American Survey
MODULE DESCRIPTION:
This course offers a survey of American literature from the colonial period to the present day. The texts selected will vary in genre and will be examined in view of the interplay between literature and its wider context
MODULE OBJJECTIVES:
- . Consolidating the students' critical and reading skills.
- Developing a historical sense of literature in America, and other parts of the English-speaking world,
- Contextualizing works of literature and relating them to other spheres of social, political, and economic action.
- Allowing students to acquire an extensive knowledge of literature produced in the English-speaking world.
- Broadening the students' perspective on English literature by including literatures from the colonial and postcolonial world.
- Lectures, presentations, preparations, home and reading assignments, short projects,
- Library research,
- pair work, tutoring, group work,
COURSE CONTENt (2019-2020):
The following texts will have to be covered in class.
- Native Voices
- Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672) : The Flesh and the Spirit
- Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758): Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
- John de Crévecoeur (1735 – 1813): What is an American ?
- Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809): Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs
- Washington Irving (1783 -1859): Rip Van Winkle
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882): Self Reliance
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864): Young Goodman Brown
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849): The Fall of the House of Usher
- Henry David Thoreau (1817 -1862): Resistance to Civil Government
- Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892): Song to Myself ; Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking
- Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) : I taste a Liquor Never Brewed ; I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
