English 232, American Literature from 1865

TR 8:00 a.m.-9:15 a.m.

230 Arts Building

Dr. Jonathan P. Eburne Office Hours:

Dept. of English and American Studies Tues. 11:30-12:30: MacKinnon’s café

Email: jpe11@psu.edu Wed. 10:00-12:00: Saint’s café

and by appointment

Course Home Page: available through ANGEL (http://cms.psu.edu/)

Return to Homepage

Return to Teaching Page

This course surveys major literary works in America from the late 19^th and 20^th 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 one’s individual identity— whether the pressures of family history, race, gender, economic class, or memories of the past.

Required Texts

1. Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson

2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Other Short Stories

3. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

4. Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward

5. Abraham Cahan, Yekl

6. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

7. Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

8. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

9. Eugene O’Neill, A Long Day’s Journey into Night

10. Jerome Rothenberg, ed. Revolution of the Word

11. T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

12. Flannery O’Connor, Three by Flannery O’Connor
13. Dorothy Allison, Bastard out of Carolina

Additional Assigned Readings are on Online Reserve, accessible from the library home page: www.lias.psu.edu

Syllabus and Additional course materials are accessible through ANGEL http://cms.psu.edu/