Survey of American Literature
During the term I will lecture on the following 14 general topics. At the examination at the end of the term, you will be given 3 of the topics and asked to write essays on 2 of them, giving as much specific information as you can about the topics’ authors and works and making use of the passages for discussion and analysis that I discuss during the lectures. You will have three hours for the written exam, which will be worth 30 points. The reading notes on your 5 assigned authors are worth 20 points, and your lecture notes are worth 10 points, for a total of 60 points possible for the course. The lecture notes and reading notes will serve as evidence of your attendance and active participation in the course, and they will also help you prepare for the written examination. I will collect the lecture notes at the end of each day’s lecture and return them at the following lecture. Lecture notes will only be accepted immediately after each lecture. The reading notes on your assigned authors are due at the written examination.Marks for the course will be assigned on the following scale:
53-60 points: 6/отличен
46-52 points: 5/много добър
36-45 points: 4/добър
27-36 points: 3/среден
less than 27 points: 2/слаб
Lecture Topics
1. Summarize the American Puritans’ religious beliefs, giving examples from the work of William Bradford, Cotton Mather, Jonathon Edwards, Anne Bradstreet, and Edward Taylor; compare and contrast the Puritans’ writing with the work of their non-Puritan contemporaries John Smith, Thomas Morton, and Roger Williams. 2. Discuss the American romantic fiction of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. 3. Discuss the lives and work of the following American transcendentalists: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Walt Whitman. 4. Discuss nineteenth-century American poetry, giving examples from the work of the following poets: Phillip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allen Poe, Sidney Lanier, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Emily Dickinson. 5. Discuss the rise of American realism, defining and giving examples from local-color realism, as practiced by writers such as Mark Twain, Harriet Becher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin, and the genteel, psychological, transatlantic realism of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Also, compare and contrast these varieties of realism. 6. Define, compare, and contrast realism and naturalism, giving examples from the following authors: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and John Steinbeck. 7. Describe the experiments, concerns, and achievements of American modernism, giving examples from the work of the following writers and poets: Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, and Robinson Jeffers. 8. Discuss the experiments and achievements of the following postmodern “absurdist-existentialist” writers, giving examples from the work of Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey, Richard Brautigan, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo Donald Barthelme, Paul Auster, Hunter Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. 9. Point out how Black American writers have contributed to the struggle for racial equality in America, giving examples from the work of such writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Adrienne Kennedy, Ishmael Reed, Tony Cade Bambarra, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. 10. Jewish-American writers have been particularly influential in contemporary American and world literature. Since 1975, two have won the Nobel Prize for Literature and others have been awarded Pulitzer Prizes. Discuss the major themes and stylistic innovations of such writers as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Myra Goldberg, and Jonathon Safran Foer. 11. The Northeast urban and suburban scene has been skillfully treated by John Updike, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Tom Wolfe, and Russell Banks. Discuss this school of contemporary American regionalism, referring to these authors and their work. 12. Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty have ably depicted the American South. Willa Cather claimed the Midwest and the Southwest as her literary territory, as have Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko. Annie Proulx’s work evokes many regions: Nova Scotia, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming. Gretel Ehrlich and Annie Dillard have written lyrical accounts of living far from cities and close to nature. Ehrlich describes her life in Wyoming in The Solace of Open Spaces, while Dillard philosophizes about her life in rural Virginia in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Washington State’s Puget Sound in Holy the Firm. Discuss these important contemporary American women regionalists, giving examples from their work. 13. Discuss contemporary American drama, giving examples from the plays of the following dramatists: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Beth Henley, and Toni Kushner. 14. Discuss recent trends in American poetry, giving examples from the work by the following poets: Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Rita Dove, and Nancy Willard.REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS
