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American Studies Online Syllabus

The following is an electronic syllabus for the literature section of our American Studies course. Each selection has an online component and perhaps some supplementary material that will expand your understanding of the course readings.

 Supplementary Resources

 

Literary Homework Syllabus

Introduction to American Literature: The American Experience

Notes on the First Four Colonies: South, New England, South, New York

History--The South

John Smith
from The General History of Virginia
read pages 42-49; answer 1-8, page 48.
concept: History

Supplementary Online Resources

Webquest: Visit Virtual Jamestown (homework credit)

For a further investigation of the Early Colonies, check out the American Studies Internet Readinss page.

The New England Colony: Puritans & Pilgrims

Individual Figures--Check the homework questions.

History--New England

Puritan Poetry

Supplementary Online Resources

The Salem Witch Trails

Cotton Mather
from The Wonders of the Invisible World (Salem Withcraft Trials)
Concepts: Journal Entry, bias

Read The Crucible-- a play by Arthur Miller
We will be both reading the play and watching the movie.
The Crucible/McCarthy Hearing Project: 100 points
** Individual Research Paper: First Draft Due

Online Quiz: Check Your Puritan I.Q.

 

The First Great Awakening

END OF FIRST QUARTER

1800-1840 A Growing Nation: From Reason to Romance

European Romantics
Writers , Painters, &  Musicians
 

 American Romanticism can be broadly defined as that perspective which looks at objects and sees them as emblems of a greater reality. In other words, freedom of perception for the individual can be completely liberated.

Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

 



Early American Fiction

The Rise of the Short Story: Discussion and Notes

Short Story Collections

Individual Writers


Washington Irving
"The Devil and Tom Walker"
Concepts: Folk Tale

Washington Irving: Selections

 

James Fenimore Cooper
from The Prairie
read pages 194-203; answer 1-10
Concepts: Setting, heroic figures--Natty Bumppo as "Adam in the fiction of the New World."

3. Webquest: Edgar Allan Poe (homework credit)

Edgar Allan Poe

"The Fall of the House of Usher"
read pages 210-225; answer 1-14, pages 224-225/
Concepts: Romanticism in Poe, Elements of the Short Story--setting, single effect and theme
"The Oval Portrait"
read pages 232-237; answer 1-8, page 236

Concepts: frame story, cause and effect

Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Works

Poertry

"The Raven"
read pages 226-231; answer 1-9, page 231Concepts: Alliteration, consonance, and assonance, allusions

"To Helen"
read pages 238-239; answer 1-5, page 239
Concepts: allusions , symbolism

 

1840-1855 The New England Renaissance: Romanticism to Transcendentalism--The Utopian Era

A Comparison of Utopian Communities (The Farm, Brooks Farm, etc) (100points)

"Introduction to Transcendentalism"

Individual Writers

Ralph Waldo Emerson
from Nature; from Self-Reliance
Concepts: Transcendentalism, analogies, conformity

"The American Scholar"

"Concord Hymn"
Concepts: writing about history

* Test Three/Transcendentalism = 100 points

 

Anti-Transcndentalism: Hawthorne and Melville

Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The Minister's Black Veil"
read pages 300-315; answer 1-10, page 311
Concepts: Anti-Transcndentalism, parables

Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels and Short Stories

 

Hermman Melville
Read pages 316-333; from Moby Dick; answer 1-15, on page 333.
Concepts: Anti-transcendentalism, symbolism, theme

Supplementary

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Sellections

Late Romanticism and Poetry

Webquest: Romanticism in American Art (homework credit)

Visit The Emily Dickinson Museum

Emily Dickinson
read pages 370-395; answer questions
1-3, page 372 for "'Hope' is the thing with feathers--"
1-6, page 373, fro "There is a certain Slant of light--"
1-7 page 377, for "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"
1-9, page 385, for "Because I could not stop for Death--"
1-6; page 387, for "The Bustle in a House"
1-2, page 389, for "Much Madness is divinest Sense"

Concepts: Style, unconventional punctuation and capitalization, brevity of lines and stanzas; figurative language, quatrains.

 

Walt Whitman
Read pages 458-473;
Answer Questions.
1-2, page 459, for "Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass"
Concept: America as the subject of poetry
1-5, page 464, from "Song of Myself"
Concepts: Style, free verse, author's attitude
1-3, page 469, "Beat! Beat! Drums!"
Concept: symbols.

Walt Whitman: Revising Himself This Library of Congress exhibition traces this evolution of Leaves of Grass and Walt Whitman's life, tapping a range of editions and drafts of the famous work. A wealth of interesting biographical material on Whitman, his friends and associates, his work as a teacher, tending the wounded during the Civil War, and for the federal government, also appears in the exhibit

Walt Whitman Archive The Walt Whitman Archive includes a host of versions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, numerous poetry manuscripts witn a related guide, a detailed biography of Whitman, and a bibliography of articles, books, chapters of books and poems about Whitman published from 1975 to the present.

Mark Twain

Supplementary Reading

 Sir Walter Scott: Selections

Harriet Beecher Stow

 

1850-1865 "The Civil War"

For a further investigation of the Early Colonies, check out the American Studies Civil War Journals.

Frederick Douglas
"My Bondage and My Freedom"
Concept: Autobiography

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas

From Mary Chesnut's Civil War Journal

Abraham Lincoln

 

Matthew Brady Portraits

Matthew Brady and the Civil War

Civil War Photographs Homepage

Civil War Virtual Battlefield Tours

Internet Field Trip: Civil War

Photographs of the Civil War

More Photographs of the Civil War


 

Robert E. Lee "Letter to his Son"
Page 451
Answer Quesstions 1-5

Walt Whitman Revisited
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"
Read pages 412-423; Answer questions 1-8, page 423.
Concepts: Elegy, Free verse

 

Vocabulary Due: 50 points
* Test One/Civil War = 100 points

7. Civil War Journals/Hypermedia Composition (100 points)

 

Booker T. Washington: Up From Slavery

 

1865-1900 Early American Short Stories: Romanticism to Naturalism

O'Henry's Short Stories

O'Henry

Regionalism--The WEST

For a further investigation of the WEST, check out the American Studies Internet Readinss page.


