American Literature at Faco

Course Description:

This course covers a wide range of American prose and poetry including a study of major themes such as transcendentalism, individualism, romanticism, modernism, realism and the American dream. Through a method of practical criticism students will be familiarised with the necessary skills for making a critical analysis of the texts and appraising their representative importance in the corpus of American literature. Additional material will be introduced to the class to elucidate different trends in the American literary tradition. Students will be evaluated on the basis of: 

1) active participation and meaningful contribution to the critical appreciation of the literary texts

2) seminar presentations (groups of up to three students each week)

3) Diaries

Diaries are notebooks for keeping track of the course and will contain commentaries by each student on all the material covered in the course. Diaries will be evaluated on the basis of: 

1) thoroughness of observation and completeness

2) personal touch and creativity

3) Discernment and understanding of the material they cover

Course Programme: September 2012 to December 2012

1) Introduction to American Literature

2) A Journey, by Edith Wharton, 1862–1937

3) The Strength of God, by Sherwood Anderson, 1876 –1941

4)  New York To Detroit, by Dorothy Parker, 1893 –1967

5) Clean Well-Lighted Place, by Ernest Hemingway, 1899 –1961

6) An Alcoholic Case, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1896-1940

7)  The Girl with a Pimply Face, by William Carlos Williams, 1883 –1963

8) The Whistle, by  Eudora Welty, 1909 – 2001

9) He, by Katherine Anne Porter, 1890 – 1980

10) A Late Encounter with the Enemy, by Mary Flannery O'Connor, 1925 – 1964

11) Sunday Teasing, by John Updike, 1932 – 2009

12) My Son the Murderer, by Bernard Malamud, 1914-1986

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* C. Day Lewis ( 1904 – 1972): Once upon a time poetry and science were one, and its name was magic. Magic, for our earliest ancestors, was the most effective way of understanding nature and their fellow-man, and of gaining power over them. It was not till some three centuries ago that science finally broke away from magic: the scientific revolution of seventeenth century withdrew from the "supernatural" as a field of study....

*A.N. Witehead (1861 – 1947) said:

The soul cries aloud for release into change. It suffers the agonies of claustrophobia. The transitions of humour, wit, irreverence, play, sleep, and ---above all---of art are necessary for it. Great art is the arrangement of the environment so as to provide for the soul vivid, but transient, values, human being's require something which absorbs them for a time, something out of the routine which they can stare at."27 " Accordingly, the great art is more than transient refreshment. It is something that adds to the permanent richness of the soul's self-attainment. It justifies itself both by its immediate enjoyment, and also by its discipline of the inmost being." 

*A poem a day keeps psychiatrist away.

*Language logically and scientifically used cannot describe a landscape or a face.

*I.A. Richards (1893 –1979): "Poetry makes us remember how we felt. It operates in a field which is closed to science.

*T.R. Henn (1901-1974)  has spoken of the moral values of art as the " sensitising of the human mind to the living world and its complexities." The final justification of all poetry" he says, is " hat it seeks to express a peculiar fusion of ideas and emotions which are normally on the edge of consciousness, or even beyond it."

*Coleridge (1772 – 1834):  A poem is an organic growth from within outwards. 

*Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626): Poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation.  

* And the idea that poetry is a way of penetrating through appearances to the heart of reality.

* Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC): Poetry as mimesis, imitation- recording and recreation of experience.

* William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850): “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”

*Robert Frost (1874 –1963) : A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. –

*Interior Landscape:

In Man's Search for Meaning, penned by Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Victor Frankl, his thesis, formed from observations acculmulated during his time in Nazi death camps, was that man has little if any control over circumstances. But—and this is a big but—you do have control over your attitude toward what is happening to you. This observation about one’s attitude became Frankl’s means of survival. Attitude and mindset are a part of one’s interior landscape, safe from intrusion.