The Colonial Period
1) Thomas Morton (1579-1647): “New English Canaan” 2) John Smith (1580-1631): “The General History of Virginia”; “A Description of New England” 3) William Bradford (1590-1657): “Of Plymouth Plantation” 4) Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672): “Prologue”; “The Tenth Muse”; “Contemplations”; “Upon the Burning of Our House”; “As Weary Pilgrim”; “Meditations” 5) Edward Taylor (1642-1729): “Huswifery”; “God’s Determinations”; “Meditations” 6) Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758): “Personal Narrative”; “A Divine and Supernatural Light”; “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”; “Images or Shadows of Divine Things”The Rise of Romanticism
7) Philip Freneau (1752-1832): revolutionary and lyric poetry 8 ) Washington Irving (1783-1859): ” A History of New York… by Dietrich Knickerbocker”; “Rip Van Winkle”; “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; The Alhambra: “Preface”; “The Pioneers”; “The Prairie”; “The Last of the Mohicans”; “The Pathfinder”; “The Deerslayer”; “The Pilot”; “The Spy” 9) James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851): “Leatherstocking Tales” 10) Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849): lyric poetry; “Ligeia”; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; “The Purloined Letter”; “The Mask of the Red Death”; “The Pit and the Pendulum”; “The Philosophy of Composition”; “The Poetic Principle”High Romanticism and Transcendentalism
11) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1982): “Nature”; “Self-Reliance”; “The American Scholar”; “The Divinity School Address”; “The Over-Soul”; lyric poetry 12) Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864): “The Maypole of Merry Mount”; “Young Goodman Brown”; “The Minister’s Black Veil”; “Rappacini’s Daughter”; “The Birthmark”; “The Artist of the Beautiful”; “The Blithedale Romance”; “The Scarlet Letter”; “The Marble Faun” 13) Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): “Walden”; “A Week on the Concord and Merrimac”; “On Civil Disobedience” 14) Herman Melville (1819-1891): “Bartleby the Scrivener”; “Benito Cereno”; “Moby Dick”; “Billy Budd”; essays (“Hawthorne and His Mosses”) 15) Walt Whitman (1819-1892): Leaves of Grass: “Song of Myself”; “For You O Democracy”; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; “There Was a Child Went Forth”; “I Sing the Body Electric”; “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing”; “Goodbye My Fancy” 16) Emily Dickinson (1830-1886): lyric poetry, lettersRealism and Naturalism
17) Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896): “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” 18) Mark Twain (1835-1910): “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”; “The Whittier Dinner Speech”; “Roughing It”; “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”; “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”; “The Mysterious Stranger” 19) Henry James (1843-1916): “The Real Thing”; “The Beast in the Jungle”; “The Art of Fiction”; “The Turn of the Screw”; “Daisy Miller”; “The Portrait of a Lady”; “The Ambassadors”; “Washington Square”; “The Wings of the Dove”; “The Golden Bowl” 20) Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909): “The Country of the Pointed Firs” 21) Kate Chopin (1850-1904): short stories (“The Storm”); “The Awakening” 22) Edith Wharton (1862-1937): “The Other Two”; “Roman Fever”; “The Age of Innocence”; “The House of Mirth” 23) Stephen Crane (1871-1900): “Maggie – A Girl of the Streets”; “The Red Badge of Courage”; “The Open Boat”; “The Blue Hotel”; “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” 24) Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945): “Sister Carrie”; “An American Tragedy”; “The Financier” 25) Jack London (1876-1916): “The Law of Life”; “To Build a Fire”; “The Call of the Wild”; “White Fang”; “Martin Eden”; “The Sea Wolf” 26) Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951): “Main Street”; “Babbitt”; “Arrowsmith”; “Elmer Gantry” 27) John Steinbeck (1902-1968): “The Long Valley”; “The Red Pony”; “Tortilla Flat”; “Cannery Row”; “Sweet Thursday”; “Of Mice and Men”; “The Grapes of Wrath”; “East of Eden”; “The Moon is Down”; “Travels With Charlie”Modernist Poetry
