Course Schedule
Week 1 – Overview & Realism
01.14 Tue
Syllabus Overview; Wallace Stevens "Anecdote of the Jar"
01.16 Thu
Mark Twain, "How To Tell A Story" (including "The Wounded Soldier" and "The Golden Arm"); William Dean Howells "The Smiling Aspects of Life"; Mark Twain, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"
Week 2 – Realism & Local Color
01.21 Tue
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
01.23 Thu
Brett Harte, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" Sign Up For Blogging Days (In Class)
Week 3 – Naturalism
01.28 Tue
Jack London, White Fang
01.30 Thu
Jack London, White Fang
Week 4 – Poetic Experiments
02.04 Tue
02.06 Thu
Walt Whitman, "I Sing The Body Electric"; The Walt Whitman Archive
Week 5 – Psychological Realism
02.11 Tue
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
02.13 Thu
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper"; Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman "A New England Nun"
Week 6 – The City, The War, The Crash
02.18 Tue
Carl Sandburg "Chicago", "I am the People, the Mob", "Skyscraper" Assignment #1 Due by 3AM Tomorrow
02.20 Thu
Ernest Hemingway, "In Another Country"; F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisted"
Week 7 – The Modern Stage
02.25 Tue
Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh
02.27 Thu
Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh
Week 8 – Harlem Renaissance
03.04 Tue
Countee Cullen "Incident", "Yet Do I Marvel"; Langston Hughes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers", "A Dream Deferred", "The Weary Blues"
Week 9
03.11 Tue
Spring Break, No Class
03.13 Thu
Spring Break, No Class
Week 10 – High Modernism
03.18 Tue
Wallace Stevens "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"; Ezra Pound "In a Station of the Metro"; William Carlos Williams "This Is Just to Say", "The Red Wheelbarrow"
03.20 Thu
Marianne Moore "The Pangolin"; Mina Loy "Parturition"
Week 11 – Other Modernisms
03.25 Tue
Raymond Chandler, "Goldfish"; Dashiell Hammett, "Arson Plus"
03.27 Thu
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulu"
Week 12 – Atomic Modernisms
04.01 Tue
Allen Ginsberg, "Howl"
04.03 Thu
Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" Assignment #2 Due by 3AM Tomorrow
Week 13 – The Beat Generation & The Cold War
04.08 Tue
Gregory Corso, "Bomb"; Jack Kerouac, "Visions Of Neal, pt. 1", "Visions of Neal, pt. 2", "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose", "Meditation in the Woods"
04.10 Thu
Philip K. Dick, "The War With the Fnools"; Judith Merril, "That Only a Mother"
Week 14 – Dreams Deferred
04.15 Tue
Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem
04.17 Thu
Chester Himes, Cotton Comes to Harlem
Week 15 – American Postmodernism
04.22 Tue
Donald Barthelme, "The Balloon"; Louise Erdrich "Dear John Wayne"
04.24 Thu
Joyce Carol Oates "Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly"
Week 16 – "The" "Contemporary"
04.29 Tue
David Foster Wallace "Shipping Out" (aka "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again")
05.01 Thu
Jonathan Safran Foer "About the Typefaces Not Used In This Edition"; Jennifer Egan "Great Rock and Roll Pauses" (Yes, it's a Powerpoint presentation; watch and listen) Assignment #3 Due by 3AM Tomorrow