AMERICAN LITERATURE IN PERSPECTIVE

AMER527

Course Code: AMER527
Semester: First Term (Fall)
Theory+Practice: 3 + 0
ECTS: 5

Course Type

Compulsory Course

Course Level

Master's Degree Without Thesis

Year of Study

Semester

First Term (Fall)

ECTS

Name of Lecturer(s)

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this course, the students;

will be able to situate the major periods and movements in American literature within a historical and conceptual framework,
will be able to discuss some of the themes that have preoccupied American writers in their attempts to define, explore, and question aspects of American culture and identity.

Mode of Delivery

Face to face

Prerequisites

Recommended Optional Programme Components

None

Course Description

This is a course designed to provide an overview of American literature in order to prepare a contextual framework for the seminars. The approach used will be conceptual as well as historical.

Course Contents

WEEK	TOPICS
1^st Week	The Colonial Period to the Revolution: General introduction on the early settlements, the colonial and Puritan perceptions of America, and building a new nation: John Smith, William Bradford, Thomas Morton, John Winthrop; the natives and the colonists: Roger Williams and Mary Rowlandson; Puritanism and Puritan literature;
2^nd Week	Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, and Cotton Mather;
3^rd Week	The expansion of the colonial settlements, the introduction of slavery, the colonial economy, the political awakening of the colonies, the impact of the European Enlightenment, and the American Revolution. The literature of the period.
4^th Week	The Revolution to the Civil War: Life and society in post-Revolution America, search for new modes and forms in literature.
5^th Week	References to the writings of the period.
6^th Week	The Civil War to World War I: The social, political, cultural, and economic causes of the Civil War, the North-South conflict, the inception of the so-called "Second Republic" era after the war, and the Reconstruction.
7^th Week	Developments and movements in American culture and literature in the post-Civil War period to the end of the nineteenth century, black writing, early twentieth-century American culture and literature to World War I.
8^th Week	References to, and studies of the authors and their works.
9^th Week	World War I to World War II: American culture and literature in the interbellum period (World War I to World War II); the social, political and cultural context; The Harlem Renaissance;
10^th Week	Sample readings from, and references to, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Allen Tate.
11^th Week	Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Lillian Hellman.
12^th Week	World War II to the Present: American culture and literature from the 1940s to the present, studied through sample readings and with reference to the social, political and cultural context of the period;
13^th Week	References to the works of Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roetke, Robert Hayden, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Duncan, Robert Creely, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton;
14^th Week	Eudora Welty, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Denise Chavez, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Edward Albee.

Recommended or Required Reading

The Norton Anthology of American Literature.Ed. Nina Baym et al., 8th edn., 6 vols. New York: Norton, 2012.
A People and a Nation: A History of the United States.Ed. Mary Beth Norton et al. 7th edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
Spiller, Robert, et al., eds. Literary History of the United States.
Gura, Philip F.The Crossroads of American History and Literature.
Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States.
Elliott, Emory. Columbia Literary History of the United States.

Planned Learning Activities and Teaching Methods

Lecture
Discussion
Presentation
Questions/Answers

Assessment Methods and Criteria

	Quantity	Percentage (%)
Mid-term	2	60
Other	1	15
Total(%)		75
Contribution of In-term Studies to Overall Grade(%)		75
Contribution of Final Examination to Overall Grade(%)		25
Total(%)		100

ECTS Allocated Based on Student Workload

Activities	Quantity	Duration (Hour)	Total Workload (Hour)
Midterm exam	2	3	6
Preparation for Quiz
Individual or group work	14	3	42
Preparation for Final exam	1	10	10
Course hours	14	3	42
Preparation for Midterm exam	2	5	10
Laboratory (including preparation)
Final exam	1	3	3
Homework
Weekly Articles and Resource Research	14	3	42
Total Work Load			155
Total Work Load / 30 (h)			5.16
ECTS Credit of the Course			5

Language of Instruction

English

Work Placement(s)

Programme Qualifications / Learning Outcomes

	LO1	LO2
K1	X	X
K2
K3	X	X
K4		X
K5	X	X
K6	X	X
K7
K8
K9
K10		X
K11	X	X
K12
K13