Mark Twain
from Roughing It, "Tom Quartz"
Read pages 494-498
Answer questions 1- 4; page 498
Concepts: Point of View, Exaggeration, Dialect

from Life on the Mississippi, "The Boys' Ambition"
Read pages - 500-505
Answer questions 1- 5; page
Concepts: Narration

"The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"
Read pages - 505-511
Answer questions 1- 8; page 511
Concepts: Humor-- Point of View, Exaggeration, Regional Dialects, and Tone

Bret Harte
The Outcasts of Poker Flats
Read pages - 516-525
Answer questions 1- 8; page 525
Concept: Regionalism

The Luck of Roaring Camp

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Read pages - 528-537
Answer questions 1- 10; page 537
Concepts: Point of View, Sequence of Events, Irony

Kate Chopin
"The Story of an Hour"
Read pages - 548-553
Answer questions 1- 10; page 553
Concepts: Irony, the role of women in society

Realism to Naturalism

Jack London
"To Build a Fire"
Read pages - 564-577
Answer questions 1- 11; page 577
Concepts: Conflict, Theme, Realism

Stephen Crane
"The Open Boat"
Read pages - 578-597
Answer questions 1- 9; page 597
Concepts: Realism and Naturalism, Symbols

Supplementary Reading

Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson's Turner's Frontier Thesis: The Frontier in American History

 

O'Henry Collection

Zane Grey

Dime Novels: American Treasures of the Library of Congress

Edith Wharton: Selections

Henry James: selected work

8. Webquest: Hypertext: "How the Other Half Lives" Social Reform in 19 Century America (homework credit)

 

Supplementary Photographs

 

END OF FIRST SEMESTER

 

The Great Gatsby Magazine Project/The Gatsby Party Project

Read The Great Gatsby
* Test Three/Gatsby = 100 points

Modernism in American Short Stories: Anderson to Faulkner
Introduction: 634-649

Ring Lardner

Sherwood Anderson
"Sophistication"
Read pages 650-660
Answer questions 1- 10; page 660
Concepts: Modernism, a different look at small town life, understanding a character's motivation

Ernest Hemingway, "In Another Country"
Concepts: Modernism, style, symbolism, theme

F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Winter Dreams"
Read pages - 670-687
Answer questions 1- 9; page 687
Concepts: Characterization, historical context

 

Katherine Anne Porter
"The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"
Concepts: Stream of Consciousness, Flashbacks, symbolism, style

Thomas Wolfe
"The Far and the Near"
Concepts: Point of View -- limited third person

Eudora Welty
"A Worn Path"

John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath Web Project

William Faulkner
"The Bear"
Concepts: Symbolism, Allusions, Flashbacks, Point of View, Diction

Supplementary References

Parody

 

Other American Writers

Willa Cather Homepage

The Sinclair Lewis Homepage

Ring Lardner's "You Know Me, Al"

H.P. Lovecraft: Collected Stories

 World Authors

Katherine Mansfield

Franz Kafka

Rudyard Kipling

Guy de Maupassant

H. H. Munro "Saki"

 

Modern Poetry

 

William Butler Yeats

Ezra Pound

T. S. Eliot

Wallace Stevens
"Anecdote of the Jar."
Concepts: Interpretating Symbolism

William Carlos Williams
"The Red Wheelbarrow"
"This Is Just To Say"
Concepts: Writing an Apology

Carl Sandburg
"Grass"
"Chicago"
Concepts: Free Verse

e.e. cummings
"since feeling is first," page 864
"anyone lived in a pretty how town," p. 865
"old age sticks," p. 867
Concepts: Writing about Style

Robert Frost

Parody: The Modern Humorist: Funny parodies of famous poems

The Harlem Renaissance Webquest

Langston Hughes
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers"
Answer 1-7, page 911
Concepts: a comparison between rivers and black people

* Additional writers and stories will be added as needed. There may also be an intense look at music, theater and film.

Poetry and Prose of the Harlem Renaissance

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-House Five

Dresden Bombing Assignment

Post Modern World War II-Present

FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Concepts: Irony

JOHN UPDIKE
Concepts: Diction, Style, Understanding Jargon

JOYCE CAROL OATES
Read: "Journey," page 984
Concepts: Point of View

DONALD BARTHELME
Concepts: Experimental Fiction

LARRY McMURTY
Read: from Lonesome Dove, page 1020
Concepts: Setting, Sensory Language

 

Shirley Jackson Site Online

 

Vocabulary Due: 50 points
* Test Seven/Post Modernism = 100 points

VIETNAM: THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, Tim O'Brian

* Test Eight/The Things They Carried = 100 points
** Individual Research Essay Due: 100 points
Gatsby Magazine Project Due
Revised Collaborative/Individual Hypermedia Project Portfolio Due

Poimt Total: Approximately1700 points
Daily Quizzes based upon homework: 400 points
Vocabulary: 200 points
Tests: 800 points
Essay: 100 points
Civil War Journals: 100 points
Collaborative Projects/Gatsby Magazine: 100 points

 

Novels Read:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Great Gatsby
Slaughter House Five
The Things They Carried
Drama: The Crucible

 

Appendix:

 

 
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