American Literature - Fall 1998

This is not a survey course, but it aims to give students some sense of the achievements, complexities, and historical significance of a variety of literary works produced by Americans from the colonial period to the beginning of the Civil War. Its primary emphasis is on major texts written between 1820 and 1860. We will examine the specifically "literary" elements of these works--the conventions on which they draw, their rhetorical, stylistic, and structural devices, their representational strategies, etc.--and will consider their major explicit and implicit themes, and we will also give attention to the relationship of these works to the specific historical contexts out of which they emerged and to which they directly or indirectly referred.

The Monday, Wednesday, and Friday meetings of the course will be devoted to a mixture of lectures and discussions. It is critical for the work of the course that you regularly attend both the lectures and participate actively in the discussions. Your final course evaluation will take into account your attendance and the quality of your contribution to class discussions.

The reading for the course averages close to 300 pages a week. You should plan to spend about twelve hours a week on the reading. Some "short-cut" reading strategies will be suggested for the longer texts, in the event you find yourself pressed for time. The following paperback texts are required for the course. All of them can be purchased at the Bay Tree Bookstore:

• Mary Rowlandson, The Captive: The True Story of the Captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (American Eagle Publications paperback)
• James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (Penguin paperback)
• Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (Rutgers UP paperback)
• Henry L. Gates, Jr., ed., The Classic Slave Narratives ( Mentor paperback)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Penguin paperback)
• Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Penguin paperback)
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (Penguin paperback)
• Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Signet paperback)
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Penguin paperback)

Copies of all the texts are also on two-hour reserve in McHenry Library. You should try very hard to complete the reading before the class for which it is assigned. The lectures will assume that you have already read the assigned material being discussed, and you clearly will not be able to contribute usefully to the discussions unless you have done the reading in advance.

You will be writing five papers in this course. The first three papers, each no longer than 2 pages in length, will focus on specific passages from your reading. Their specific format will be described in class. These papers are intended to help you hone your close-reading skills and to enable you to contribute more productively to class discussions. You should choose complex and challenging passages to analyze. The fourth paper, 5-6 pages long, will be on a text of your choice from the course. The final course paper, 7-8 pages long, will allow you to pursue some topic of interest to you in Moby-Dick.

• Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, Houghton Mifflin
• Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive, Harper Collins Trade Div.
• Solotaroff and Rappaport, The Schocken Book of Contemporary Jewish Fiction, Schocken
• Moses Rischin, The Promised City, Harvard
• Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, Noonday, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Saul Bellow, Herzog, Penguin
• Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Rebecca Goldstein, Mazel

• Saul Bellow, The Bellarosa Connection, Penguin
• Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint, Fawcett
• E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime, Fawcett
• Lore Segal, Her First American, Fawcett
• Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky, Penguin Publishers
• Rebecca Goldstein, Strange Attractors, Penguin
• Bernard Malamud, The Assistant, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Sarah Schulman, Empathy, New American Library
• Alan Hoffman, Small Worlds, Abbeville Press

• Richard Sennett, Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, Prentice Hall
• William Kennedy, The Albany Trilogy: Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, Penguin
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Random House
• Murray Baumgarten, City Scriptures, Harvard
• Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, Penguin
• Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem, Dell
• Alan Hoffman, Kagan's Superfecta, Abbeville Press
• Murray Baumgarten & Barbara Gottfried, Understanding Philip Roth, University of South Carolina Press
• Anzia Yezierska, The Bread Givers, Persea, George Braziller
• Alix Shulman, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Academy Chicago
• Clive Sinclair, For Good or Evil: The Collected Stories of Clive Sinclair, Penguin

A movie series, including films by Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg, Barry Levinson, and Joan Micklin among others, will be shown Wednesday evenings beginning at 7pm in Porter 144.

• Week 1
  • April 1, Tues., Eth(n)ical Life: City Writing, Introduction to Jewish Writers, and the American City
  • April 3, Thurs., Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus
• Week 2
  • April 8, Tues., Bernard Malamud, The Assistant; Kate Simon, Bronx Primitive
• Week 3
  • April 15, Tues., Selections from Jewish Fiction; Moses Rischin, The Promised City, Parts 1 and 2
• Week 4
  • April 22, Tues., Selections from Jewish American Stories; Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
  • TAKE-HOME EXAM
• Week 5
  • April 29, Tues., Writing the Invisible into Visibility: Henry Roth, Call It Sleep and Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man; Moses Rischin, The Promised City, Parts 3 and 4
• Week 6
  • May 6, Tues., Saul Bellow, Herzog; Sennett, Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities; personal choices from list above
• Week 7
  • May 13, Thurs., PAPER DUE. Engendering Urban Possibilities: Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint; Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
• Week 8
  • May 20, Tues., Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
• Week 9
  • May 27, Tues., Exchange Day, Rebecca Goldstein, Mazel; The Mind-Body Problem; Rebecca Goldstein, Strange Attractors
• Week 10
  • June 3, Tues., Urban Premises: Norman Mailer, Woody Allen and the Contemporary City; Gritty City: The Albany Trilogy of William Kennedy
  • FINAL PAPER

Revised 7/19/04.