School
of American and Canadian Studies
American Literature
2: Since 1900
Q4 A 220
Semester Two:
2000-2001
Module Tutors: Pete
Messent and Anna Notaro
Module Name: American
Literature 2: Since 1900
Module Code: Q4A220
Level: A
Year: 2000-2001
Semester: Two
Module Convenor: Peter
Messent
Module Tutors Peter
Messent and Anna Notaro
Module Tutors’
Office Hours: To
be posted on office doors (Trent B68 and B42 respectively) and announced in
class
Prerequisites: None
Course Description:
The purpose of this course is to provide an introduction
to American Literary Culture in the period from 1900 to the present. The period
starts with a modernised
This module follows in sequence from American Literature
1 (to1900) though students from outside the American Studies Department can
take this module as a free-standing one. As in American Literature 1, we do not
aim in any way for total coverage of a period here. This would be impossible
within the time constraints involved. Instead, the module focuses on a series
of key representative texts that will be discussed in detail in seminars and
lectures. We intend that you should read carefully all the texts named below,
with seminar discussion then generally focused on one part of that reading. It
is hoped, and intended, that the material to which you are introduced will act
as a springboard for further work on your part. We expect you to read as much
of, and as widely as possible in, the American literature of this period as it
is represented in the Anthology. This will not only increase your general
understanding of the subject but prepare you for the more specialised courses
which will follow (for many of you) later in your degree. This is the period in
which the
The designated text is THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE, FIFTH EDITION, VOLUME TWO, edited by Nina Baym and others,
available from the University bookshop. You need not buy any other text for the
module. This anthology contains a very large selection of texts and should
allow you to browse in particular fields and authors that take your interest.
The first priority in the module is clearly the specified reading for the
lectures and seminars, but your second priority should be reading other texts
from the Anthology that are not on the syllabus. You should now be gradually
starting to build up your reading of secondary (critical) texts, and to use
these as you approach your essays, but your main emphasis should be on the
primary reading.
Objectives:
1. To introduce students to a wide range of American
literature in the period, and its historical and cultural context.
2. To introduce students to the methods required for the
analysis of literary and cultural texts at degree level.
Method and Frequency of Classes.
Generally there will be two lectures a week and one seminar, but this may occasionally be altered to allow for forum discussion in place of a lecture (with small group work followed by report and feedback to the larger group). Lectures will generally be used to place the weekly readings in terms both of the development of different literary forms (narrative, poetry, drama) and their development in the period, and in giving an understanding of the larger cultural context in which such texts belong. Weekly seminars will meet in groups of ten (as the norm) to discuss in detail some specific texts or texts from the week’s reading.
Group lecture times: Monday 10am (Arts Centre Lecture
Theatre, by South Entrance) and Tuesday 9 a.m (Portland LTB9). Seminar groups
and times to be arranged separately. Students
are required to attend all classes, both lectures and seminars. If you are
unable for any reason to attend, please inform your lecturer or tutor, with any
documentation that may be necessary. Students who fail to attend will
be reported to the School’s Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Assessment:
Students must write two essays, 2000 words each in
length.
We suggest that the first essay be written on material
to which you have already been introduced by this stage of the module. The essay deadline is 12 noon on Thursday
15th March.
As you will notice the essay titles broaden out as they
go on, and there are three essays right at the end of the essay list that allow
you to take on ambitious topics. You are encouraged to do so if you feel
confident enough. The second essay
deadline is 12 noon on Wednesday May 9th.
Course-work essays should normally be typed or
word-processed. Neat hand-written papers are acceptable where a student has no
access to the above facilities or has not yet learned to use them. Each essay
counts for 25% of the final module mark.
In the final examination (date to be announced later)
students will be required to answer two questions referring to two or three
different texts (at a minimum) as they do so. This is where the reading you do
for the lectures will be important, and where any further reading you have done
in the Anthology could also pay dividends, since the more you have been able to
read, the better informed and the wider-ranging your answers should be. The
exam will be two hours in length and will count for 50% of the final mark.
Pete Messent’s phone number is 9514265 and e-mail Peter.Messent@nottingham.ac.uk
Anna Notaro’s phone number is 9514241 and e-mail Anna.Notaro@nottingham.ac.uk
Students will be required to fill out a questionnaire
assessing the module at the end of semester.
Schedule of Lectures, Seminars and Required
All page references to the Norton Anthology
You are expected to read all texts specified below. Where the seminar will focus on just one of those texts, that text is underlined and italicised.
Week of 29 January and 5th February: Into the Twentieth Century:
Charlotte
Perkins Gilman: ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and ‘Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”’, pp. 656-670
Stephen Crane, ‘The Open Boat’, pp. 743-60.
Theodore Dreiser, ‘Old Rogaum and His Theresa’: pp. 792-805.
In the first
seminar, we will look closely at the opening of the Crane and Dreiser stories.
In the second, we will focus on the Gilman material.
