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Welcome to Litteraria:
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POWERED BY
Year Three, full-time program
University of Silesia
Fall Semester

American Literary History
SURVEY LECTURE
Paweł Jędrzejko






NAVIGATION
  • Course description
  • Course objectives
  • Credit requirements
  • Class contents
  • Mandatory reading
  • Recommended texts
  • Mandatory films
  • Useful links
  • Forum

    •  

    Course description

    The central idea of the lecture is to help students understand the interconnectedness between the evolution of the American literary scene and other developments in American cultural history, especially in the context of the transformations of the dominant philosophical and aesthetic concepts related to important turning points in American history. The survey allows the students to revise their knowledge of American Literature since Early Colonial period until present.

    Course objectives

    - To allow the students to acknowledge the significance of the discipline of literary scholarship;
    - To allow the students understand the concept of the literary-historical process;
    - To refresh student's memories of the canonical works of American Literature;
    - To allow the students observe the interconnectedness of various aspects of human intellectual activity in the context of American cultural history;
    - To facilitate student's understanding of contemporary United States
    - To demonstrate points of convergence and points of divergence in Polish and American metanarratives.

    Credit requirements

     Credit based on attendance

    Class contents

     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
    13) Modernity and Modernism in American Letters
    14) Atom Bomb: Towards Postmodernity

    Mandatory reading

  1. Native American creation myths (Iroquois, Pima)
  2. Bartolome de las Casas: (excerpts from the Norton Anthology of American Literature)
  3. A. N. Cabeza de Vaca: (excerpts from the Norton Anthology of American Literature)
  4. J. Smith: (excerpts from The General History of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles)
  5. W. Bradford: (excerpts from Of Plymouth Plantation)
  6. J. Winthrop: "A Model of Christian Charity"
  7. R. Williams: "A Key to the Language of America"
  8. Anne Bradstreet: Poems
  9. Michael Wigglesworth: "The Day of Doom"
  10. E. Taylor: "Preparatory Meditations," "God’s Determinations"
  11. S. Sewall: (excerpts from The Diary)
  12. C. Mather: (excerpts from The Wonders of the Invisible World)
  13. J. Edwards: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
  14. B. Franklin: "The Way to Wealth," "The Edict by the King of Prussia," "The Sale of the Hessians," excerpts from The Autobiography 
  15. J. Woolman: The Journal of John Woolman (excerpt): "Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes"
  16. S. Occom: "Sermon Preached at the Executon of Moses Paul"
  17. J. H. St. J. de Crevecoeur: Letters from an American Farmer („What is an American”)
  18. Th. Paine: (excerpts from Common Sense; "Of the Theology of the Christians, and the True Theology"
  19. Th. Jefferson: "The Declaration of Independence"
  20. Ph. Freneau: Poems
  21. Phillis Wheatley: Poems
  22. Royall Tyler: The Contrast
  23. W. Irving: "Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow"
  24. William Apess: "An Indian Looking-Glass for the White Man"
  25. J. F. Cooper: The Pioneers
  26. E. A. Poe: "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Ligeia," "The Raven," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Purloined Letter," "The Philosophy of Composition"
  27. N. Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, "Young Goodman Brown," "The Minister's Black Veil," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," preface to The House of the Seven Gables
  28. H. Melville: Moby Dick, Billy Budd, Sailor
  29. R. W. Emerson: "Nature," "Self-Reliance"
  30. H. D. Thoreau: Walden, "Resistance to Civil Government," "Life Without Principle"
  31. M. Fuller: "The Great Lawsuit"
  32. Walt Whitman: Preface to The Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself 
  33. E. Dickinson: Poems
  34. Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Letters from the Earth (excerpts)
  35. W.D. Howells: "Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading"
  36. Kate Chopin: The Awakening, "Emancipation: A Life Fable”
  37. H. James: "Daisy Miller," "The Art of Fiction"
  38. S. Crane: The Red Badge of Courage, "The Open Boat"
  39. Th. Dreiser: Sister Carrie
  40. John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men, Grapes of Wrath
  41. Eugene O'Neill: Long Day's Journey into Night
  42. Tennessee Williams: Streetcar Named Desire

    Recommended texts

     
    • 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 dostÄ™pne antologie literatury amerykaÅ„skiej zawierajÄ…ce omawiane teksty;
    • A. Kopcewicz, M. Sienicka, Historia literatury Stanów Zjednoczonych w zarysie, T. I i II, Warszawa, 1983;
    • A. Salska, red. Historia literatury amerykaÅ„skiej 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), UstroÅ„, 2001;
    • T. Pyzik, red. Wielkie tematy literatury amerykaÅ„skiej (wszystkie dostÄ™pne tomy serii), Katowice

    Mandatory films

     List to be provided

    Useful links