America: the Feminist Movement, Margaret Fuller, Kate
Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
11. Nov. 26. From Slavery to Emancipation: Aspects of African American Thought
(Phyllis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass,), the genre of the slave
narrative;
12. Dec. 03. Some Theoretical Problems and Dilemmas of American Naturalism
(Stephen Crane, Dreiser)
13. Dec. 10. Branches of regional humor and Mark Twain
14. Dec. 17. The great poets of the 19th century: Walt Whitman vs. Emily
Dickinson
3
II. Criticism, Optional Background Readings:
1. Zsolt K. Virágos. Portraits and Landmarks: The American Literary Culture in the 19th
Century. 2nd edition, Debrecen: IEAS, 2007.
2. Sarbu, Aladár. The Reality of Appearances: Vision and Representation in Emerson,
Hawthorne, and Melville. Budapest: Akadémia, 1996.
3. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Seltzer, 1923.
4. Matthiessen, F. O.. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson
and Whitman London: Oxford UP, 1941.
5. Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst, MA: The Johns
Hopkins UP, 1989.
6. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Stein and Day, 1960.
7. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of
Industrialization, 1800-1890. Oklahoma.: U of Oklahoma P, 1999.
8. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New
York: Oxford UP, 1986.
9. Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.
10. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New
York: Knopf, 1993.
III. Compulsory Readings for the end of the semester colloquium:
POETRY:
Edgar Allan POE, "The Raven," "Ulalume," "Annabel Lee," “To Helen," "The
Conqueror Worm,"
4
Emily DICKINSON, poems numbered 49, 67, 214, 258, 303, 328, 341, 441, 449, 453,
478, 511, 585, 712, 829, 986, 1072, and 1175
Walt WHITMAN, "Song of Myself" (paragraphs 1-21, 24, 33, 40, 41, 51, 52), "Out of
the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
TALES & SHORT STORIES:
Edgar Allan POE, "The Purloined Letter," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "A Descent
into the Maelström," "The Cask of Amontillado"
Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, "Young Goodman Brown," "Rappaccini's Daughter," "My
Kinsman, Major Molineaux"
Herman MELVILLE, "Benito Cereno", "Bartleby, the Scrivener,"
Stephen CRANE, "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," "The Bride Comes to Yellow
Sky"
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE AND ESSAYS:
Edgar Allan POE: “Poetic Principle”, "The Philosophy of Composition," Review of
Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales
Ralph Waldo EMERSON: “Nature,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar,”
“Divinity School Address,” “The Poet”
Henry David THORAU: “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.”
Walt WHITMAN: Preface to Leaves of Grass
NOVELS:
Henry David THOREAU: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1845) (chapters II, and
conclusion)
Nathaniel HAWTHORNE: The Scarlet Letter (1850)
5
Mark TWAIN: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Stephen CRANE: The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Frederick DOUGLASS: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, A Slave (1845)
(selections)
Kate CHOPIN: The Awakening (1899)
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Students are kindly requested to download and print the syllabi, and turn up at the first
class of the courses with the hard copy of their syllabi. To download them, please click on
the hyperlinks.