Weeks of 12 and 19 February: Poetry 1:
Selections from Robert Frost (‘Mending Wall’, ‘Home
Burial’, ‘After Apple-Picking’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Desert
Places’ ‘Design’) and William Carlos Williams (‘Spring and All’, ‘The Red
Wheelbarrow’, ‘The Wind Increases’,
‘This is Just to Say’, ‘The Dance’ (1944), ‘Burning the Christmas Greens’):
Week Two: T. S. Eliot: ‘The Waste Land’. See Anthology. Tutors may specify
additional poems to read for seminars.
Week of 26 February: Modernism:
William
Faulkner: As I Lay Dying: pp. 1532-1630.
Week
of 5 March:
Gertrude Stein, From The Making of Americans, pp. 1093-95 (‘a history of each one of them’). From Tender Buttons: pp. 1105-1107 (‘May not be strange to’).
Ernest
Hemingway: ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ (not in Anthology: copies to be
distributed).
John Dos Passos: from
F. Scott Fitzgerald: ‘
Week
of 12 March.
African-American Writing:
Zora Neale Hurston: ‘How It Feels to be a Colored Me’ (1436-38), From Their Eyes Were Watching God (1147-56)
Ralph Ellison: From Invisible Man, pp. 1883-1901
Week
of 19 March:
Eugene
O’Neill: Long Day’s Journey Into Night: pp. 1289-1367.
Week
of 23 April:
Drama 2: David
Mamet: Glengarry Glen Ross: pp. 2313-48
Week
of 30 April:
Poetry 2: Selections from Robert Lowell (‘My Last
Afternoon…’, ‘Skunk Hour’, ‘For the Union Dead’; Sylvia Plath (‘Lady Lazarus’,
‘Daddy’), Allen Ginsberg (Part 1 of ‘Howl’) and Frank O'Hara (‘A Step Away from
Them’, ‘The Day Lady Died’). See Anthology. Close reading of particular poems in
seminars (tutors may specify additional poems to read).
(Bank Holiday on
Monday. Monday seminar classes to be re-scheduled)
Recent Fiction: A
selection: Gerald Vizenor, ‘Almost
Browne’: (2158-63). Raymond Carver, ‘Cathedral’ (2197-2208), Sandra Cisneros: ‘My Lucy Friend Who Smells
Like Corn’ etc. (2375-84).
Coursework Essay Questions
Do not cover the same subject matter in the two of your
essays (i.e. do not do two essays on gender role or the relation of private to
public etc.). Generally we allow you here to focus on the texts studied for the
module. But if you wish to explore the work of any author further please feel
very free to do so. If you are working on any of the poets we have studied you
will need to work on the full selection of poems given in the Anthology, and
are encouraged to read beyond this too.
1
Take
one passage of no more than fifteen lines from any text we are studying. Give a
close
analytic reading of
that passage illustrating the distinctive artistic techniques used by that
writer and the particular thematic concerns that emerge. Then place the passage
both in the larger context of the work from which it is taken and the
historical and/or cultural context that surrounds it.
2.
Discuss
the relationship between the agency of the individual subject and environmental
conditioning (the
pressures of the surrounding world) in any one or two of the readings done in
weeks one and two (Dreiser, Gilman, Crane).
3.
Discuss
what you find distinctive about the style and narrative technique of any prose
writer studied on this module and the relationship in their work between style
and content (you can restrict yourself to the individual text we have read).
4.
Discuss
the representation of space in any one or two texts on this module.
5.
Discuss
and illustrate the importance of one of the following subjects in the poetry of
Frost, Eliot or Williams:
The use
of the first person voice
Fragmentation
and discontinuity
The use
of metaphor
The
relationship between word and world
6.
Why
do you think Faulkner uses the particular narrative technique he does in
writing As I Lay Dying ?
OR
Discuss the
relationship between word and action in As I Lay Dying ?
7.
Does
any meaning emerge from Gertrude Stein’s writing. What do you think she gains
by making her work so resistant to easy readerly access?
8.
Discuss
the movement between the different sections (Newsreel, Camera Eye, conventional
narrative) in Dos Passos and what he achieves in this interaction?
9.
Discuss
the relationship between the public and the private world in ‘Babylon
Revisited’ and ‘Hills Like White Elephants’.
OR
Identify the major
stylistic differences between Hemingway and Fitzgerald in ‘Hills Like White
Elephants’ and ‘Babylon Revisited’
OR
Discuss the
representation of gender role in Hemingway and Stein (you may if you wish
focus just on the set texts you
have read, though you will need to do further reading of the Stein extracts).
10.
Discuss
the representation of racial difference in either Hurston or Ellison’s work
(please read the full Anthology selection before doing this question).
11. Discuss how either O’Neill in Long Day’s Journey
into Night, or Mamet in Glengarry Glen
Ross, use the full range of the language of the theatre
(words, actions, setting, dramatic scenes, and tableaux etc.) to foreground
their thematic concerns?
12.
Discuss
the representation of the self, and the relationship of that self to the larger
historical world in any one or two of the poets studied in Week Ten (Lowell,
Plath etc.).
