Download BBNAN11300 American Literature Instructor: Márta Pellérdi Email

BBNAN11300
American Literature
Instructor: Márta Pellérdi
Email:[email protected]
Time: Wednesday 14:15-15:45:
Thursday: 8:30-10:00.
Room: 206 (Amb.)
Survey of American Literature from the Beginnings until the End of the
Twentieth Century: Fiction, Poetry and Drama
Spring Term seminar (2016)
Course description: The purpose of the seminar is to provide an overview of American Literature
from the seventeenth until the twentieth century and acquaint students with some of the literary
works of the most well-known American writers, poets, and dramatists through close reading of the
texts assigned for the course. Reading the texts is absolutely necessary for the active discussion
required during the seminar. Some of the texts are available in limited copies at the department
library but in some cases students will have to obtain the necessary reading material from other
sources.
1. Introduction: discussion of course requirements; Puritan Poetry: Anne Bradstreet’s “Before the
Birth of One of Her Children,” and “The Author to Her Book”;
2. Benjamin Franklin: “Preface to Poor Richard Improved” 1758; [“The Way to Wealth”] and
Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle”;
3. Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher”;
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Rappaccini's Daughter” and “Young Goodman Brown”;
5. Herman Melville: “Bartleby, the Scrivener”;
6. Poetry: Carl Sandburg: “Chicago”; E.L. Masters: “Reuben Pantier” and “Emily Sparks”: Ezra
Pound: “The Rest”, “In a Station of the Metro;”
7. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby;
8. Post-war Drama I: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman;
9. Post-war Drama II: Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire;
10. Confessional and Beat Poetry: Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” and Allen Ginsberg’s
“Supermarket in California”;
11. Minimalism: Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”;
12. Evaluation.
Requirements: Regular attendance and (max. 3 absences allowed);
 active participation (25%);
 short tests during lessons (20%);
 one brief introduction to one of the works scheduled for discussion in 8-10
minutes (20%);
 essay: 5-6 page in-depth analysis focusing on a specific feature of any of the
works discussed in class, MLA style: 35% (the deadline for submitting essays is
April 21st);
 academic honesty.
All the short stories can be accessed from the internet and most of the poems can be found in the James E.
Miller Jr., ed. Heritage of American Literature (Chicago, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991)
vols. 1-2, 1991. Copies of the plays are available in the library.