English 232
American Literature II, 1865 to the Present
Fall 2002
Dr.
Jonathan P. Eburne
This course proposes that the 20th
centuryÑ the era we still consider ÒmodernÓ even though the century itself has endedÑ
began sometime around 1865, in the aftermath of the Civil War. This is, perhaps, a curious
notion. Yet many of the pressing
issues faced by the writers, politicians, and thinkers of that immediate
post-war moment continue to haunt the way we think about modern life. On the one hand, the United States
still struggles with the political and emotional residue of the 19th
century: segregation and racial persecution, gender inequality, the gulf
between rich and poor, and disagreements about the nationÕs political
structure. On the other hand,
American literature since the Civil War has continued to interrogate how these
very problems shape American life and American values.
Was the 20th century a dream or a
nightmare? For all its marvels and
accomplishments, the past century has been fraught with horrorsÑ historical,
individual, culturalÑthat are often difficult to bear, and difficult to talk
about. This course surveys some of
the major literary works in America from the late 19th and 20th
centuries, whose authors strive to piece together a sense of what American life
looks like and feels like in the modern age. Many poets and writers struggled to invent entirely new
languages with which to express this experience; others reinvented traditional
forms in order to give them new meaning.
And sometimes they used more abstract forms: jokes, patterns of
language, babble, repetitions, and even silence. This course will examine how American writers write about
some of the most difficult issuesÑ the trauma of war, the evils of racial and
sexual violence, and even about their own fears of the futureÑ in ways that
still manage to find hope and meaning within what T.S. Eliot refers to as the
Òheap of broken imagesÓ of modern life.
¥ The required text is
the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. II, 5th
Edition. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998).
¥
Handouts are available online from the Online Library Reserve.
Course
Requirements
There will be three very brief (1-page) writing
assignments throughout the term, which will require you to respond critically
and conceptually to a recent reading.
There will be one in-class exam and one final exam. Each exam will ask you to identify
passages from the works weÕve read and explain their significance. Finally, there will be two papers. The first will be a short essay (3-5
pp.); the second, final paper will be slightly longer (7-8 pp.). Papers will be due in class on the day listed on the
syllabus. I will not accept late papers, and there will be no make-up exams.
Attendance and class participation are mandatory
and will significantly affect your final grade.
The
two papers will combine to make up 40% of the course grade (10% + 30%); the
final exam will be worth 25% and the mid-term will be worth 10%. The short writing assignments and class
participation will combine for the remaining 25% (5% for each assignment and
10% for attendance and participation).