OR
Discuss the
differences in poetic technique, and what you see as the results of those differences, in any one or two of the
poets studied in Week Ten.
13.
Discuss
any one or two of the texts studied in Week Eleven (Carver, Cisneros etc) in
terms of the relationship between narrative technique and subject matter.
14.
State
briefly what you understand by one of the following terms and use a selection
of texts to illustrate: realism, naturalism, modernism, postmodernism (we would
suggest here that you
focus on two
or three key features of these movements and illustrate closely with reference
to your selected texts.
15. Take two novels or plays or a representative range
of poetry by any writer named in the Anthology and discuss what you
see as formally and thematically distinctive about their work.
16. Write a short piece of prose (500 words maximum) or
poetry (40 lines maximum) in the style
of one of the writers you have
studied. (you are encouraged to read more than the work appearing in the Anthology).
Then take 1200-1500 words to explain the problems you faced as you went about this task, as you
identified and attempted to imitate the mix of stylistic tactics and thematic motifs in
that author's work.
Secondary
You will find books and articles written on the majority
of the authors we are studying in the Hallward Library. We encourage you to
fully explore the library’s resources, asking advice of the American Studies
subject librarians (Val Housley and Deborah Bragan-Turner on Level Four) where
you need their help. The module convenor will also be happy to give
recommendations and advice too. Start by looking up the author’s name in the
library catalogue and see what critical studies are available. In general the
more recent the book, the more likely it is to contain some kind of resume of
critical consensus on an author or text up to that point. Don’t forget too the
critical journals and the resources they offer (the MLA Bibliography on CD Rom
in the Library is an invaluable resource here). And the Yahoo site is a good
place to start looking for materials on the Web. Here is a list of general
books which may prove useful to you. The majority are in short loan. Any not in
SL are asterisked:
Charles Altieri Enlarging
the
Gerald Berkowitz American
Drama of the Twentieth Century
Chris Bigsby The
Second Black Renaissance*
A
Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century American Drama,
Vols. 1 and 2.
Mutlu Blasing American
Poetry: The Rhetoric of its Forms
Malcolm Bradbury Years
of the Modern: The Rise of Realism and Naturalism,
in
Marcus Cunliffe (ed) American Literature to 1900*
The
Modern American Novel
Malcolm Bradbury
and J.
McFarlane Modernism
Malcolm Bradbury
and Richard
Ruland From Puritanism to
Postmodernism: A History of American Literature
R. W. Butterfield (ed.) Modern
American Poetry
Ruby Cohn New
American Dramatists, 1960-1990
Joanne Feit Diehl Women
Poets and the American Sublime*
Henry Louis Gates Reading
Black, Reading Feminist
Black
Literature and Literary Theory
Richard Godden Fictions
of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer
Richard Gray American
Poetry of the Twentieth Century
Ihab Hassan Contemporary
American Literature: 1945-72*
Daniel Hoffman The
Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing
Richard Howard Alone
With
Linda Hutcheon A
Poetics of Postmodernism
Hugh Kenner A
Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers
Jacob Korg Language
in Modern Literature: Innovation and Experiment
Susan Juhasz Naked
and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women*
Brian Lee American
Fiction: 1865-1940
David Lodge The
Modes of Modern Writing*
Larry McCafferty
and Tom
LeClair Anything Can Happen:
Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists*
Brian McHale Postmodernist
Fiction
Jay Martin Harvests
of Change: American Literature 1865-1914*
Ann Massa American
Literature in Context: 1900-1930
Kevin McNamara Urban
Verbs: Acts and Discourses of American Cities
Peter Messent New
Charles Molesworth The
Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry
Hana Wirth Nester City Codes: reading the Modern Urban
Novel
Peter Nicholls Modernisms: A Literary
Guide
Michael North Race
and Modernist Literature
Marjorie Perloff The
Poetics of Indeterminacy*
Sheila Roberts Still
the Frame Holds: Essays on Women Poets and Writers
M. L. Rosenthal The
New Poets
Charles Ruas Conversations
with American Writers*
Elaine Showalter Sister’s
Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing*
Eric Sundquist American
Realism: New Essays*
Tony Tanner City
of
Geoffrey Thurley The
American Moment: American Poetry at Mid- Century*
Helen Vendler Part
of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets
R. Von Hallberg American
Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980
Linda Wagner-Martin The
Modern American Novel 1914-45
Patricia Waugh Metafiction*
Liz Yorke Impertinent
Voices: Subversive Strategies in Contemporary Women's Poetry*
You may find the following reading on General Critical
Approaches helpful (all in short loan)
Catherine Belsey Critical
Practice
S. Rimmon Kenan Narrative
Fiction
D. Tallack (ed) Literary
Theory at Work: Three Texts
T. Eagleton Literary
Theory: An Introduction
R. Reising The
Unusable Past
H.L. Gates Black
Literature and Literary Theory
A. Durant & N.Fabb Literary
Studies in Action
S. Gilbert & S. Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic
C. Brown & K. Olson Feminist
Criticism
Judith Butler Gender
Troubles