Learning Outcomes
- Students will practice reading closely literary texts, films, speeches, newspaper clippings
- Will gain knowledge of certain key historical, social and political events that influenced American literary and cultural production
- Will re-evaluate and re-assess certain important notions on the basis of the themes examined in class (race, gender etc.) and other socio-political developments.
Course Content (Syllabus)
This interdisciplinary course will set to explore some central themes and concepts that define American literature and culture from 1914 till the present day by shedding light on certain historical and political facts. Topics to be studied include: Land/Immigration, Native Americans, Gender, Urbanism, Technology, Race/African Americans, Politics, Ecology, 9/11 etc. Texts: literary and cultural texts (speeches, songs, poems, essays, lyrics); films and photographs.
Keywords
literature, culture, politics, history, environment (urban and natural), race, gender, technology
Additional bibliography for study
Anzaldua, Gloria. Bordelands: the new mestizo = La frontera (1987).
Barker, Chris. Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities (1999).
Bennett, Andy. Cultures of Popular Music (2001).
Bloom, Harold. Black American Women Poets and Dramatists (1996).
Bradbury, Malcolm, and Howard Temperley. Introduction to American Studies (1998).
Breidlid, Anders, et. Al. American Culture: An Anthology of Civilization Texts (2004).
Castillo-Speed, Lillian. Latina: Women’s Voices from the Borderlands (1995).
Clark, Michael. Dos Passo’s Early Fiction 1912-1938 (1987).
Dos Passos, John. Manhattan Transfer (1925 and 1953).
Garofalo, Reebee. Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the USA (2008).
Holmes, Su. Understanding Reality Television (2004).
Jarab, Josef, et al. America in the Course of Human Events (2006).
Ruland, Richard and Malcolm Bradbury. From Puritanism to Postmodernism (1991).
Hodges, Adam, and Chad Nilep. Discourse, War and Terrorism (2007).
Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Vonnegut Effect (2004).
Lange, Dorothea. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties (1969).
Leak, Jeffrey. Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature (2005).
Lee, Martyn J. The Consumer Society Reader (2000).
Lentricchia, Frank. New Essays on the White Noise (1991).
Markey, Janice. A New Tradition? The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich (1988).
Nabokov, Peter. Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the Present 1492-2000 (1999).
O’ Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: the Emerging Voice (1987).
Olster, Stacey Michele. The Cambridge Companion to John Updike (2006).
Porter, Joy. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005).
Scully, Vincent. American Architecture and Urbanism (1988).
Temperley, Howard, and Christopher Bigsby. A New Introduction to American Studies (2006).
Updike, John. Terrorist (2006).