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History of American Literature
(Pre-Colonial to Romantic)
Course Description

Name of the subject: American Literary History
Specialization: translatological
Program: 3+2
Type of program: full-time, B.A. (first-level)
Form of instruction: a lecture
Hours of instruction: ?
Semester: 3
ECTS Credits: ?

General description: The hereby presented course focuses upon America in the narrow sense of the word. Anglophone US - oriented as it is, however, it offers a variety of perspectives, including, at times, those adopted by Transatlantic American Studies and Hemispheric American Studies. It is, nonetheless, a chronological survey of selected literary and paraliterary texts, beginning with Native American narratives and finishing with naturalism/modernism, all set against the background of the cultural history of the sociopolitical phenomenon which, following the Revolutionary War, became the United States.

Issues raised in the course of the lectures:

1) The Judaeo-Christian metanarration in the context of the discourse of colonization;
2) Reformationa and Puritanism: Literature of the Early Colonial Period;
3) The Great Awakening: Puritanism and the Discourse of Enlightenment;
4) Literature of the Age of Reason;
5) The American Revolution and its Consequences (the development of press and political writing, in search of a formula of national literature);
6) The American West and the Discourse of the Frontier;
7) The Birth of the Gothic and the Transformation of Aesthetic Paradigms;
8) The Literature of the American Renaissance: Transcendentalism;
9) Existentialism and Symbolism in the Literature of the American Renaissance;
10) American Poetry of the Second Half of 19th Century;
11) The Civil War and the Birth of Realism;
12) American Naturalism: Toward Modernism

Formula of Final Testing: examination (on completion of three semesters)

Recommended Literature:

N. Baym et al. (eds.), The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vols. I and II, New York, 1994;
P. Lauter et al. (eds.), The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vols. I and II, Lexington, 1990;
Inne dostępne antologie literatury amerykańskiej zawierające omawiane teksty;
A. Kopcewicz, M. Sienicka, Historia literatury Stanów Zjednoczonych w zarysie, T. I i II, Warszawa, 1983;
A. Salska, red. Historia literatury amerykańskiej XX wieku. T. I i II, Kraków, 2003;
E. Elliott, ed. The Columbia Literary History of the United States, New York, 1998;
E. Elliott, ed. The Columbia History of the American Novel, New York, 1991;
T. Pyzik, red. Readings in American Civilization (wyd. II), Ustroń, 2001;
T. Pyzik, red. Wielkie tematy literatury amerykańskiej (wszystkie dostępne tomy serii), Katowice