American Literature 1 3301-L1AL1
The course is a survey of the most important tendencies and phenomena in the history of American literature from traditional Native American oral narratives to the literature of the 1920s. The material for discussion is arranged chronologically and the thematic core of the course is as follows: colonial literature, the Enlightenment, romantic fiction, transcendentalism, nineteenth-century poetry, realism, naturalism, modernist poetry, and the Harlem Renaissance.
Course coordinators
Type of course
Mode
Prerequisites (description)
Learning outcomes
Knowledge
K_W01 The graduate will be able to identify the place and specificity of English Studies against the background of other academic disciplines within the humanities
K_W02 The graduate will be able to understand key terminology, well established methods and theories of literary studies and culture studies within English studies
- K_W04 The graduate will be able to describe the relation between American literature and historical and cultural processes on an advanced level.
K_W09 The graduate will be able to identify the multiplicity of cultures in the USA and their complexity as well as to recognize American cultural codes and structural and institutional background on an advanced level.
Abilities
K_U01 The graduate is able to employ the terminology and methodological tools from literary studies to analyze American literature.
K_U03 The graduate is able to analyze American literary and cultural phenomena and draw generalizations on their basis with respect to the social, historical, and economic context.
Social competences
K_K03 value responsibility for one’s own work and respect the work of others, adhering to the professional and ethical norms in various projects and other activities undertaken at work, voluntary services, etc.
K_K06 The graduate is ready to value cultural heritage and cultural diversity.
Assessment criteria
Being prepared for classes (reading the assigned texts)
Participation in class discussion
A maximum of 3 absences is allowed
Final test: written test
Make-Up: written test
Practical placement
N/A
Bibliography
Tsimshian tribe
“Raven Makes a Girl Sick and Then Cures Her”
Anne Bradstreet
“Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House”
Edward Taylor
“Upon the Sweeping Flood”
Jonathan Edwards
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
Benjamin Franklin
“Continuation of the Account of my Life, begun at Passy, near Paris 1784” (from Autobiography)
Hector St. John de Crèvecœur
“What Is an American?”
Washington Irving
“Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Young Goodman Brown”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Self-Reliance”
Henry David Thoreau
“Resistance to Civil Government”
Herman Melville
“Bartleby the Scrivener”
Edgar Allan Poe
“The Cask of Amontillado”
Walt Whitman
“Song of Myself” (parts 1-6)
Emily Dickinson
poems 258, 712, 986
Henry James
Daisy Miller
Edith Wharton
“Roman Fever”
Mark Twain
Huck Finn (chapters 1-8)
Jack London
“To Build a Fire”
Stephen Crane
“Open Boat”
Robert Frost
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Ezra Pound
“In a Station of the Metro”
W. C. Williams
“The Young Housewife”
H.D.
“Fragment 113”
Langston Hughes
“Mulatto”
“Harlem”
Zora Neale Hurston
“Sweat”