EN 313: Contemporary American Literature
Instructor
Lawrence Gorman
Office Phone
(312)939-0111x2403
Office Address 403
E-mail
[email protected]
Required Text
John Parks, The American Short Story since 1945
R. S. Gwynn and April Linder, Contemporary American Poetry
Course Description
Survey of American literature since 1945.
Course Objectives
At the end of this course students should be able to identify the conventions of
contemporary American texts, interpret those texts, placing them in their
historical/literary context, analyze their place in their generic traditions, and analyze the
ideological purposes and uses of those texts.
Objectives:
1. Identify and respond to the specifically literary features of the texts.
A: Analyze plot
B: Analyze characterization
C: Analyze point of view
D: Analyze figurative language
E: Analyze symbol and allegory
F: Analyze theme
G: Analyze tone
2. Identify and respond to the characteristic effects of individual writers
A: Analyze writer’s narrative characteristics
B: Analyze writer’s characteristic tone
C: Analyze writer’s characteristic structure
D: Analyze writer’s characteristic themes
E: Analyze writer’s characteristic tropes
F: Analyze writer’s repertory of characters
3. Evaluate the specifically literary feature of texts
A: Infer why a writer chose a particular story
B: Infer why writer shaped story into specific plot
C: Evaluate aesthetic and ethical ends of plot
D: Evaluate aesthetic and characterization
E: Infer why writer chose particular point of view
F: Infer reasons for diction
G: Evaluate aesthetic and ethical effect of diction
H: Analyze the ideology of particular themes
I: Evaluate the political and ethical effects of overall ideology
4. Identify the generic features of texts
A: Identify plot genre
B: Relate characterization to plot genre
C: Identify generic stylistic features
D: Identify ideology founding genre
E: Identify how literary features violate generic expectations
5. Relate texts to their historical/cultural contexts
A: Identify historical/cultural allusions in text
B: Analyze texts in terms of larger cultural ideologies
6. Evaluate the aesthetic and ethical effects of individual texts
A: Effect of text on individual sensibility
B: Identify self’s relation to ideal audience
C: Identify text’s relation to overall cultural discourse
D: Evaluate text’s ideology on particular readers
7. Identify and respond to the characteristics of postmodernism
A: Identify and respond to examples of carnival and heterogeneity in texts
B: Identify and respond to primitivism
C: Identify and respond to examples of the breakdown of form
D: Identify and respond to a concern for surface over depth
E: Identify and respond to creation of the antihero
8. Analyze the causes of postmodernism
A: Analyze the weaknesses in the modernist ideology and aesthetic
B: Analyze the continuities and discontinuities between modernism and
postmodernism
C: Analyze the effects of the breakdown of colonialism
D: Analyze the effects of information technologies
E: Analyze the effects of consumer culture
9. Analyze the effects of the postmodernist ideology
A: Analyze the effects of the breakdown of traditional values
B: Analyze the effects of carnivalization
C: Analyze the effects of privileging form over content
10. Reconstruct the literary history of the twentieth century
A: Demonstrate the progression of literary texts
B: Identify reception of given text
C: Identify change in reception of text
D: Show why reception of text changed
F: Demonstrate how texts revise previous texts
Tentative Schedule
Week 1
Eudora Welty “Why I Live at the P. O.
Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
Tillie Olson “I Stand Here Ironing”
Week 2
Philip Roth “Defender of the Faith”
James Baldwin “Sonny’s Blues”
Saul Bellow “Looking for Mr. Green”
William Gass “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”
Examination 1
Week 3
Robert Coover “The Babysitter”
Donald Barthelme “Views of My Father Weeping”
Joyce Carol Oates “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Max Apple “The Oranging of America”
Week 4
Leslie Marmon Silko “The Storyteller”
T. C. Boyle “Greasy Lake”
Charles Johnson “Exchange Value”
Richard Ford “Rock Springs”
Examination 2
Week 5
Raymond Carver “Cathedral”
Amy Hempel “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried”
Robert Stone “Helping”
Don DeLillo “Videotape”
Week 6
Amy Clampitt “The Kingfisher”
“What the Light Was Like”
“Nothing Stays Put”
Richard Wilbur “Mind”
“Love Calls to the Things of this World”
“Advice to a Prophet”
Maxine Kumin “Woodchucks”
“Morning Swim”
“Noted in the New York Times”
A. R. Ammons “Corson’s Inlet”
“First Carolina Said-Song”
“The Foot Washing”
Examination 3
Week 7
Robert Bly “After Drinking All Night with a Friend, We Go Out in a Boat . . .”
“For My Son Noah, 10 Years Old”
“The Scandal”
James Merrill “Charles on Fire”
“The Broken Home”
“Causal Wear”
Robert Creeley “Naughty Man”
“I Know a Man”
“Oh No”
“The Language”
Week 8
Allen Ginsberg “A Supermarket in New York”
From Howl I
“America”
Frank O’Hara “Why I Am Not a Painter”
“The Day Lady Died”
“Poem”
John Ashbery “Farm Implements and Rutabaga in a Landscape”
“Paradoxes and Oxymorons”
“The God of Fairness”
“This Room”
James Wright “St. Judas”
“Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio”
“A Blessing”
“Two Poems about President Harding”
Week 9
Anne Sexton “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward”
“All My Pretty Ones”
“In Celebration of My Uterus”
“Cinderella”
Adrienne Rich “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”
“Living in Sin”
“Diving into the Wreck”
“Rape”
“An Atlas of the Difficult World: XIII (Dedications)
Gary Snyder “Hay for Horses”
“Riprap”
“A Walk”
“The Bath”
Sylvia Plath “The Colossus”
“Daddy”
“Edge”
“Lady Lazarus”
“The Moon and the Yew Tree”
“Morning Song”
Examination 4
Week 10
Mark Strand “Eating Poetry”
“Keeping Things Whole”
“The Tunnel”
“The Great Poet Returns”
Michael Harper “Black Study”
“Dear John, Dear Coltrane”
“We Assume: On the Death of Our Son, Reuban Masai Harper”
Robert Pinksy “Shirt”
“The Want Bone”
“ABC”
James Tate “The Lost Pilot”
“The Blue Booby”
“Teaching the Ape to Write Poems”
Week 11
Yusef Komunyakaa “Facing It”
“My Father’s Love Letters”
“Ode to the Maggot”
Carolyn Forche “The Colonel”
“Expatriate”
“For the Stranger”
Examination 5
Grading Policy
The final grade will be assigned by averaging five essay examinations with classroom
discussion. The essays themselves will be judged on the amount of relevant detail
supporting the thesis. Each essay must have a thesis; it should interpret the assigned
story in such a way that demonstrates both mastery of the story itself and of the
concepts that will be introduced in class. . Each examination will be worth 15% of the
final grade. Class participation will also be worth 25% of the final grade.
Plagiarism Policy
The University considers student plagiarism to be a serious offense. Plagiarism is defined
as the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and words of another author
and the representation of this material as one’s own original work. For the first account of
plagiarism, a zero is given for the assignment. The instructor is required to meet with the
student regarding the first plagiarism charge. A second account of plagiarism results in
the student failing the course. The faculty member is required to notify the student as
well as the Records Office immediately following the decision to assign an ‘F’ grade.
In cases where students feel unsure about a question of plagiarism involving their work,
they are obliged to consult their instructors on the matter before submission.
Cell Phone Usage
Cell phones must be turned off during any class period or exam. If a cell phone is used
during exam, the student runs the risk of failing the exam. The instructor reserves the
right to assign a penalty for cell phone use in class.