28) Wallace Stevens (1879-1955): “Harmonium“; “Idea of Order”; “The Man With the Blue Guitar”; “Opus Posthumous” 29) Robert Frost (1874-1963): “A Boy’s Will”; “North of Boston” 30) William Carlos Williams (1883-1963): lyric poetry, “Paterson” 31) Ezra Pound (1885-1972): “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”; “Cathay”; “The Cantos” 32) Marianne Moore (1887-1972): “The Pangolin”; “What Are Years” 33) Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962): lyric poems ( “Shine”, “Perishing Republic”; “Women of Big Sur”) 34) T. S. Eliot (1888-1965): “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; “The Waste Land”; “The Hollow Men”; “The Four Quartets”; “Murder in the Cathedral”; “The Cocktail Party”; literary criticism (“The Metaphysical Poets”; “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)Modernist Prose
35) Gertrude Stein (1874-1946): “Three Lives”; “The Making of Americans”; “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” 36) Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941): “Winesburg, Ohio”; “Death in the Woods”; “The Egg” 37) F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940): “The Rich Boy”; “Winter Dreams”; “The Great Gatsby”; “Tender is the Night”; “The Last Tycoon” 38) William Faulkner (1897-1962): stories (“A Rose for Emily,” “The Bear,” “The Old Man”); “The Sound and the Fury”; “Absalom, Absalom”; “Light in August” 39) Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961): stories (“Indian Camp,” “Big Two-Hearted River”, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” “In Another Country”); “A Farewell to Arms”; “For Whom the Bell Tolls”; “The Sun Also Rises”; “The Old Man and the Sea” 40) Nathanael West (1903-1940): “The Day of the Locust”; “Miss Lonelyhearts”New Directions: The Beats, Black Humor, Absurdism, Postmodernism
41) J. D. Salinger (1919-2010): “Nine Stories”; “The Catcher in the Rye”; “Franny and Zooey” 42) Jack Kerouac (1922-1969): “On the Road”; “The Dharma Bums”, “Dr. Sax” 43) Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007): “Slaughterhouse Five”; “The Sirens of Titan” 44) Joseph Heller (1923-1999): “Catch 22″ 45) Ken Kesey (1935-2001): “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”; “Sometimes a Great Notion”; “Garage Sale Armies of the Night”; “Advertisements for Myself” 46) Richard Brautigan (1935-1984): “Trout Fishing in America”; “In Watermelon Sugar”; “A Confederate General in Big Sur” 47) John Barth 1930 – ): “The Floating Opera”; “The Sotweed Factor”; “Lost in the Funhouse”; “Giles Goatboy”; “The Friday Book” (nonfiction) 48) Donald Barthelme (1931-1989): “City Life”; “Sadness”; “Amateurs”; “The Dead Father”; “Snow White”; “Sixty Stories”; “Forty Stories” 49) Robert Coover (1932 – ): “The Origins of the Brunists”; “The Universal Baseball Association”; “Spanking the Maid”; “The Elevator”; “Seven Exemplary Fictions” 50) Don Delillo (1936 -): “White Noise”; “The Names”; “Underworld”; “Mao II” 51) Thomas Pynchon (1937 – ): “Entropy”; “The Crying of Lot 49″; “Gravit’s Rainbow”; “V” 52) Paul Auster (1947 – ): “City of Glass”; “Ghosts”; “The Locked Room”; “Mr. Vertigo” 53) David Foster Wallace (1962-2008): “Infinite Jest”; “Girl With Curious Hair” (stories)Contemporary Regionalism and Multiculturalism
54) Flannery O`Connor (1925-1964): “A Good Man is Hard to Find”; “Revelation”; “Good Country People”; “Wise Blood” 55) Carson McCullers (1917-1967): Ballad of the Sad Café 56) Eudora Welty (1909-2001): “A Visit of Charity”; “Death of a Traveling Salesman”; “A Worn Path”; “Powerhouse”; “The Petrified Man”; “The Ponder Heart” 57) Philip Roth (1933 – ): “Defender of the Faith”; “The Conversion of the Jews”; “Portnoy’s Complaint”; “The Professor of Desire”; “The Breast”; “American Pastoral”; “The Plot Against America”; “The Human Stain”; “The Dying Animal” 58) Saul Bellow (1915-2005): “The Dangling Man”, “Seize the Day”; “Henderson the Rain King”; “Herzog” 59) Langston Hughes (1902-1967): “The Weary Blues”; “Fine Clothes for the Jew”; “Shakespeare in Harlem”; “Jes B. Semple”, satirical editorials 60) Zora Neale Hurston (1901?