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B.2.2   American Studies

B.2.2   (i) American literature

 

Textbooks:

  • Lewicki, Z. (ed.) (1986) American Literature. Warszawa: U.S. Embassy in Warsaw.
  • Elliott, E. (ed.) (1988) The Columbia Literary History of the US. New York: Columbia UP.
  • Baym, N., et al. (eds) The Norton Anthology of American Literature, IV ed.
     

Readings:

 

Early Native American And Puritan Literature

  • Anne Bradstreet “Here Follows Some Verses Upon The Burning Of Our House”
  • Edward Taylor “Upon The Sweeping Flood”
  • Jonathan Edwards “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God”

Terms: Structure Of A Puritan Sermon, Jeremiad, Metaphysical Conceit

  • Benjamin Franklin “Continuation Of The Account Of My Life, Begun At Passy, Near Paris 1784” (From Autobiography)

Terms: Pragmatism, American Dream, Self-Made Man

Transcendentalism

  • Ralph Waldo Emerson “Self-Reliance”

Terms: Oversoul, Civil Disobedience, Individualism

American Renaissance

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”
  • Herman Melville “Bartleby, The Scrivener”
  • Edgar Allan Poe “The Cask Of Amontillado”

Terms: Romance, American Gothic, Symbolism, Allegory, Unreliable Narrator

Nineteenth-Century Poetry

  • Walt Whitman “Song Of Myself” (Parts 1-6)
  • Emily Dickinson Poems 258, 712, 986

Terms: Free Verse

Realist Fiction

  • Henry James Daisy Miller
  • Jack London “To Build A Fire”

Terms: Realism, Naturalism, Determinism, Point-Of-View Technique

Modernist Poetry

  • Ezra Pound “Pact,” “In A Station Of The Metro”
  • W. C. Williams “The Young Housewife,” “This Is Just To Say”
  • Langston Hughes “Mulatto”

Terms: Imagism, Impersonal Theory Of Poetry

Modernist Fiction

  • Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises

Terms: Stream Of Consciousness, Cablese, Focalization

Twentieth-Century Drama

  • Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire

Terms: Expressionism

Contemporary Poetry

  • Allen Ginsberg “Howl” Part One
  • Sylvia Plath “Lady Lazarus”
  • Elisabeth Bishop “One Art”

Terms: Confessional Poetry, Villanelle

Contemporary Fiction

  • Robert Coover “The Babysitter”
  • John Barth, “Night-Sea Journey”
  • Shirley Jackson "The Lottery"
  • Toni Morrison “Recitatif”

Terms: Metafiction, Intertextuality, Parody, Pastiche


B.2.2 (ii) American culture

  • Bromhead, P. Life in Modern America.
  • An Outline of American Geography, USIA.
  • An Outline of American Government, USIA.
  • Luedtke, L. S. (ed.) Making America.

Key terms:

  • Economic, geographic, and cultural regions
  • Basic intstruments of statehood
  • Institutions and the society, e.g. schooling system, ethnic minorities
  • Institutions and culture, press, TV
  • Current events