(Dr Helen M Dennis)

Twentieth-century American writing covers a range of extraordinary rich and diverse themes, strands and forms. There are many different ways in which a history of this century’s literature could be constructed, and in a one-year module it is impossible to give comprehensive coverage of all writers’ achievements. The aim of this module is:

to sample some of the key movements and writers

to develop analytical and critical skills through close reading of the set narrative and poetic texts

to develop strategies for reading texts within the context of twentieth-century American culture.

The module examines American poems and narratives from 1918 to the end of the century, focusing on selected areas, such modernism and post modernism; ethnicity and gender; regionalism and cultural geography.

Outline Syllabus:

Willa Cather, My Ántonia (1918); F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925); William Faulkner, Light in August (1932); Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952); Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957); Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963); Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1965);  Don DeLillo, White Noise (1984);  Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (revised version 1994); Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (1992); William Carlos Williams. Collected Poems. (Carcanet, Poetry Pleiade edition).

 

Essential secondary reading --- Campbell, Neil & Alasdair Kean. American Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1997; Mitchell, Jeremy & Richard Maidment eds. The United States in the Twentieth Century: Culture. Hodder & Stoughton / Open University Press, 1994 (second edition 2001).

Prerequisite: EN213 Nineteenth Century American Literature.