-1960): “The Gilded Six-Bits”; “Of Mules and Men”; “Their Eyes Were Watching God” 61) Ralph Ellison (1914-1994): “Invisible Man” 62) James Baldwin (1924-1987): “Sonny’s Blues”; “The Fire Next Time”; “In Another Country”; “Giovanni’s Room” 63) Tony Morrison (1931 – ): The Bluest Eye; Sula; Beloved, Jazz 64) Alice Walker (1944 – ): “The Color Purple”; “1955”; “Everyday Use”; “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” 65) N. Scott Momaday (1934 – ): “The Way to Rainy Mountain”; “Ancient Child” 66) Gerald Vizenor (1934 – ): “Hotline Healers”; “The Heirs of Columbus”; “Earthdivers” 67) Linda Hogan (1947 – ): “Mean Spirit”; “Red Clay”; “Book of Medicines”; poetry 68) Leslie Marmon Silko (1948 – ): “The Man to Send Rain Clouds”; “Lullaby”; “Coyote Holds a Full House in His Hands”; Ceremony; selected poems 69) Louise Erdrich (1954): “Fleur”; “Lulu’s Boys”; “American Horse”; “Love Medicine” 70) Maxine Hong Kingston (1940 – ): “Woman Warrior”; “China Men” 71) Amy Tan (1952 – ): “The Joy Luck Club”; “The Hundred Secret Senses”Contemporary Realism and “New Journalism”
72) John Updike (1932-2009): The “Rabbit” tetralogy, “The Witches of Eastwick”; “Centaurs”; “Couples”; “A Month of Sundays”; criticism (“Hugging the Shore”) 73) John Cheever (1912-1982): short stories; “The Wapshot Scandal”; “The Wapshot Chronicles” 74) Russell Banks (1940 – ): “Angel on the Roof” (short stories); “Rule of the Bone”; “The Sweet Hereafter” 75) Raymond Carver (1938-1988): short stories; “Will You Please be Quiet, Please?”; “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”; “Cathedral”; “Elephant” 76) Annie Proulx (1935 – ): “Postcards”; “The Accordion Crimes”; “The Shipping News”; “Close Range”; “Wyoming Tales”; “Bad Dirt”;”More Wyoming Tales” 77) Annie Dillard (1945 – ): “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”; “Holy the Firm”; “The Living”; “The Maytrees”; poetry (“Tickets for a Prayer Wheel”) 78) Gretel Ehrlich (1946 – ): “Heart Mountain”; “The Solace of Open Spaces”; “A Match to the Heart”; “Yellowstone” 79) Tom Wolfe (1931): “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”; “The Purple Decades”; “From Bauhaus to Our House”; “The Painted Word”; “The Right Stuff”; “Bonfire of the Vanities”; “A Man in Full” 80) Hunter Thompson (1937-2005): “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”; “The Rum Diary”Contemporary Drama
81) Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953): “Desire Under the Elms”; “The Hairy Ape”; “The Ice Man Cometh”; “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” 82) Tennessee Williams (1911-1983): “The Glass Menagerie”; “A Streetcar Named Desire”; “The Night of the Iguana” 83) Arthur Miller (1915-2005): “All My Sons”; “Death of a Salesman”; “The Crucible”; “The Misfits” 84) Edward Albee (1928 – ): “The Zoo Story”; “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”; “Tiny Alice”; “A Delicate Balance”; “Seascape” 85) Sam Shepard (1943 – ): “The Tooth of Crime”; “True West”; “Fool for Love”; “Paris, Texas”; “North”; “Silent Tongue” 86) David Mamet (1947 – ): “American Buffalo”; “Glengarry Glen Ross”; “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll”; “Vanya on Forty-Second Street”; “The Spanish Prisoner”; “The Edge” 87) Beth Henley (1952 – ): “Crimes of the Heart”, “Miss Firecracker” 88) Tony Kushner (1956 – ): “Angels in America”; “Perestroika”Contemporary Poetry
89) Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) 90) Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) 91) Robert Lowell (1917-1977) 92) Denise Levertov (1923-1997) 93) Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) 94) Galway Kinnell (1927 – ) 95) Philip Levine (1928 – ) 96) Adrienne Rich (1929 – ) 97) Gary Snyder (1930 – ) 98) Nancy Willard (1936 – ) 99) Robert Bly (1939 – ) 100) Rita Dove (1952 – )AUTHOR ASSIGNMENTS
STUDENT NAME STUDENT # AUTHORS (see numbered author list)
Tanya Koleva 0803131003 1,25,45,60,80 Dimitria Ivanova 0803131004 2,26,46,61,81 Boryana Gagova 0803131005 3,27,47,62,82 Yordanka Kaneva 0803131006 4,28,48,63,83 Angel Gadzhev 0803131007 5,29,49,64,84 Joseph Chanov 0803131008 6,30,50,65,85 Nina Shishmanova 0803131010 7,31,51,66,86 Petya Sharkova 0803131014 8,32,52,67,87 Maria Angelova 0803131017 9,33,53,68,88 Gyulizar Yusein 0803131020 10,34,54,69,89 Nadezhda Ivanova 0803131021 21,37,47,72,94 Nikolina Halkova 0803131026 11,35,55,70,90 Antonia Daradanova 0803131027 12,36,56,71,91 Elka Gyunelieva 0803131028 13,37,57,72,92 Dilyana Koleva 0803131029 14,38,58,73,93 Valentin Radev 0803131032 15,39,59,74,94 Beloslava Bankova 0803131033 16,40,58,75,95 Kristiana Stamova 0803131035 17,41,57,76,96 Ivelina Hristeva 0803131037 18,42,56,77,97 Gergana Shikova 0803131042 19,43,55,78,98 Snezhana Georgieva 0803131043 20,44,54,79,99 Stanislava Vulkova 0803131047 21,43,53,78,100 Milena Shekedzhieva 0803131050 22,42,52,77,99 Radka Paunova 0803131051 23,41,51,76,98 Gergana Goranova 0803131058 24,40,50,75,97 Petya Georgieva 0803131066 23,39,49,74,96 Bozhidara Draginova 0803131077 22,38,48,73,95