HomeMy WebLinkAboutLIT-202Bergen Community College
School of English
Department of Composition and Literature
Course Syllabus
LIT202: American Literature 1880 to Present
Instructor:
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Office Hours: TBA
Course Description:
This course is a study of representative American literature from the late nineteenth
century to the present. Students read works by such authors as Twain, O'Neill, Hurston,
Hemingway, Faulkner, Frost, Wright, Ginsberg, and Rich.
General Education Course. Lecture (3.00). Prerequisite: WRT-101.
Suggested Text(s):
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 6th Edition.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1970.
Roth, Philip. Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories. New York: Vintage, 1959.
Student Learning Objectives: As a result of meeting the requirements of this course,
you will be able to:
1. Identify major works and themes of American literature from the latter nineteenth
century to the present.
2. Employ close textual analysis to interpret and evaluate works of American
literature.
3. Demonstrate, in both class discussion and written assignments, an understanding
of the major genres of the period as well as the various literary techniques that
writers use in constructing their texts.
4. Identify the correlative aesthetic, literary, historical, cultural, social, and/or
political movements that contextualize the texts under study.
5. Apply appropriate critical lenses to works of American literature.
6. Produce a properly formatted written evaluation of selected works of American
literature; and demonstrate competency in both research methodologies and
literary analysis.
Course Requirements:
Students will be required to do the following:
1. Analyze works of literature using a variety of approaches.
2. Participate in class activities such as discussion, writing, and presentations.
3. Write 15-20 pages or 3750-5000 words for the course. This may include the following:
journals, quizzes, papers, exams, research papers, class presentation, summaries, and
responses
Final grade will be calculated as follows:
Written responses: 35%
Midterm Paper: 25%
Final Paper: 30 %
Class participation: 10%
Attendance Policy:
Your presence is vital to our classroom community, so regular attendance is required.
You will be permitted four absences after which your grade will be negatively affected.
You are expected to come to class every day prepared to discuss assigned texts and to
produce written responses both in class and at home.
A note on plagiarism: please give credit where credit is due! Honesty is expected of you.
It is expected that the work you hand in will always be your own, and that you will never copy
sentences, phrases, paragraphs, or whole essays from any other person's work, for that is
plagiarism. If you are ever unclear about how to cite another person or author's ideas, come see
me or consult your manual.
Written assignments must be formatted according to MLA standards. You will find citation
guides on our library’s website. Please note that you will also be expected to produce a
documented term paper with secondary sources; and you may find appropriate—relevant—
resources in our library. You are encouraged to schedule an appointment with one of our
reference librarians if you did not attend an instructional seminar in your writing class.
BCC’s Writing Center is located in L125, and you are encouraged to work with our faculty and
professional writing tutors. Please note that the center is indeed a tutoring center—you are not
to drop off your paper for proofreading as this is not a function of the center.
Sample Class Schedule/Reading List:
Week 1
Introductions.
American Literature and the sociopolitical landscape—introduction, pp. 3-14.
Week 2
Discussion of Realism, Regional Writing, and Representational Literature as a means of
resistance.
Walt Whitman Preface to Leaves of Grass pp. 21-35
Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, pp. 37-79
Martin Espada “Poetry like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination” (handout)
Week 3
Whitman continued.
An introduction to women’s voices—Dickinson & Gilman.
Emily Dickinson: 280, 315, 1545
Adrienne Rich “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” (handout)
Week 4
No Class Tuesday 9/20. Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” pg. 831
Week 5
The regional narrative…
Henry James “Art of Fiction” pp. 553-562
Theodore Dreiser “Old Ragaum and His Theresa” pg. 952
Abraham Cahan “A Sweat-Shop Romance” pg. 822
Writing Assignment #1: Please write a 2-3 page response to/analysis of Realism as a
means of representation and/or resistance in a minimum of two of the texts covered.
Week 6
“American Literature Between the Wars” pp. 1071-1086
Gertrude Stein “The Making of Americans” pg. 1152
Robert Frost “The Figure a Poem Makes” pg. 1200
Week 7
Modern American Poetry/Prose
T. S. Eliot “The Wasteland” pg. 1430
Zora Neale Hurston “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” pg. 1516
Ernest Hemingway “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” pg. 1848
Midterm Paper assignment: Please write a 3-5 page comparative analysis of two authors
from the Modern period—literature between the wars. This essay will be a documented
paper and must adhere to MLA style.
Week 8
Race in America
Langston Hughes “Visitors to the Black Belt” pg. 1899
Ralph Ellison “Battle Royal” pg. 2083
James Baldwin “Going to Meet the Man” pg. 2191
Alice Walker “Everyday Use” pg. 2469
Week 9
Toni Morrison “Recitatif” pg. 2253
The Bluest Eye
Week 10
The Bluest Eye
Week 11
Finish The Bluest Eye
Topics/Proposals due for final paper.
Your final paper (due Week 15) will be a 5-7 page deep analysis of a specific genre
and/or author. You will analyze/critique the author and/or specific text for both its
representational and aesthetic qualities.
Week 12
“American Prose Since 1945” pp. 1953-1965
Saul Bellow “Looking for Mr. Green” pg. 2095
Kurt Vonnegut “Fates Worse Than Death” pg. 2183
Thomas Pynchon “Entrapy” pg. 2357
Introduction to Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus
Week 13
Goodbye Columbus
Writing Assignment #2: This will be a short (1-2 page) response to a principle character
in the text.
Thanksgiving
Week 14
Women’s Voices
Maxine Hong Kingston “Tripmaster Monkey” pg. 2402
Gloria Anzaldua “El sonavabitche” pg. 2455
Louise Erdrich “Fleur” pg. 2562
Week 15
American Poetry since 1945
Amiri Baraka “A Poem for Willie Best” pg. 2315
Stanley Kunitz “Father and Son” pg. 2653
Gwendolyn Brooks “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till” pg. 2786
& “The Blackstone Rangers” pg. 2786
Allen Ginsberg “Howl” pg. 2865 & “A Supermarket in California” pg. 2872