EN 3321: American Literature Since 1865
Summer 2011
Course Description:
The literature of the U.S. after 1865 is the literature that defines a country itself newly defined.
This course examines, through roughly chronological thematic and aesthetic collections of texts,
how the nation and its literature have developed as specifically American. The course will move
through the significant developments in national life and literary production and will consider
foundational and transformative works and authors as well as the diversity of voices that
contributes to the U.S. and its literature. We will think about what might characterize American
literature and the ideals, tensions, concerns, and contradictions of the national imagination
between the definitive historical moments of the Civil War and 9/11—two events that have
shaped American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, respectively.
Instructor Information:
Dr. Molly McKibbin
E-mail: mckibbin@yorku.ca
Office: TBA
Office Hours: Thursdays 6-7 p.m.
Texts:
The Heath Anthology of American Literature 6th ed. vols. C, D, E
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Assignments:
Three Close Readings (2 pages each): 10%
First Essay (4 pages): 10%
Midterm Test (100 mins./in class—passage identification, short answer): 20%
Second Essay (8 pages): 25%
Final Exam (3 hrs./exam period—passage identification, short answer, essay): 30%
Participation: 5%
Important Dates:
May 10: Close Reading #1 Due
May 24: Close Reading #2 Due
June 7: First Essay Due
June 16: Midterm Test
July 5: Last Day to Drop
July 5: Close Reading #3 Due
July 21: Second Essay Due
August 2-12: Exam Period
Assignment/Late/Extension Policies:
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Close reading assignments will not be accepted after their respective due dates. Close reading
assignments are due at the beginning of lecture. Essays submitted late will lose 2% per calendar
day. Late essays must be e-mailed as Word documents and late penalties will be calculated
according to the date the Word document is received and opened successfully. All essays must
be submitted in hard copy by the next class. Only in cases of documented emergencies can the
test or exam be written on a date other than what is scheduled. Because of the severely
compressed schedule of the course, extensions for essays will be granted only in cases of
documentable emergencies or severe personal circumstances (being terribly busy is
understandable but unfortunately not an acceptable reason for an extension . . . so schedule
accordingly!).
Schedule:
May 3: Introduction: Developing an American Literature
William Dean Howells, from Criticism and Fiction (C 241-43)
May 5: North/South and Black/White
Kate Chopin, “Désirée’s Baby” (C 415-19)
Charles Waddell Chesnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine” (C 124-32) and “The Wife of His
Youth” (C 152-59)
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask” (C 178) and “Sympathy” (C 180-81)
May 10: Realism
William Dean Howells, “Editha” (C 248-57)
Henry James, “The Jolly Corner” (Project Gutenberg online)
Ambrose Bierce, “Chickamauga” (C 343-47)
Edith Wharton, “Souls Belated” (D 1242-60)
**Close Reading #1 Due
May 12: Naturalism
Stephen Crane, “The Open Boat” (C 517-33) and “A Man Said to the Universe” (C 543)
Jack London, “South of the Slot” (C 546-56)
Theodore Dreiser, “The Second Choice” (D 1362-75)
May 17 & 19: Re-examining the Antebellum South
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
May 24: “The New Woman”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-paper” (C 673-85)
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, “A New England Nun” and “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” (C 848-66)
Mary Austin, from Earth Horizon (C 1050-57)
**Close Reading #2 Due
May 26: The Melting Pot
Mary Antin, from The Promised Land (C 1068-74)
Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin), from The School Days of an Indian Girl (C 1058-66)
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Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far), “The Wisdom of the New” (C 966-79)
Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna), “A Half Caste” (C 981-86)
May 31 & June 2: The West
Willa Cather, My Ántonia
June 7: Modernism
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Recuerdo” and “[I, being born a woman]” (handout)
Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” and “L’art, 1910” (D 1402)
William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (D 1471) and “The Poor” (D 1479)
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (D 1583-86)
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), “The Helmsman” (D 1530-31) and “Helen” (D 1532)
Marianne Moore, “Poetry” (D 1655-66)
Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man” (D 1681) and “Of Modern Poetry” (D 1686)
Gertrude Stein, “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” (D 1462-65)
e. e. cummings, “[the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls]” and “[i like my body when
it is with your]” (D 1573-74)
**First Essay Due
June 9: The Harlem Renaissance
Alain Locke, “The New Negro” (D 1746-54)
Jean Toomer, from Cane [selections] (D 1756-63)
Langston Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “I, Too,” “Harlem” (D 1774+), and “The
Weary Blues” (D 1931-32); “Visitors to the Black Belt,” “Note on Commercial Theatre,”
and “Democracy” (handout)
Claude McKay, “The Harlem Dancer,” “If We Must Die,” “The Lynching,” and “America” (D 1848-50)
