Wingard (Moravian College)

General Information

Abstract

"I am large. . . . I contain multitudes" Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" In this course we will read and study the work of more than 20 authors working in prose fiction and nonfiction and poetry from around the time of World War I until recent times. Mostly, we will concentrate on what's called the Modern period: the years between the century's two world wars. Within those generic and historical limits, it is my hope, we will experience diversity. In planning this course, I have tried to broaden the canon of "major writers" that is usually studied. Some of the usual suspects have been rounded up, to be sure, but the lineup also includes a number of writers whom you may not have heard of, let alone read, because they have long been unanthologized or their work has been out of print. Diversity should also apply to the way we approach literary texts in this course. Basically, I want you to practice reading, interpreting and criticizing texts, but at the same time there should be room for different ways to do these things. What critical approaches are you familiar with? Which one(s) have you been taught to use or have experimented with on your own? Finally, diversity should pretty naturally operate in this learning community simply because we are all different people who bring different perspectives to any experience we encounter. Certainly one goal of literary study in a classroom should be to express, share and learn from these differences.

Population

This course is an upper-level survey of American literature in the 20th century. Students are mostly juniors and seniors. Format is mostly discussion.

Bibliography and Texts

Texts:

Lauter, Paul, et al. eds. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol 2. Faulkner, William . Light in August. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Gold, Michael. Jews Without Money. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust.

Additional Readings

Bleau, N. Arthur. "Robert Frost's Favorite Poem." Frost: Centennial Essays III. Ed. Jac Tharpe. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. 174-76.

Friedman, Susan. "Who Buried H.D? A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in `The Literary Tradition'." College English, 36 (March 1975), 801-14.

Holland, Norman. from The Brain of Robert Frost. New York: Routledge, 1988. 16-23.

Kearns, Katherine. excerpts from "`The Place Is the Asylum': Women and Nature in Robert Frost's Poetry." American Literature, 59:2 (May 1987), 190-210.

O'Brien, Conor Cruise. "Purely American: Innocent Nation, Wicked World." Harper's Magazine, April 1980, 32-34.

Walker, Alice. "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston." Ms., March 1975, 74-79, 85-89.

Wolfe, Tom. "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel." Harper's Magazine, Nov. 1989, 45-56.

General Writing and Pedagogy

General Writing and Pedagogy: Students write two unit tests and a final exam--all are essay tests with questions distributed in advance. Students also keep a response journal, writing at least one entry for each author whose work they read, and they write one paper that expands a response or responses to a single text by any 20th-century American author not assigned in the syllabus. The journal assignment begins with students completing a "Personal Literary Repertoire Inventory" (see below).

Readings & Pedagogy

Unit #1; 2 class sessions

Readings for Unit #1: "To The Reader" and introduction to the Modern period (in Heath).

Unit #2; 3 class sessions.

Readings for Unit #2: selected poems by Frost (in Heath); criticism by Bleau, Holland, and Kearns (handouts).

Unit #3; 3 class sessions.

Edith Wharton , "Roman Fever," and Theodore Dreiser , "Typhoon".

Unit #4; 7 class sessions.

Readings for Unit #4: "Alienation and Literary Experimentation" (in Heath); poems and criticism by Pound (in Heath and on handouts), poems by H.D. , poems by Williams; short stories by Barnes and Hemingway (in Heath).

Unit #5; 3 class sessions.

Readings for Unit #5: Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; essay by O'Brien (handout).

Unit #6; 2 class sessions.

Readings for Unit #6: "The Harlem Renaissance" (in Heath); prose by Locke , poems by Hughes and McKay (in Heath).

Unit #7; 7 class sessions.

Readings for Unit #7: Hurston , Their Eyes Were Watching God; Walker, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (handout); Faulkner , Light in August.

Unit #8; 5 class sessions.

Readings for Unit #8: "Issues and Visions in Modern America" (in Heath); Gold, Jews Without Money; prose by Kang , poems by early Chinese immigrants (in Heath).

Unit #9; 2 class sessions.

Readings for Unit #9: prose by Mourning Dove and Mathews (in Heath).

Unit #10; 3 class sessions.

Readings for Unit #10: West, The Day of the Locust; essay by Wolfe (handout).

Unit #11; 2 class sessions.

Readings for Unit #11: introduction to the Contemporary period and selected prose or poetry from the Contemporary section of Heath.

Guidelines for Response Journals

This is a place for you to practice interactive reading by formulating and recording your responses to readings, by beginning to work out interpretations and criticisms, by talking to yourself and/or back to an author, on paper.

As a journal, these are the basic considerations: write often, write a lot each time, don't edit yourself as you write. The assignment says to write at least one entry for each author we read; that can be one entry for several texts by an author, one entry on one text, several entries on one text, etc. If we read the work of 20 authors, you should have at least that many entries in your journal. (You should also write journal entries on the extra text you pick for your paper.) One criterion I will use to assign a grade to your overall journal is purely quantitative: having the minimum required number of entries will earn you a C on this criterion; this grade will vary downwards or upwards as entries increase or decrease. I'll also look at how much you write per entry, whether you are letting the words and thoughts flow or whether you're just barely eking them out. This factor will account for a plus or minus in this part of your grade. But remember: I will not grade individual entries.

Concerning what to write in a particular entry, start with your response to the text you are reading. What do you think of it? What do you feel about it? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Does it interest you? Bore you? Disgust you? Excite you? Stimulate you? Remind you of something? Answer questions for you? Raise questions for you? And so on. Next, probe into why you have the response(s) you do. There are two broad parts to this: what does the text contribute to your response? and what do you contribute to your response? Try to account for both in your journal entries. Here's a good place to remind yourself that journal writing of this kind isn't a matter of putting down the "right" answer; this is exploratory writing -- you are probing your thoughts and feelings with respect to the text, or following them to see where they will lead (to undiscovered and exciting territory, I hope!)

