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