Countee Cullen, “Incident,” “Yet Do I Marvel,” and “Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song” (D 1804+)
Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat” (D 1831-39)
June 14: Race and Class Relations in the New South
William Faulkner, “Barn Burning” (D 1704-16)
Ralph Ellison, “A Party Down at the Square” and “Flying Home” (E 2382-99)
Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch” (D 2137-45)
June 16: The Southern Gothic
Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (E 2568-78)
Eudora Welty, “The Wide Net” (E 2279-93)
**Midterm Test (in class—everything up to and including June 14)
June 21: Traumas of WWII
John Okada, from No-No Boy (E 2534-44)
Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” “Howl,” and “America” (E 2581-93)
Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl” (E 2653-55)
June 23 & 28: Cold War Paranoia
Arthur Miller, The Crucible (E 2404-77)
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June 30: Civil Rights and After
Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream” (E 2710-13)
Malcolm X, from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (E 2628-33)
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (E 2545-66)
Toni Cade Bambara, “The Lesson” (E 3061-66)
Amiri Baraka, “Black Art” (handout)
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool,” “A Bronzeville Mother . . .” and “The Last Quatrain . . .” (E
2499-2504); “The White Troops Had Their Orders But the Negroes Looked Like Men,”
“Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” and “kitchenette building” (handout)
Muriel Rukeyser, “Martin Luther King, Malcolm X” (E 2354)
July 5: Second and Third Wave Feminisms
Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck” and “Power” (E 2678+)
Sylvia Plath, “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Stings” (E 2838-44)
June Jordan, “Poem about My Rights” (E 2978-80)
Audre Lorde, “Power,” “Stations,” and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s
House” (E 2892+)
Dorothy Allison, “Tell Me You Don’t Know” (E 3316-24)
**N.B. last date to drop without receiving a grade
**Close Reading #3 Due
July 7: Legacies of Colonial America
James Welch, from Winter in the Blood (E 3102-13)
Leslie Marmon Silko, “Lullaby” (E 3266-72)
D’Arcy McNickle, “Hard Riding” (D 2091-96)
Sherman Alexie, “Because My Father Always Said . . .” (E 3539-45)
Joy Harjo, “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,” “New Orleans,”
“Anchorage,” and “Deer Dancer” (E 3393+)
July 12: Postmodernism
Donald Barthelme, “At the End of the Mechanical Age” (E 2814-18)
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (E 2797-2812)
John Ashbery, “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” (E 2648-49)
Raymond Carver, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” (E 3014-22)
David Foster Wallace, “The Devil Is a Busy Man” (E 3528-30)
July 14: Immigrant, Second Generation, and Diasporic American Identities
Hisaye Yamamoto, “Seventeen Syllables” (E 2515-23)
Maxine Hong Kingston, “No Name Woman” (E 3125-33)
Gharati Mukherjee, “A Wife’s Story” (E 3115-24)
Edwidge Danticat, “New York Day Women” (E 3598-601)
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Ducks,” “My Father and the Figtree,” and “Blood” (E 3418+)
July 19: Voices from the “Borderlands”
Gloria Anzaldúa, “La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness” (E 3173-84)
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Helena María Viramontes, “The Cariboo Café” (E 3459-68)
Richard Rodriguez, from The Hunger of Memory (E 3221-25)
Sandra Cisneros, “Eleven” (E 3475-76)
Pat Mora, “Border Town: 1938,” “Unnatural Speech,” and “University Avenue” (E 3191-93)
July 21 & 26: Revisiting Slavery
Toni Morrison, Beloved
**Second Essay Due (July 21)
July 28: Responses to 9/11
Don DeLillo, from Falling Man (E 3594-95) and “In the Ruins of the Future” (E 3583-90)
David Simpson, “Telling It Like It Isn’t” (E 3592-93)
Michael Rothberg, “Seeing Terror, Feeling Art . . .” (E 3590-91)
Wai Chee Dimock, “Planet and America, Set and Subset” (E 3578-82)
Jean Baudrillard, from The Spirit of Terrorism (E 3574-78)
**Final Exam (TBA)
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Close Reading Questions
Close readings allow students to practice their skills as critical readers in a short form (i.e.
without having to write a formal essay). Responses should be concise and specific and should
provide a detailed analytical reading of the literature. You may focus as you see fit, considering
any aspect of form or style such as narrative voice, point of view, imagery, symbolism, use and
choice of language, rhythm, structure, rhyme, etc.
Responses should be between one and two pages (double-spaced) in length and are due at the
beginning of class. No late close reading assignments will be accepted. No Works Cited is
necessary. Ensure you do not exceed the length maximum of two pages.
Please follow MLA guidelines (1" margins, Times New Roman 12 pt. font, double spacing).
Double-sided printing is encouraged and preferred. No title pages, please; list identifying
information at the top left of your first page.
#1: May 10
Choose, identify, and closely analyze a specific paragraph or short scene (no more than half a
page) in Bierce’s story “Chickamauga.”
#2: May 24
Analyze the physical description(s) of the narrator’s bedroom and/or house in Gilman’s story
“The Yellow Wall-paper” or analyze the description(s) of Austin’s house and/or neighbourhood
in Earth Horizon.
#3: July 5
Provide an analysis of any one of Plath’s poems (from the syllabus).
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