You might ask yourself, What does the text contribute to my response? or How does the text contribute to my response? Doing so should take you into familiar territory in some ways: you can talk about whatever formal or thematic elements the text seems to have; you can talk about any genres or subgenres the text may be a part of and how that contributes to your response; you can talk about whatever you know, think or believe about the author of the text and his/her contributions to whatever you respond to in the text; you can talk about whatever you know, think or believe about the context in which the text was produced and how that contributed to whatever you respond to.

You might ask yourself, What do I contribute to my response? or How do I contribute to my response?

Some of this might be familiar territory, but you might surprise yourself with some discoveries too. You can talk about the expectations and experiences you bring to the text. You might have these in mind before you start to read, or they may be brought to consciousness as you begin or proceed to read. You can talk about your attitudes toward anything you notice in the text: what do you know, think or believe about anything the text is "doing" or "saying"? You can talk about your cultural situation (for lack of a better term): gender, race, age and class. You can talk about the effect of whatever critical position you are reading from, which of course requires you to be conscious of that position. A spin you can put on this is to consciously adopt a position before you start to read: put pressure on the text, try to read it "against the grain." There are numerous critical positions or perspectives available. This journal should be a place where you can explore different ways to read.

Third, try to analyze your response. This means reading back over what you have already written and writing about it. What does it tell you about yourself as a reader? What does it tell you about the culture that either you or the text or both is/are written by? Do you see that or how you were reading in a particular way and the effect that had on your reading experience with the text? Could you consider what would happen in another reading if you read differently? (That might lead you to another reading of the text and another journal entry!) Do you see how your cultural situation affected your reading? Could you consider what would happen in another reading if you read as a different person? (That might lead you to another reading and another journal entry too. We are all different people within ourselves or in our imaginations. Try it!)

If you give a good effort to writing the kinds of things described above, the length of a journal entry will take care of itself. I'm not one to count words, but if you want some kind of yardstick to measure minimum length of a journal entry, let's say a page and a half, single spaced. I will consider that in assigning a grade to your overall journal, and I will also consider content in terms of your honest effort to do the kinds of things I have outlined here and the quality -- depth, self- consciousness, playfulness, risk-taking, self-instructing -- of your analyses in your entries.

Personal literary repertoire inventory (PLRI)

Make this a sort of preface to your response journal. Write as fully as you can in response to the following questions. Please turn in what you write by 4 p.m. tomorrow (Sept. 5) afternoon at Zinzendorf Hall, third floor drop box.

1. What do I know/think/believe about:

a. what literature is or is supposed to be--

is it didactic or aesthetic? is it for moral improvement, political or social education, or for art's sake alone?

does/should it acknowledge a role in politics and society, or does/should it stand apart or above?

do writers have a point, message or theme to get across, or do they just write, without concerning themselves with larger purposes or ends or with readers?

what accounts for the production of a literary text? (e.g. the Muses, individual genius or talent, inspiration, marketing strategies? social or historical conditions, public taste)

b. what's involved in reading literature--

does a reader have to get some point, message or theme from a literary text--perhaps put there by the author--in order to read successfully? If not, what else might constitute a successful reading?

how much is a reader allowed to read into a literary text? what limits her or him in doing so?

2. How are my answers to any of the above questions modified when I think of American literature, or the work of any particular American writers?

3. How do I approach reading a literary text?

do I approach it differently than other kinds of texts? or ones I don't read for class?

what do I expect to happen or find when I read literature? what is this based on?

what do I actively do when I read?

4. What critical approaches, theories or assumptions do I know about? which of these do I actually read with? why?

5. a. How am I situated with respect to each of the following?

gender age group / race or ethnicity / sexual preference / social class

b. How does my situation with respect to one or more of the above categories affect the way I read? Is there another category I'd place myself in as a reader?

6. What subjects or topics in 20th-century American literature am I especially interested in as I begin this course?

7. a. What other literature courses have I had? where? when?

b. What have I learned about literary study in any of these courses that has proven helpful or interesting beyond that course?

Guidelines for "Researched" Papers

1. This assignment asks you to start from a reading of a text in 20th- century American literature and not assigned in the syllabus and work from there to a) broaden your repertoire about that text, b) reconsider that text in light of your broadened repertoire and c) report on this process in a paper.

2. This paper really should be essentially not very different from a good response journal entry. That is, your response and analysis should remain at the forefront; don't pretend to an "objective" analysis/interpretation of the literary text you are reading.

3. Your paper should differ from response journal writing only in being more focused and organized. That is, your writing in the paper should be arranged around and driven by a thesis statement that is carefully and logically developed over the rest of the paper. In keeping with point 1 above, this thesis statement would focus on your reading of the text you have chosen.

4. The above points suggest an approach to your secondary sources as follows: Do not take them as objective truth statements about your text, or its author or the historical/cultural context of the text or anything else. All criticism, as we have seen, is necessarily biased and subjective; that doesn't make it wrong, but we should always take into account the subjective nature of interpretation.

Do take them as the products of other readers' readings (even though the conventions of what they are writing may cause the writers to hide themselves behind a pose of "objectivity"). Therefore you do not have to use these sources to "prove" or "support" an analytic argument of your own about the text you are reading; you may even disagree with what they say, or read the same text differently from the way those other readers read it.

Do take them as means of "broadening your repertoire" with respect to the text you are reading/writing about. That is, when you consider what other readers have to say, you now know, think or believe more--or differently--about the text you have read in common with these other readers. Useful questions to ask yourself (useful in terms of generating thoughts and words for your paper) are these: What do I know, think or believe about my text after having read what these secondary sources say? Why do I know, think or believe what I do?