Gary Lee Stonum
315 Guilford, 368-3342
Office hours: Tues 1:30 – 3:00 pm

and by next-day appointment
Email: gary.stonum@case.edu


Syllabus
ENGL 256: Major American Writers
Spring 2004

Updated January 4, 2004

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Overview

Like all English courses, this is a class in reading and writing, and its main purpose is to enhance your capacities at both activities.   Secondarily, it also functions as a survey of “major American authors,” each of those words in scare quotes needing some scrutiny.

Like Gaul, this class divides into three parts, the first and the last being devoted to the means of analysis, interpretation, and appreciation appropriate to particular literary modes:  narrative fiction (mainly short stories but also one novel) in the first third of the course and lyric poetry in the final third.   Sandwiched between these two, both directed towards understanding fictive texts (also known as imaginative literature, belles lettres, or sometimes just plain literarature) and towards writing intelligently about such texts and how they work, is a section devoted to the contexts of American literature.   This section will look at several of the main documents about American identity and character in the context of the development of the United States from the 17th century through the 20th.

Required text

Nina Baym, et al. Norton Anthology of American Literature, shorter 6th edition, (isbn: 0393979695).

Schedule of readings and assignments

Date

Assignments and topics

Jan 12

introduction

 

Part One:  Storytelling

Jan 14

Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” and Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Young Goodman Brown,” and “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,”

Jan 16

Irving and Hawthorne on early America, continued

Jan 21

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Purloined Letter”

Jan 23

Herman Melville, “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno”

Jan 26

American Gothic, continued

Jan 28

Charles W. Chestnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine” and “The Wife of His Youth” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wall-paper”

Jan 30

 

Feb

2

Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron” and Henry James, “The Real Thing” and “The Beast in the Jungle”

Feb

4

 

Feb

6

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Winter Dreams” and Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”

Feb

9

William Faulkner, “That Evening Sun” and “Barn Burning”

Feb 11  

Modernist fiction, continued

Feb 13

Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People” and Philip Roth, “Defender of the Faith”

Feb 16

 

 

 Part Two:  Americanisms

Feb 18

Norton introductions and timelines:  “Literature to 1700” and American Literature:  1700-1820” and William Bradford, excerpts from Of Plymouth Plantation and Jonathan Edwards, “A Personal Narrative” and Benjamin Franklin, “The Way to Wealth”

Feb 20
 

Story paper due

National origins, continued

Feb 23

Mary Rowlandson, excerpts from Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration and J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, “What is An American” and Samson Occam “A Short Narrative of My Life”

Feb 25

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance” and Henry David Thoreau, “Economy” and Walt Whitman “Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)”

Feb 27

American renaissance men, continued

Mar 1

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, pp 1244-1390 (chapters I-XXXII)

Mar 3

Huckleberry Finn, cont. pp 1390-1432 (chapters XXIII-XLI

Mar 5
 

Norton introduction and timeline:  “American Literature:  1865-1914” and Rebecca Harding Davis, “Life in the Iron-Mills

Mar 15

Norton introduction and timeline:  “American Literature between the Wars: 1914-1945” and “American Prose since 1945”

Mar 17

Norton introductions and timelines:  “American Prose since 1945” and “American Poetry since 1945”

Mar 19

W.E.B. DuBois, excerpts from The Souls of Black Folk and Maxine Hong Kingston, “No Name Woman”

Mar 22

In-class exam on American cultural history

 

Part Three: Verse

Mar 24

Introduction to the analysis of verse

Robert Frost:  The Oven Bird   

Mar 26

Robert Frost:  Mending Wall, After Apple-Picking, The Road Not Taken, Birches, Fire and Ice, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Design

Mar 29

Frost, continued

Mar

31

Walt Whitman:  Song of Myself

Apr

2

Walt Whitman:   Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

Apr

5

Emily Dickinson, poems with Johnson numbers 130, 185, 241, 249, 258, 303, 328, 342, 435, 448, 465, 501, 505, 510, 632, 712, 754, 1129, and 1624

Apr

7

Dickinson continued

Apr

9

Dickinson continued

Apr 12

Wallace Stevens:  The Snow Man, Sunday Morning, Ideas of Order at Key West, and Of Modern Poetry

Apr 14

William Carlos Williams:  The Young Housewife, Portrait of a Lady, Queen Anne’s Lace, The Red Wheelbarrow, This is Just to Say

Apr 16

 

Apr 19

Hart Crane,  James Wright and Rita Dove; all the anthology selections for each

Apr 21

Ohio poets, continued

Apr 23

Ohio poets continued

Apr

30

Poetry paper due

 

Procedures

Reading assignments; classroom work: Please read the assignments before the dates listed on the schedule.  Please also read the biographical introductions to each of the authors take up.   Neither the lectures nor the discussions are likely to make much sense if you have not yet done the reading.

Attendance is required; those failing to meet this requirement will be obligeded to withdraw from the course.  Parts of various classes over the semester will be devoted to individual or small-group exercises, which by their nature cannot easily be made up. If you must miss a class for good reason, please let the instructor know by email as far in advance or as soon after as possible.  

Writing assignments

 

In the first paper, from a list of stories to be announced later, you are asked to analyze the narrator’s relation to or perspective on the events of the story and how this shapes the story’s overall effect or meaning

In the second paper you are asked to explicate one modernist story, poem, or set of poems. "Explication" is the art of investigating the meaning of a literary text and showing how the meaning is generated. In other words, it is concerned with both theme and techniques, and it often links these matters to ideas about literature and authorship.

The in-class exam on cultural history will cover the material read up to that point, with an emphasis on the textbook’s biographical and historical introductions.

 

Roundtable

 

The general rubric is that each student should post at least two messages before fall break and two afterwards; if all goes well, many students will contribute a good deal more by way of questions, observations, and responses to other postings. Content, length, and topic are up to you; you will be graded on whether you contribute but not what. The roundtable is a place for class discussion, in other words, perhaps our main one in a class of this size.  It is a forum in which the instructor will participate but not one that he will lead or supervise.  

If class size precludes profitably use classroom time for discussion, the instructor may propose other, voluntary sessions for such discussion.

Grading

 

Each of the papers and the exam count for 30% of the final grade, the balance deriving from participation in the roundtable and in-class activities