English
232, American Literature from 1865
MWF 12:20 - 1:10
268 Willard
Fall 2003
Dr. Jonathan
P. Eburne Office
Hours:
Office: 41
Scott Building Monday
10:00- 11:30
Email: jpe11@psu.edu Wednesday
10:00-11:30
Office
Phone: 865-3945 and
by appointment
This
course surveys major literary works in America from the late 19th
and 20th centuries, whose authors strove to piece together what
American life looks and feels like as it enters the modern age. Many modernist writers attempted to
invent entirely new poetic and fictional languages with which to express this
experience; others reinvented traditional forms in order to give them new
meaning.
Throughout
these experiments with form, American writers of the post-Civil War era
nevertheless interrogated how political, social, and intellectual issues shape
American life and American values. This course will examine how these writers
have used language and literary form as the means for staging the clash of
local customs and beliefs with national, and even international, demands. In particular, we will examine what
these writers have to say about the fate of freedom and rugged individualism in
the face of dramatic social changes, as well as the more subtle social
pressures that constitute oneÕs individual identityÑ whether the pressures of
family history, race, gender, economic class, or memories of the past.
REQUIRED
TEXTS:
1. Mark Twain, PuddÕnhead Wilson
2. Edith Wharton, Old New York: Four
Novellas
3. Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick and
Struggling Upward
4. Abraham Cahan, Yekl
5. Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
6. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
7. Eugene OÕNeill, A Long DayÕs Journey
into Night
8. Jerome Rothenberg, ed. Revolution of the Word
9. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
10. Flannery
OÕConnor, Three by Flannery OÕConnor
11. Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of
Carolina
Syllabus
and Additional course materials are accessible through ANGEL http://cms.psu.edu/