Title and Code of Course: AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE 19-20th CENTURIES
BAN 2331a, b
Venue and Time of Course: BAN 2331a Wednesday 16-18.15 Room 322
BAN 2331b Friday 10-12.15 Room 322
Instructor’s Name: Dr. Katalin G. Kállay Associate Professor (Institute of English Studies)
Instructor’s Email Address: [email protected]
Credit Point Value:
3
Number of Lessons
per Week:
3
Type of Course:
Seminar
Method of Evaluation:
In-Class Presentation,
In-Class final paper
Course Description:
The aim of this seminar is to acquaint students with masterpieces of American literature
through the method of close reading, to give an opportunity for intensive conversation and
discussion of the major issues dealt with in the lecture course (BAN 2330). The course
requires active participation in the form of presentations, occasional quizzes and creative
exercises.
Bibliography:
The works listed in the READING LIST
Richard Ruland -- Malcolm Bradbury: From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A History of American Literature
(Penguin Books, New York, 1992)
Peter B. High: An Outline of American Literature (Longman Inc., New York, 1986)
Relevant Chapters from The Norton Anthology of American Literature (ed. Nina Baym, W.W.Norton &
Company Inc., New York, 1998.)
Országh László -- Virágos Zsolt: Az amerikai irodalom története (Eötvös József Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 1997)
Bollobás Enikő: Az amerikai irodalom története (Osiris Kiadó, Budapest, 2005)
Reading List
For the courses BAN 2330 and 2331
American literature
Spring, 2012.
I. FICTION: NOVELS
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw
Toni Morrison: Beloved
II. SHORT FICTION
Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle”;
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Imp of the Perverse”; “The Cask of Amontillado”,
Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Young Goodman Brown”;
Herman Melville: “Bartleby the Scrivener”;
Ambrose Bierce: “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
Stephen Crane: “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”
Ernest Hemingway: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
F.Scott Fitzgerald: “Babylon Revisited”
William Faulkner: "A Rose for Emily", "That Evening Sun", excerpts from The Sound and the Fury
Excerpts from Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Flannery O'Connor: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
Shirley Jackson: "The Lottery"
Bernard Malamud: "The Magic Barrel"
John Cheever: "The Swimmer"
Raymond Carver: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"
III. POETRY
Anne Bradstreet: “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven”; “Annabel Lee”; “Israfel”
Walt Whitman: “Song of Myself” (1-21, 24, 33, 40, 41, 51, 52); “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”; “To a Locomotive in
Winter”
Emily Dickinson: Poems numbered 241 (“I like a look of Agony”), 249 (“Wild Nights”), 695 (“As if the sea should part”),
712 (“Because I could not stop for Death”), 754 (“My life had stood -- a loaded Gun”), 1539 (“Now I lay thee down to
sleep”), 1732 (“My life closed twice”), 1755 (“To make a prairie”) + 5 of your own choice!
Carl Sandburg: "Chicago", "Grass", "Happiness"
Edgar Lee Masters: "Margaret Fuller Slack", "Lucinda Matlock"
Robert Frost: "After Apple Picking", "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
Ezra Pound: "Canto I."
T. S. Eliot: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
W.C.Williams: "The Red Wheelbarrow", "The Young Housewife", "This Is Just To Say"
W. Stevens: "Of Modern Poetry", "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
E. E. Cummings: [in Just -], [O sweet spontaneous], [Buffalo Bill's defunct]
Claude McKay: "If We Must Die", "The Lynching"
Langston Hughes: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "I, too", "Song for a Dark Girl"
Countee Cullen: "Yet Do I Marvel"
John Berryman: "Of Suicide", The Dream Songs 1, 14, 29, 76
Robert Lowell: "For the Union Dead", “Skunk Hour", “Memories of West Street and Lepke”
Allen Ginsberg: "A Supermarket in California", "Sunflower Sutra"
Sylvia Plath: "Lady Lazarus", "Daddy"
IV. DRAMA:
Eugene O'Neill: A Long Day's Journey Into Night Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar
Named Desire Edward Albee: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
V. MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
Jonathan Edwards: Excerpts (TBA)
Benjamin Franklin: Excerpts (TBA)
Thomas Jefferson: “The Declaration of Independence”
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Philosophy of Composition”
Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Self-Reliance”
Frederick Douglass: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave